John Carter movie review by Carter Brown

I had heard, at first, a lot of negative things about John Carter, one of the most recent films from Walt Disney Pictures. This is the same branch of the Walt Disney Studios that produced blockbusters such as The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe as well as the Pirates Of The Caribbean trilogy. I had also heard that the director of John Carter Of Mars (the full name of the film), Andrew Stanton got into.... A lot of trouble after the release of the film because of how poorly it performed at the box office. The previous week before I chose to watch the film I asked some of my friends about the movie. They said it was "Nothing out of the ordinary." "An average film. Nothing too special" "Confusing". Hmm. Well I do, honestly, enjoy a bad movie now and again so why not? Lucky for me John Carter is on constant repeat on one of the Encore movie channels I had, so I DVR'd it and watched the movie later.

I'm not going to ruin the ending for anyone that may happen upon this movie review, but I really liked it. Perhaps the movie received such negative reviews because you have to watch the FULL movie to understand it. The ending reveals why the WHOLE movie conflict is taking place to begin with, and unless you don't watch the whole thing, the movie can appear confusing.

I thought the cinematography was pretty fascinating. Because this isn't the 70s and film makers rarely use sets it seems these days, the whole John Carter backdrops were made from CGI; Computer Generated Imagery.This essentially means the entire movie was filmed against a green screen. Almost every movie these days integrates CGI use for the movie backgrounds, especially in Harry Potter, but up until now, I never thought about how hard it might be to.... Perfectly compose or frame a shot when all you have to work off of, is a blank green screen. The camera angles were really cool, and all shots were framed beautifully. The CGI was really, really well done. I can't express how it stood out among the rest to me. I have never really  been a fan of CGI and in the case of the "Remastered" Star Wars trilogy with added special effects, it was the CGI that killed it for me. John Carter was an exception. The lighting was really well balanced as well. He actually looked like he was outside the entire time. I will look more into the production techniques used during the filming process, but from what I saw John Carter Of Mars was a pretty good film. It seems to me that it didn't receive as much credit as deserved. I hope that soon people will realize how John Carter is not such a bad film.