The suits at Disney chose to leave "of Mars" off the title of this McMovie. Though I'm not privy to their reasoning I'd say it was the smartest thing they could have done. When Edgar Rice Burroughs authored the "John Carter of Mars" stories little was known about the red planet. Today most 4th graders would look at the ridiculous representation here and scoff "My baby brother knows that Mars doesn't have a breathable atmosphere!"
The title character of this movie is a psychopath whose only desire is for violence and mayhem. He's aggressively anti-social and would just as soon punch you as say "hello". He fought for the confederacy during the Civil War (I guess Disney research has shown that being pro-slavery makes you a more attractive hero) and despises the victorious Union troops who capture him. Being an ultra-violent, slavery-loving psychopath there ain't a Union jail can hold him gosh dang it and he soon escapes Union control and flees into the desert where, of course, he comes upon an alien in a cave who just happens to be dying and just happens to pass on to him a device that teleports him to "Mars" (though if I had a baby brother he could tell you that the Martian sunlight as depicted here is all wrong).
Carter finds that in the lighter gravity he's able to jump really far. He eventually careens into a cabbage patch nursery abandoned by whoever was supposed to be doing nest duty but is shortly thereafter captured when the derelict nest watchers, (who were apparently on toilet break or something), return. Before he's captured he demonstrates his ability to jump really high and this impresses the native desert people who adopt him as "Virginia" (the state he said he came from).
From here the story begins to weigh heavily on the eyelids. There's a war going on between the two resident "humanoid" races. All the peace loving low-tech desert-victim-people can do is stand by and witness the horrible brutality the (white) humanoids rain down on one another. There's a princess (the monarchy fairy tale raises it's fetid, slimy head yet again) who's also a tech whiz and is dead set against being married off to a prince of the enemy side, blah, blah, blah, yawn, snore...
So you get the idea. The reluctant psychopath is drawn into the conflict, the princess falls for him because lunatics are so wonderfully unpredictable, the victim-people from the desert find a champion (if they didn't let him fight someone else he'd probably kill them) and, since you have two groups of white guys fighting each other, at least some white guys are guaranteed to lose as dictated by Hollywood by-law b2871.
So just what is John Carter? Well, it's part "Cowboys and Aliens" (not the good parts) part "Attack of the Clones" (especially the art direction) and part Beauty and the Beast (though I have yet to figure out who the beauty is). It's possibly a good movie for young children who haven't had much science yet in school or been exposed to any decent sci-fi. For me it's the worst sci-fi film since "Congo". On the upside we now know what cabbage patch kids look like when they grow up.
If you're a sci-fi fan considering plopping down your hard earned money on John Carter I'd suggest holding onto your money until June 8th.
I'm sorry but this is just not a fair review. The criticisms almost all have to do with the original material that comes from Edgar Rice Burroughs' novels, which most people recognize as fairly great science fiction, given what people did and did not know about Mars at the time, as well as the fact that most of the things we take as cliche and overdone these days actually came directly from his novels and other novels of the time. You can't treat a movie like this as if the story had been written in the 21st Century. If we take ourselves back to a time when Mars was a little more mysterious and mythical, it's a remarkably great story, and the film, while it has a few rough edges, is quite an impressive realization of that story.
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