"[5] A year and a half later, in his New Yorker article, Friend documents accompanying Stanton on a visit to Giacchino where they discuss the movie's score and how it relates to the narrative.

With the opening voiceover and battle footage, he had put music from Syriana that sounded "dire and Middle Eastern and forlorn, like a culture clinging to its nobility."

Giacchino agreed but suggested a different merger, doing the Mars theme chorally near the end of the film, to accentuate the Therns' apparently inevitable takeover of the planet, an idea Stanton eagerly accepted.

The latter's review read "what Giacchino does so winningly with “John Carter,” as in much of his big-ticket scoring, is to flood us with the kind of magic that makes the kid in all of us want to grow up to duel with two-story aliens, fly spaceships and kiss the voluptuous girl.

They’re all elements that made the properly called “John Carter of Mars” a progenitor of today’s way-familiar genre spectaculars [...] As a composer who’s been to plenty of those worlds during the formative years of his musical imagination, Giacchino continues to pay that tradition forward in wonderful style here.

"[14] Movie Music UK, gave 4.5 stars and said "Listeners who enjoy large scale fantasy scores with strong main themes and significant action set pieces will enjoy John Carter greatly, as will those who appreciated Giacchino’s earlier efforts in similarly-styled scores, especially the aforementioned likes of Super 8, and the Lost (TV series).

The weaknesses of the work relate to its somewhat muddy enunciations of its Mars-related secondary themes and a seeming inability by Giacchino to nail the narrative flow of the story through satisfying transitions (with an extended sense of anticipation).