Episode #159 – John Carter (2012)

What this episode covers

In the Mars Mountains of film podcasts, where opinions arrive vacuum-sealed and pre-approved by Letterboxd disciples who say “actually” the way sommeliers say “oak-forward,” there floats a strange and likable little vessel called Fear and Loathing in Cinema Podcast. It is less a podcast than a late-night booth at a diner where the mozzarella sticks have gone cold, the coffee has achieved sentience, and nobody particularly cares who wins the argument so long as the argument remains entertaining. The show traffics in the usual pleasures of movie obsession. There’s nostalgia, critique, and the occasional unnecessary defense of a sequel no jury would acquit. But its real talent lies in what might be called the affectionate autopsy. Films once left for dead are dragged back onto the slab, not to be mocked exactly, but reconsidered with the squinting tenderness usually reserved for old tattoos and high-school yearbook photos. Was it bad? Certainly. Was it perhaps interestingly bad? Now we’re talking. The podcast understands that cinema history is littered with glorious disasters, and sometimes the wreckage is more revealing than the masterpiece. At the center of it all is a quartet with the chemistry of a dinner party that somehow survives both politics and tequila. Bryan Kluger hosts with the relaxed confidence of a man who has willingly walked into a burning theater because he heard the third act gets weird. Dan Moran approaches plot holes like a litigator cross-examining an unreliable witness. Preston Barta mounts passionate defenses for cinematic lost causes with the zeal of a public defender representing Waterworld. And Chelsea Nicole, whose observations often land with surgical precision, has a gift for reminding everyone that horror movies are usually less about monsters than the deeply bizarre choices humans make while near monsters. Together, they’ve stumbled into that rare territory where criticism still has a pulse, humor still has a brain, and loving movies means occasionally putting them, and yourself, on trial. Episode #159 of Fear and Loathing in Cinema finds Bryan, Chelsea, Dan, and Preston wandering deep into the crimson sands of John Carter, Disney’s enormously expensive attempt to convince the world that a shirtless Confederate soldier jumping around Mars was the future of blockbuster entertainment. Instead, the film landed with all the grace of a piano falling out of a fifth-floor apartment window. And yet, somewhere between the gigantic white apes, floating battleships, and boardroom panic attacks, there exists a movie that is oddly charming, wildly sincere, and perhaps misunderstood in the way only massively overbudget Hollywood disasters can be. The gang dissects the curious corporate psychology behind Disney’s decision to spend enough money to fund a small lunar program on a property most audiences mistook for either a financial thriller or a canceled TNT detective series. Preston recalls the peculiar cultural moment when studios became terrified of the word “Mars,” largely because Mars Needs Moms had cratered at the box office so spectacularly that it apparently frightened executives into removing planets from movie titles altogether. Chelsea wonders if the film would have succeeded had it simply hired a different actor. Dan argues that every executive involved should have been legally required to explain the plot using only refrigerator magnets. And Bryan, somehow, becomes the voice of reason. The episode also dives into the impossible burden carried by director Andrew Stanton, the Pixar genius behind Finding Nemo and WALL-E, who made the leap into live-action filmmaking with the confidence of a man who had never once been told “no” in a production meeting. The hosts discuss whether John Carter failed because it was bad, or because audiences in 2012 had already consumed thirty years of science-fiction stories inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs and therefore treated the or...