Movie Eulogy: John Carter

I can't bring myself to review John Carter: there's just no point. It was a solid movie with a serious casting flaw. It was a hell of a lot of fun - not quite as good as the Star Trek reboot, but certainly within leaping distance.

And critics, as they are wont to do, failed to appreciate it. I truly believe that, as an invention, Rotten Tomatoes's Tomatometer is a technological leap forward in critical film analysis as significant as that day, so many decades ago, when an early film critic looked up at the night sky and gazed upon stars. But clearly it contains a flaw. When it comes to genre action movies, the Tomatometer is utterly unable to differentiate an enjoyable flick from a dull one. As such, movies like John Carter are relegated to the same bucket of rotten films as hundreds of less deserving pictures.

But by now we know the signs: movies with a rating between 35% and 60% where the majority of positive are glowing rather than tepid will generally be as good as your average movie in the 85% - 90% range. We've seen it before, and - until such day as this flaw is corrected - we'll see it again.

But it's a shame John Carter had to get burned. Of course, Disney's piss-poor marketing campaign is more to blame than all the critics put together.

After all, who reads reviews anymore?