John Carter: A continuation of Taylor Kitsch's bad summer

Civil War veteran John Carter finds himself transported to Mars, where he becomes entangled in a different civil war between the inhabitants of the planet. He must decide if he will help the Martian Princess or simply continue to drift through life as he was doing back on Earth.

At this point, you almost feel bad for Taylor Kitsch. Both of the major summer blockbusters he has starred in (this one and Battleship) have lost their respective studios money and were soundly drubbed by film critics. However John Carter, like Battleship, was not such a horrible movie. The story, while overburdened with an excess of useless subplots, cutesy Disney moments and unnecessary characters, was accessible enough for the audience so they could at least have a basic understanding of what was happening on screen (i.e. John needed to unite two of the warring factions against the third in order to save the planet and rescue the beautiful Martian Princess). The action became repetitive (yes, we know John can jump really high, that was clear the tenth time we saw it on screen!) but it was palpable and kept the audience engaged. Kitsch tried his best to play up John as an anti-hero who was torn between those incidents which broke him back on Earth and the need to become the warrior and leader he seemed destined to become, and there were some scenes which were effective (the part where there are cuts between a battle sequence and John burying his family comes to mind) but there were some points where he just seemed lost and looked more like Abercrombie & Fitch model who accidentally wondered unto the set. The rest of the cast failed to rise above the mediocre dialogue and character development provided to them by the cliched script.

It is never going to be considered a classic or even a great sci-fi fantasy film but John Carter is not the most horrible way to spend two hours of your life.

Grade: C

Battleship: Seriously, you could do worse

While participating in International Naval war games in Hawaii, a fleet of ships run into an alien armada who intend to conquer the earth. The ships and their respective crews must work together in order to stop this from happening.

A movie based off of a board game seems like a silly idea on paper and director Peter Berg's Battleship certainly does nothing to curb that line of thinking for it was a loud, inane summer popcorn action flick with barely enough story and character to make it sub-standard at best. It is not the worst thing to come out of Hollywood in recent years, in fact, the action and special effects looked and sounded great (guess they spent some of that purported $200 million dollar budget on something worthwhile, too bad it wasn't a script) but there was nothing beyond those special effects and action sequences to give the film life or intelligence. This lack of story, plot, or characters has led many critics to make comparisons of Battleship to the Transformers films (which, oddly enough are produced also by Hasbro). Critics have long chided the director the Transformers films, Michael Bay, for perpetuating the effects laden/story lacking films that Hollywood seems to turn out anymore. In some ways, they are right to do so. The Transformers film series peaked with the original in regards to presenting a whole film, with story and characters to go along with the special effects, and the only reason that happened was Bay had to establish the characters that were going to be around for those two sequels (well, Megan Fox only did one more but I don't think her "acting" ability was missed in the third one). The sequels were either brainless (Transformers 2) or had such stunning special effects, no one seemed to care about the terrible acting or story. Battleship felt like a mash up between those two films, it had a poorly constructed story with holes in the plot big enough to sail a destroyer through and a lead actor in Taylor Kitsch who lacked the screen presence (or acting chops in general) to lead a big budget summer film. Still, those special effects and other visual goodies (to go along with a twist at the climax of the film which featured some real American heroes) throughout provided enough entertainment to at least keep the audience engaged.

Don't believe the hype, Battleship wasn't so terrible that you won't be entertained at some points, it just lacked the intelligence and story to make it anything more than a brainless summer popcorn action flick.

Grade: C-