Who? Where? What? And Most Certainly, Why?

Sometime when I was 8 or 9, I ran across a comic book called Weird Worlds that ran two Edgar Rice Burroughs novel series in it. One was about Pellucidar, the hollow world at the Earth's core where dinosaurs, mammoths and cave-men still roamed. The other was about a former Confederate soldier who did his roaming on the planet Mars, surrounded by four-armed green men, fantastic creatures, bizarre science and a noble race of "red men," or copper-skilled humanoids, who included among their number the "most beautiful woman of two worlds," the princess of Helium, Dejah Thoris.

The soldier's name was John Carter, and a couple of years later I found in the library the book on which the comic series was based, A Princess of Mars. Although Burroughs' most famous creation, Tarzan, has been in dozens of movies and television shows, it took a century for his first hero to get to the screen, with the release of John Carter by Walt Disney Studios a hundred years after Under the Moons of Mars was serialized in 1912. It was re-titled Princess for a 1917 book printing.

I very very very very very very much wanted to like this movie. I'm old enough now to see Burroughs' limitations as a writer, but the tales of Barsoom gripped my 10-year-old imagination and really have yet to let go, and the back of my mind always harbored a hope that someday we would see on a screen the action, intrigue and adventure that sprawled across the dead sea bottoms of dying Mars. So I wanted to like it the way a 10-year-old wants a ten-speed bike. I didn't get that bike until I was 11, and I guess I'm also still waiting for my cinematic ticket to Barsoom -- the real Barsoom.

Burroughs' story is simple. Former Confederate officer John Carter searches for gold in the Arizona territory. Pursued into a mysterious cave by Apaches, he finds himself strangely overcome and then suddenly transported to a planet he immediately recognizes as Mars. At first a captive and then a chieftain among the tribe of 15-foot-tall, four-armed green Martians known as Tharks, he develops a friendship with one of their mighty warriors, Tars Tarkas. When the Tharks capture Dejah Thoris, the princess of Helium, Carter is moved to first help her escape and then eventually to win her for himself. Naturally, several obstacles will slow his quest and test his strength, endurance and the love he and Dejah Thoris share.

John Carter is written by Andrew Stanton and Mark Andrews of Pixar, with help from best-selling and Pulitzer-Prize winning author Michael Chabon. John Carter's still an ex-Confederate soldier, he still winds up on Mars and he still befriends Tars Tarkas and loves Dejah Thoris. Other than that, Stanton, Andrews and Chabon have crafted a flat, plodding eco-fable filled with logic and plot holes, unnecessary characters, silly plot twists, extraneous story lines, expository blather and a title character who's saved from complete unlikeability only by lead actor Taylor Kitsch's dead-flat performance: He's too dull to really annoy that much.

Carter finds himself on Barsoom -- what its inhabitants call Mars -- in the middle of a war between the cities of Helium and Zodanga. The Zodangan jeddak Sab Than rules a mobile city that traverses the Martian countryside and devastates everything in its path. Matai Shang, the leader of the mysterious Therns, gives Sab Than a devastating weapon with which he will bring Helium to its knees, unless Helium's leader, Tardos Mors, consents to a marriage between his daughter Dejah Thoris and Sab Than. She runs, and finds herself a prisoner of the Tharks just as John Carter has been made a chieftain. The pair find evidence of the amulet which brought Carter to Barsoom and a connection in ancient religious icons in a ruined temple. Now Carter must find a way to stop Sab Than and learn how to use the amulet to return home, if indeed he wants to. Rarely has a plot so justified the use of "blah blah blah" to cover up its extended journeys into nonsense. Stanton, Andrews and Chabon throw in set pieces from many major science-fiction and action movies for no visible reason. This scene echoes Planet of the Apes, that one Lord of the Rings, and another Raiders of the Lost Ark.

John Carter is visually spectacular with the kinds of touches that have made Stanton one of the top storytelling directors around. The green Tharks have four arms, which means they would have a completely different body language than people with two arms. Stanton shows us this in several scenes, as well as some scenes that highlight what kind of confrontational stance you might take if you had tusks. The design of Helium is definitely not the product of an Earth culture, and although we don't see it much, what we can see is fascinating and definitively alien, while retaining just enough Victorian styling to have hints of the kind of steampunk Burroughs might have envisioned. But once you stop looking at the movie and start listening to it or trying to follow it, things don't go well.

It's filled with what seem to be changes for change's sake, as though Stanton and Co. felt overwhelmingly the need to make sure everyone knows that while this movie may have been based on Burroughs' books, it's all theirs. There's a ton of these confusing resets, from the airships to making the Therns shapeshifters, but one will probably stand in for all. Everyone on Barsoom now bleeds blue. They didn't in the books, so why do they do so now? No reason, except maybe to get a PG-13 rating. They made the change because they could, and it serves no real purpose. Stanton showed more creativity in trying to explain the inexplicable name changes the movie went through than in holding his story together coherently.

Almost every Burroughs character is changed, most for the worse. Carter is a surly, self-involved brawler, Tardos Mors a weakling, the noble Kantos Kan an afterthought. Dejah Thoris is still brave and beautiful, and she does benefit from being able to be brave according to 21st century sensibilities instead of early 20th. She's now a scientist who fights her own battles, thank you very much. Dominic West gives Sab Than a swashbuckling air that makes him a much better foil than the schemer Burroughs described. West also makes you wish he'd been given the title role, because Taylor Kitsch is a story-killing, interest-slaying spot of dead air for more than three-fourths of his screen time.

Logic gaps race with plot holes to see which pile up bigger at the end. On the smaller Mars, Carter's earthly muscles and bones give him greater strength than the Barsoomians, even the giant green men. Except when the story needs him to get manhandled by a Thark. The Therns' plot to engineer Sab Than's ascendance over Barsoom will gain them...what? Eh, I dunno. And Dejah Thoris' marriage to Sab Than will advance it how? Again, I dunno. And the Zodangans are endangering everyone, because why now? Go 'way, boy, you bother me.

Story expansions don't have to wreck a tale.  Dynamite Comics started running an adaptation of the original novels in 2010 and writer Arvid Nelson has taken advantage of the format to add some backstory for Tars Tarkas and John Carter, as well as strengthen the ties between the first novel and the subsequent pair with a bridging story. Dynamite also spun out a short-run feature about the last days of old Barsoom and adventures of Dejah Thoris some 400 years before John Carter arrived (Barsoomians usually live about 1,000 years). They've even created a tie-in story pulling in Gullivar Jones, the character that many people believe inspired Burroughs' Barsoom when he traveled to Mars in Edwin Lester Arnold's 1905 Lieutenant Gullivar Jones: His Vacation. The point is that Burroughs' own plot for Princess has plenty of room for the kind of character background and add-ons that modern audiences like and plenty of things that can be cut without hampering the plot to make room for them. But Stanton's John Carter muddies instead of clarifies with its expansions and alterations, like someone modified a human overcoat to fit a Thark but put the extra two arms in the front and back instead of underneath the existing ones.

John Carter isn't really an awful movie, not in the sense of Daredevil or Elektra, two other major franchise-type characters given early spring releases because their studios knew the summertime crowd would ignore them completely. But given the talent behind it -- Stanton wrote and directed Finding Nemo and Wall-E, for crying out loud -- and the budget and the backing of the Mouse Kingdom, it looks that much worse because it should have been so much better.

In several interviews, Stanton said he wanted to direct this project and one of the major reasons was his love of Burroughs' Barsoom stories. If he loved them that much, then he probably should have told one of them.