John Carter, Disney’s hugely expensive Mars epic and the live-action directing debut from Pixar’s Andrew Stanton, arrives in theaters today burdened with huge expectations. The movie is overstuffed with everything from gothic inheritance tales, to alien corporate raiders, to scientific breakthroughs, to Civil War PTSD. But it says a great deal about John Carter that the movie’s at its best when most of those elements are off-screen, and when our titular hero’s doing an awkward ballet as he learns to walk in Martian gravity, or as he reckons with the dog-like alien who’s decided to adopt him.

While it isn’t a major part of the movie, a clear symptom of John Carter‘s larger problems is the way in handles the trope, of the sympathetic—and innocent—Confederate. Carter was a Confederate in the original source material, and he’s presented here through a common narrative: a man comes home from a war in which he was a disinterested participant to find his home destroyed and his wife and child dead. It’s true that there were non-slave holding whites who fought for the Confederacy (and on the Union side, the response to the law that allowed wealthy men to pay substitutes to fight for them gave rise to the saying “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight.”). But there’s something unattractive about a narrative that paints men who fought to uphold slavery and white supremacy, even if they were only doing it for the paycheck, as victims without any sort of engagement of the cause for which they fought.

On Mars, Carter’s decision to become a different man largely consists of deciding it’s all right for him to love Martian princess Dejah Thoris. His championing of the Tharks, the aliens who first find him and adopt him into their tribe, who aren’t exactly an analogue for American slaves (the humans on Mars seem to ignore them or form loose alliances with them, rather than oppressing them) is less a matter of political awakening than the most convenient way for him to stop Dejah’s wedding the evil Sab Than, who has been attacking her city. Early in his acquaintance with them, Sola, a female Thark, takes the brand that ought to have been meant for Carter. Even in space, white men get off easy. It would be nice if someone could acknowledge that the biggest moral reckoning for a man who fought for the Confederacy ought to be making amends for the cause he served rather than moving on after he was widowed. John Carter has a lot of serious themes on the table, but it can’t prioritize between them, and ends up doing well by almost none of them.

It’s too bad that there’s so much human (and Thern) sturm und drang in John Carter, because the Tharks are far and away the most charming part of the movie. As Tars Tarkas, Willem Defoe is a combination of world-weary and very funny. “Your spirit annoys me,” he tells Carter, who refuses to give up when the two are sent into an arena to fight some nasty beasties. When Carter leads the Tharks on a bold invasion of Sab Than’s capitol city, only to find out his forces are besieging Dejah’s home city of Helium, Tars Tarkas smacks him upside the head. Watching the Tharks try new things as necessity forces them forward, whether it’s flying, adopting an irritating Earthman into their ranks, or slowly embracing more sentimental parent-child ties.

It’s too bad that the originality of the Tharks is undercut by the fact that many of the action sequences involving them are pillaged directly from the Star Wars movies. When Carter’s first imprisoned prior to the arena fight, the shots of his prison are cribbed from Luke Skywalker’s imprisonment in Jabba’s palace. Carter’s fight against a nasty pair of white apes is set in a sand-colored arena much like the one in Attack of the Clones, and the mechanics of his win suggest he’s seen Skywalker successfully fight a Rancor. And a series of fights on hovercrafts are borrowed, both in their dynamics and the way they’re shot, from the Endor chases in Return of the Jedi.

And it’s also too bad that, despite the fact that Thark society’s one of the only things in the movie that feels specifically Martian and as such, is much more interesting to watch than the rather pointless bickering between two human societies, director Andrew Stanton spends so much time on his insufficiently developed human characters. He does best with Dejah Thoris, who is promising is promising in concept—she’s introduced to us first as a scientist, second as a princess, and third, as a competent fighter—but less so in execution. She’s saddled with ponderous lines like “If you have the means to save others, would you not take every action possible to make it so?” that sound more like the starting point for philosophical debates and less actual conversation. If her romance with Carter is meant to be a ring-of-fire transplanetary love, there just isn’t enough time for Stanton to plausibly develop it. And the movie brings up and then drops the fact that Dejah’s supposed to be on the breakthrough of a major scientific discovery. Battle sequences, apparently, are more fun than lab work, even lab work that opens up the universe.

Similarly, Stanton utterly wastes Dominc West’s sly, sexy charm on Sab Than, making him a retread of the evil rapist he played in 300. The Therns—ostensibly representations of Mars’ goddess protector, but actually rapacious devastators of worlds—are constantly talking about how stupid and violent Sab Than is. The only moment he gets to be a person with motivations or a brain is when he shows up to woo Dejah, explaining “I feared you’d been tortured by Tharks and condemened to die in their arena. I couldn’t have that on my conscience. I do have one, Princess.” But there’s no room in this movie for a genuine romantic competition between John Carter and Sab Than, or for any really serious—in a fun way—thinking about Mars’ future. We’ve got a dog in this fight—the excellent Woola—but this marvelous monster’s more entertaining than the contest he’s a part of.

Hendrick Hertzberg joins my call for more Revolutionary War movies, saying in particular that we should have a definitive Alexander Hamilton biopic. I agree, though I might recommend an adaptation of David Liss’s The Whiskey Rebels instead of a more straightforward approach. But I also think this points to a larger problem: we need a more creative approach to biopics that’s oriented towards truly great stories instead of just the most famous people who a talented actor would enjoy impersonating. To wit, ten suggestions from American history.

1. Harriet Tubman: The Underground Railroad is one of the coolest things to happen in American history, and it’s only part of what makes Harriet Tubman awesome. Tubman made 13 runs on the Underground Railroad, an act of outrageous courage given the fate that would have awaited her as a conductor were she ever caught. She was the first woman to head up a Union military expedition—which involved guiding ships past a river Confederate forces had mined—during which she helped free more than 700 slaves. And she did all of this despite having seizures and headaches. And it might be fun to see Viola Davis cut loose a little bit post The Help, or to see C.C.H. Pounder deploy her glorious steeliness on an iconic portrayal of Tubman.

2. Ida Tarbell, Ida Wells and Nellie Bly: I’m a sucker for movies about journalists, and these three women are best in class. From Tarbell’s investigation of Standard Oil, which set the standard for document-based investigative journalism going forward; to Wells’ reporting on lynching in America; to Bly’s expose of the state of mental health treatment for the poor, all three were absolutely fearless, telling stories about bureaucracies and norms and prompting reform or efforts at reform. Too often, journalism movies and television shows have to gin up absolutely ridiculous plots to up the stakes—sorry, State of Play, I love you, but it’s true. But sometimes journalists go where the government won’t, even within our own country, at considerable risk to themselves. All three roles would be juicy, but I’d particularly like to see Kerry Washington, so wonderful in The Last King of Scotland, play Wells, who was just a few years younger than Washington is now when she gave her seminal speech on lynching.
Read more

I feel sort of guilty comparing Hell on Wheels, AMC’s new Western about the construction of the Trans-Continental Railroad, to Deadwood, but it’s sort of hard not to do when the show is trying as hard as it possibly can to ape as many Deadwood elements as it can transfer to a railroad camp. As I wrote in my review at the Atlantic:

The minister who’s set himself up in Hell on Wheels is a straightforward prairie minister (though one with a dark secret that ultimately reinforces the show’s sympathy for former slave-owners and advocates of slavery), rather than the tormented Union civil war veteran who ministered to Deadwood in its first season before succumbing to the brain tumor that was robbing him of his faith. And when the Hell on Wheels minister mildly asks “Haven’t we had our fill of war? Our fill of killing?” it’s no match for the anguished cries of Deadwood’s camp doctor raging at God: “What conceivable use was the screaming of those men? Did you need to hear them to know your omnipotence?”

Hell on Wheels doesn’t compete with Deadwood in the arts of cussing or whoring, either. Declaring of the Emancipation Proclamation, as Elam Ferguson does at one point, that “Ain’t nothing good coming from this either…Look what this got. I might as well wipe my ass with it,” or the sight of Doc Durant denouncing his own pitch to investors as “Twaddle and shite,” don’t remotely compare to Swearengen promising a crowd fired up by rumors of a massacre by Native Americans “I will offer a personal $50 bounty for every decapitated head of as many of these godless heathen cocksuckers as anyone can bring in. And God rest the souls of that poor family. And pussy’s half price, next 15 minutes.” Hell on Wheels’ prostitutes are hookers with hearts of gold—and in one case, tattoos from her time in Indian captivity—rather than full-fledged citizens in this rough new society, and their interactions with men are entirely predictable.

The one thing that Hell on Wheels has on Deadwood is the sight of Common in a jaunty hat, though of course that doesn’t make up for the show’s Confederate nostalgia. There’s a really interesting story to be told about the black experience in Westward expansion, or about the railroad and Manifest Destiny from the perspective of the Native Americans who are being displaced by it. But this isn’t it. Also, this is a reminder that I need to finish blogging Deadwood. That starts again tomorrow.

I’m all for big, expansive science fiction movies that put humans on other planets, and there’s a lot of interesting stuff in Meredith Woerner’s piece on Wall-E director Andrew Stanton’s hugely ambitious adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars, now titled John Carter. But there’s one question that her set visit doesn’t answer. Is John Carter going to be a former Confederate soldier like he is in Burroughs’ original?

The Disney summary of the plot suggests he’s mustered out of an unnamed military conflict, and I wonder if they just might leave it vague. There’s obviously a strong connection between the Civil War and Westerns — the frontier gives folks a chance to refight lost wars. And while it could be convenient, from a plot perspective, to explain that a human who has ended up on a strange planet would be good at organizing an alien insurgency because he developed his skills in a specific, analogous conflict. But it’s probably better to make it almost any other conflict than the Civil War. The Confederacy doesn’t get retroactive points just because fighting in it helps someone achieve justice for another species down the road.