John Carter is one of most extensively developed projects in Hollywood history. You know how non-Hollywood folks are shocked when you tell them that a movie took ten years to get to the big screen? Try 80 years! While it’d take forever to go through the details of all this development, more recently the project saw itself as a Go picture when famed Aint-it-cool-news film lover Harry Knowles came on as an advisor. Through his influence, “The Cell” and “I Am Legend” screenwriter Mark Protosevich was brought on to write the script. Harry showed the finished draft to his buddy Robert Rodriquez, who then signed on to direct the film. But everything fell apart when Rodriquez angered the Director’s Guild (and the Hollywood community in general) by giving the directorally uninvolved Frank Miller a co-directing credit on his film Sin City (the Director’s Guild hates giving out co-credits in general. They’d prefer every movie be directed by one person). Forced to drop out of the Director’s Guild, it became difficult to clear certain production hurdles without a guild signatory. Rodriquez dropped off the project and a slew of new writers came in over the next seven years (as well as the project going back to Disney), until we got the current draft, written by Andrew Stanton, Mark Andrews, and Michael Chabon. The film went on to dramatically underperform at the box office ($73 million domestic on what was reportedly a $250 million dollar budget), resulting in the ouster of Disney Studios chairman Rich Ross. For all these reasons, we’ll be studying John Carter for how NOT to write a screenplay. The biggest problem with the story is clearly its overly complicated plotting, so that’s where I’ll be spending most of my focus on.
1) Concepts need to make sense, even in the sci-fi world – Your concept has to make sense, as it is the pillar responsible for holding your entire story up. John Carter is about a guy who magically travels to Mars where he becomes mixed up in an alien war. Except everyone on Earth knows that Mars is dead. There’s no air, no water, no alien factions running around. So we know this couldn’t happen. Since we know this couldn’t happen, we never believe in or care about anything that happens after it.
2) The more overly complicated your world, the simpler your plot should be – Star Wars may be a complex world, but it always kept its plotting simple. They needed to get the stolen plans to the good guys. The bad guys were chasing after them to stop that. John Carter has a complex world AND a complex plot – a deadly mix. There are parallel storylines in John Carter, four different planetary factions (two human and two alien), a weird sub-race of cloaked bald men, a secret arm weapon, something called “helium” that’s dying, a princess refusing to get married. We never really know what anyone is trying to do. Most sci-fi movies that succeed, even if they have extensive world building, counteract that complexity by having very simple plots.
3) There’s a fine line between intrigue and confusion– This is a mistake I see amateur writers make way too often. They’ll introduce a ton of weird stuff, but be unclear what the weird stuff is or why it’s being included, indicating that if you “stay tuned,” you’ll find out. Here, the weird bald-headed dudes who can shape-shift into different people (for no reason) hand Angry Flying Ship Guy a laser-wrist cannon. It’s supposed to be this huge moment, but the writer doesn’t imply why or how this changes anything besides the fact that Angry Flying Ship Guy can now shoot people with his wrist in addition to shooting people with his ship cannon. The writer mistakes this as “intrigue,” a curious twist in the plot that the audience will want to know more about. But the audience instead is confused by it, which leads to annoyance and eventually, rejection of the story. Intrigue is often simple (what are these mysterious plans inside R2-D2?). Confusion occurs when you try to cram too many jumbled elements together.
4) There is often a single dominant problem in a bad script that is leading to all its other problems. Find the problem and the other issues disappear – Here, it’s the over-plotting. There’s just too much damn plot. Had they fixed that, maybe focused exclusively on John Carter trying to get home, it would’ve erased so many of the script’s other issues.
5) Beware Unclear Urgency – If you’re going to write a sci-fi spec, it’s preferable that urgency is woven tightly into the plot. Star Wars has its heroes being chased throughout. District 9 had its hero turning into an alien, giving him only a few days to stop the transformation. John Carter of Mars has no urgency because its focus changes so many times. Without urgency, a story slows to a crawl, and you can’t get away with that in a summer action film. We need to feel like time is running out, that objectives need to be reached RIGHT AWAY. John Carter never achieves this, which led to one of its biggest criticisms – that it was “way too slow.”
6) The more convoluted your plot, the more scenes of exposition you will have. The more scenes of exposition you have, the more boring your script will be — John Carter suffers greatly from this. It has multiple plotlines (Helium being needed, alien baby harvesting, princesses who need to get married, multiple aliens, a confusing war, a character who needs to get home, etc). This puts a lot of stress on the writer to keep all this stuff clear for the audience, which means constantly stopping and reminding them what’s going on via exposition scenes. Which of course leads to boredom. Keep your sci-fi plot simple, as it allows for more time spent entertaining your audience.
7) A dramatic score isn’t going to magically fix a scene that isn’t working – I think us writers get carried away, imagining our key scenes on the big screen with that epic swelling score playing. When we do this, the amazing music starts to cover up all the problems inherent in the scene, problems we then become blind to. There’s this ridiculous scene in John Carter where he jumps into a group of 500 warrior aliens and, with the score rising dramatically, starts killing all of them. Uhhhhh, what??? Our hero can kill an entire army on his own??? Errr… no. But it sure looks like the writer thought it worked, as the score is practically willing us to believe. Stop using future scores to solve your issues and solve them on the page instead.
8) Reactive characters result in “yanked around” stories – Remember, reactive characters are pushed and pulled, yanked this way and that, slaves to the actions and desires of others. Therefore when you tell a story with a reactive hero, we feel the same way, like we’re being pushed and pulled, yanked and tugged, a slave to something beyond our control. While skilled writers can sometimes make this work, it more often results in a story that feels unfocused and all over the place. So it’s no surprise that’s how John Carter feels. Carter is reactive for most of the story, being pulled along by one alien faction or another, told what to do most of the time. As a result, the story never quite gains a foothold on what it wants to be. An active character on the other hand, one who chooses his own destiny, often results in a clean, focused, easy-to-follow story. This is why I think they should’ve made the plot much simpler here: John Carter tries to find his way home. That way he always stays active. He always drives the story.
9) When building your set-pieces, don’t try and survive on spectacle. Instead, rely on cleverness – For all its huge budget, there really isn’t a single memorable set-piece in John Carter, and that’s because the set-pieces amount to a bunch of basic fighting sequences. Oftentimes, a clever offbeat set-piece can be a thousand times more interesting, such as the simplistic trash-compactor scene in Star Wars.
10) Don’t construct your set-piece scenes before the movie and then fit your story around them. Create your story first, and let your set-pieces emerge naturally from that story – There’s a trailer-friendly set-piece where John Carter is pulled into an arena and must fight against two giant alien apes to the death. Problem is, it’s forced into the script unnaturally. John Carter is captured by a random “bad” alien and the next thing we know he’s being tossed into an arena to fight for his life. Why this is happening is beyond us, but it feels like someone said they wanted a “Giant Ape Fighting Arena Scene” and were going to get it into the movie through hell or high water. Yes, you want trailer-friendly scenes, but not at the expense of taking the audience out of the story. They must fit into the movie organically. To achieve this, focus on your character’s goals and where they take you, then look for set-pieces to emerge naturally through that journey. Whenever you’ve thought of a set piece ahead of time and try to unnaturally squeeze it in, it always feels out of place.
