Let me just start out by saying that I went in to this film last night with very low expectations. I had heard and read the reviews and seen its performance at the box office. I knew that I was likely to see a film that wasn’t all that good.

Unfortunately, my expectations were met.

Since this is a writing blog, I’m going to focus primarily on the script and the story structure. The first thing I will say about the script is that it was terrible. The dialogue was on the nose and way to wordy. There were lines that characters had that were uncomfortably long and it didn’t help that the acting wasn’t great, so the delivery of this bad dialogue was bad as well.

Ultimately, when looking at this movie objectively, from a storytelling standpoint, it was a disorganized mess.

Structurally, the script had some problems as well. There were elements of the Hero’s Journey in the script, but they spent way too much time focusing on the refusal of the call. It seems as though Carter spends half of the second act refusing to anwer the call to adventure, so that when he finally does, it’s not even really clear what he’s fighting for.

And here is where we get into the disorganization of the story. Warring factions on Mars are being manipulated by the Therm, a group of beings that manage the death of planets and the destruction of their societies. They basically feed off of the death of a planet and then move on to the next dying planet and help it along. We don’t find that out until the start of the third act, and that’s finally what motivates Carter into action so that he can save the Dejah, who is like the princess of Helium, one of the warring cities on Mars, which the locals call Barsoom. It’s implied during their conversation that Earth’s time is coming. It seems to me that it would have been a better choice to have Carter find out this information earlier in the story and decide that the line must be drawn here, and he’s going to stop these guys before they can destroy this planet and then move on to Earth. That would have been a strong motivating factor that would have forced Carter into action, then he could have fallen in love with Dejah later in the story, which would have served the purpose of giving Carter more to lose. That may have streamlined the story a little bit as well, because another problem this movie had was that it dragged terribly over the last half hour to forty-five minutes.

There was also a whole lot of exposition in the firt act that didn’t really need to be there because it never really had an effect on the story. A lot of the exposition that takes place on Earth should have been eliminated in order to get into the meat of the story on Mars because that’s where it happens. The filmmakers could have spent about half their time on Earth and used that time more effectively getting into the action and story on Mars.

One last thing on the story. The third act had some serious issues in the timeline. The second act ends with  Dejah leaving for her wedding. Her father is forcing her to marry the leader of the enemy city in an effort to bring peace to the planet. In that time, Carter is forced by the leader of the Therm to watch the precession. Then he escapes, but is recaptured by another group of Martians called Tharks and is brought to their city where he has to fight in a Coloseum-type setting. He wins and rallies the Tharks to join him in saving Dejah. They march miles across the desert to the wrong city before using flying vehicles to get to the wedding just on time.

With apologies to Blake Snider, that’s a lot of pipe!

I will say this. The movie wasn’t all bad. They put a lot of money into the production design, and it looks very good. There were some CG shots that didn’t look very good, but they did a good job overall.

Unfortunately, the problems with the script, the acting and the directing make this a film worth missing.