John Carter

...of Mars. There, I said it. Unaccountably, the distributors feel that the words 'of Mars' will put you off where, say, eight foot tall green dudes with four arms aren't going to. Also, apparently, they have scrawled over it with 3D crayons, and that version is best ignored. So, this is me reviewing John Carter OF MARS, in glorious 2D as nature intended.

In summary, John Carter, an American Civil War cavalryman is, accidentally and without realising what's happening to him, transported to the surface of Mars. Mars is a dying planet, with little water, thin air, and so little gravity that he is, in effect, Superman, having way more strength than he needs to get around. 

Once there, he encounters a tribe of 8 foot green Martians from a civilisation that has descended into savagery due to the planet's dwindling resources. Respecting strength above all else, he is cautiously accepted among them, until the arrival a beautiful and human-looking red Martian princess, fleeing an arranged marriage, turns Carter's head, and he grudgingly begins to think about helping her cause rather than just worrying about getting home.

 So, brief history lesson. Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote A Princess Of Mars in 1912, as a serial, which was first published in 1917. So think on that before you scoff at the old fashioned ideas in display here; this is a story which was talking about aerial warfare and weapons of mass destruction before 1912. It is not Burroughs' fault we took his thoughts and made them part of our culture. So many things owe a debt to this story, as much as this one owes a debt to Wells and Verne. This, my friends is a sci-fi *period drama*.

Now you may ask yourself if you actually want to see one of those; it's a fair point. The film-maker has an interesting choice here, does he produce a film with deliberately cheesy dialogue and a plot that is literally one hundred years old, or does he jettison his source material? For my money, he's definitely done the former, and if you're not going to watch the film in that context, it's very much akin to watching an adaptation of Jane Eyre, and asking why they're talking in such old-fashioned language.

If you are minded to watch it as a ripping good yarn, and one which comes to you straight from the dawn of sci-fi itself, you should enjoy it immensely. I certainly did. I don't agree with everything done here; the film is actually a distillation of the first three Barsoom novels; A Princess of Mars, Gods of Mars and Warlord of Mars. I didn't see any particular need for this. I think you could make a perfectly good adaptation of A Princess of Mars, and leave yourself the other two as sequels. So if you think perhaps there's just too many plot elements thrown in with a shovel, yes, you're right.

Ultimately, this film is pretty much eye candy; that's by design, Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote the novels, for all intents and purposes, as travelogues of this imaginary Mars he'd come up with, and that shines through to the film. Beautiful to look at, and viewed as the progenitor of every sci-fi action movie you've ever seen, rather than a rip off of them, full of delicious nostalgia.

Melancholia

So, opening sequence, the world ends. A big massive planet crashes into the Earth, enveloping and destroying it. Boom, game over.

Cut to a couple of months before, and we're at a wedding reception. Kirsten Dunst is marrying Some Guy, and her brother in law, Kiefer Sutherland has thrown a lavish party. Kirsten Dunst is clearly suffering from depression, and so obviously her family reacts by hassling her, bullying her and cajoling her to bloody well cheer up and stop ruining the party for everyone. Despite it being obvious that they know she suffers from depression, and that it's *her* wedding for fuck's sake. So basically, everyone she knows is a catastrophically self-absorbed asshole; even her supposedly loving husband who looks initially like he might be the exception begins making demands on her that she just can't deal with, and eventually leaves in a huff.

Cut to months later, Kirsten Dunst is still depressed, quite seriously now, unable to get out of bed, and so her sister brings her to live with her and her aforementioned husband, Kiefer Sutherland. And now we're more focussed on the sister, who is terrified that this new planet astronomers have spotted is going to crash into the earth, but who her amateur astronomer husband says is just going to pass by quite close, and it's only crazy people who say otherwise.

So, part the first is an irritating, self indulgent piece of toss, made in a dreamlike (i.e. in Glorious Badly-Out-Of-Focus-Vision) style, by Lars Von Trier, a director whose own experiences with depression have clearly led him to aggrandise and glorify the condition.

Part the second is somewhat better, as the three adults and a child tensely and testily wait for the end of the world, or not (but which, obviously, we, the viewers have been pre-spoilered that it is going to happen). What we're basically being told is that the depressive copes with Ultimate Doom better than everyone else, because they're used to it. Which is possibly true, but really not worth sitting through over two hours of Lars von Trier self indulgence to discover.

It's odd to review a film like this, because while, in some sense, yes, it's obviously better made, more thought provoking, better acted and so forth than trash like Man on a Ledge or Clash of the Titans, that only serves to give me a more substantial thing to hate.