HitFix.com John Carter Review: “Andrew Stanton’s live action debut is giddy epic fun”

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It still seems surreal to me that there really is a mega-budget bigscreen live-action film based on the Edgar Rice Burroughs stories about Barsoom and John Carter, since as long as I’ve been paying attention to Hollywood, and even well before that, there has always been a John Carter movie in some stage of development.

The good news is that Andrew Stanton, one of the cornerstones of Pixar and the director of both “Finding Nemo” and “WALL-E,” has made a nimble jump to live-action, and much of his movie is imbued with a wild, thrilling pulp energy and a genuine sense of wonder. It is a charming science-fiction adventure that makes no apologies for what it is. This is the sort of film where there is talk of Jeddaks and Tharks and Barsoom and you’re supposed to just pick it up and understand, and where we accept that Mars doesn’t look a thing like modern science tells us it does because that’s the conceit. It will be interesting to see who gets hung up on the difference between reality and this film’s conception of Mars, because there’s nothing about this that plays as “real,” but there is such a strong sense of voice that I think Stanton sells the reality beautifully.

Read the full review at Motion [Captured}

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