I liked John Carter. :P

The audience reaction 3×3 made me remember going to school in Terre Haute, IN and seeing I Am Legend in the theatre there.  Within the first 30 minutes the drunk teenagers had to leave and threw up in the hall on the way out of the theatre.  It reached an unacceptable level when Will Smith has to put his dog down and someone yelled out “That ain’t how ya kill a dog”.  

I was surprised you guys didn’t at least give a nod to James Purefoy for his all-too-few charming moments in John Carter.

As I listened, I expected you to split Kelly Wand vs. Tom & Dingus liking and hating John Carter, but for different reasons.  I understand T&D hating it because the acting is mediocre at best and the cinematography (this is supposed to be Mars?) is so disappointing.  But I expected Kelly Wand to like it because the writing – the plot and the dialogue – are so much better than we usually get in this kind of thing. 

I watched the whole movie without thinking, “This is dumb,” or “This doesn’t make sense,” or “Why don’t they just do this?”  I didn’t leave the theater complaining about plot holes.  Dejah Thoris is a smart, active, female character. Not a passive McGuffin. She’s a scientist who actually sounds like a scientist. Her motives are realistically mixed — Is she fleeing marriage for herself or to save her city? She doesn’t let LURVE for John Carter change her goals — she only decides to help him after she’s convinced he can’t/won’t prevent the marriage and/or save her city.  The ending both surprised me and made sense.

And the dialogue was so much better than the histrionic nonsense and terrible one-liners I am used to expecting in summer action movies.  Certainly nothing as bad as Christian Stewart’s St. Crispin’s Day speech in Snow White. 

And the action scenes, while nothing very new or spectacular, were at least clear and easy to follow and made sense. I was certain I’d be thinking at some point, “Well why doesn’t he just jump away?” but I never did.  And I guess more of the humor worked for me than for you guys.  I thought the comic timing at the beginning of his escape attempts landing him right back in custody was pretty good.  I liked the Thark scrum to grab an adorable piglet.  I liked the Thark leader, bored, upping the ante in the arena.

It seemed like the people writing and making the movie at least cared.  It’s really no more craft and intelligence than should be the bare minimum for this kind of big-budget action movie, but that sadly seems pretty rare.

I was also surprised you didn’t like Eileen Page as the alien pretending to be a sweet grandma while explaining his evil plan.  She definitely seemed to be having fun.

After hearing them appreciate Kristen Stewart, I feel like Tom and Christian need to watch Twilight until it’s beaten out of them.

“Highfalutin,” you may be surprised to learn, has neither a hyphen nor an apostrophe.

I might not have made the case very well, but I think they’re worth comparing because they’re both big-budget re-imaginings of existing stories relying on lots of CG effects, including heavily CGed actors, based on the fantasy genre, each with a troll scene, each with big battles, and each with a weak lead actor. Yet one is a commercial success and — in my opinion — a darn good movie. The other is a colossal bore and a colossal failure that felled studio heads.

To me, it’s fascinating how much they have in common, yet how differently they turned out. Plus, one came out on DVD shortly after one was released in theaters.