John Carter (Andrew Stanton, 2012)

Unfairly, if inevitably, compared to a number of science fiction films which gutted Edgar Rice Burroughs’ source material, John Carter admittedly doesn’t feel like anything new. Its narrative of an embittered veteran transported to another world where he becomes a just warrior fighting for natives naturally calls to mind Avatar, and some setpieces look almost uncomfortably close to similar sequences from Star Wars movies. The very nature of the story places the film in the past, its pulpy, gung-ho dialogue wholly at odds with contemporary cynicism.

Yet if Andrew Stanton doesn’t reinvent the genre with his first foray into live-action filmmaking, he does at least offer up one of the few truly thrilling, giddy adventure epics of the last decade, maybe even since the third Indiana Jones installment. Though clearly meant to launch a franchise—and thus weighed down by all the overcooked mythology and origins that define the first entry in a planned series—John Carter features enough coherent action and empathetic characterization to make one of the few overstuffed blockbusters I’d love to watch more than once.