John Carter of Mars
Mar. 15th, 2012 02:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brushwolfThe short review is that it was a really fun film, not worth full price and probably not worth matinee price, but fun. Worth seeing again, just not in the theaters.
I've actually never read the Barsoom books. My Grampa suggested that I try reading the Tarzan books when I was about halfway through my Dad's collection of them, as a kid; my Dad had all the Pellucidar books, and there was even a Venus book in the public library. I mean, I know the basic ideas as a cultural byproduct a little like how someone could know what Deep Ones and Cthulhu are without having ever flipped open a Lovecraft story. I'm confessing this heresy publicly because I'm basically judging the thing as a movie, without being desperately disappointed that It Isn't That Way in Burroughs' Originals Damnit.
I've read criticisms of the movie being a little like the Star Wars prequels, but this didn't bug me at all - I figure that elements like trekking through endless desert full of savage quasi-nomads, big arena fights with monsters, princesses pleading for the future of their home, and one-man speeder bikes are all either really basic storytelling or stuff which Burroughs had established long enough to stick in Lucas' noggin. There are visual similarities - Iain McCaig gets pulled for projects because he's talented - but there's enough difference to be worthwhile. Again, really fun to watch.
The whole southern gentleman bit grates, because I'm an expatriate southerner and really don't like the monomyth nor why I think we have it. But hey, it was pretty irrevocably in ERB's original, so I can suck it up. There's this plotline about the Tharks dealing with feelings of (gasp) compassion which I think is bullshit, but which might have been in the books. There's a villain who's just too much of a standard stomping militaristic conqueror to be believable or interesting, but for all I know he was pretty unavoidably that way in the books. The plotline about the eeeeevil bad guy planning to marry the nice good princess and being foiled at the last minute is ridiculously hokey, but for all I know it was irrevocably in the books as well. There's a hokey plot about Burroughs himself helping Carter, who's his uncle, defeat the bad guys and help him return to Mars and Deja Thoris, which I am pretty sure wasn't in the books and it wasn't very good either.
What I didn't like about the movie was basically pacing, because the movie had a huge number of plotlines going and was trying to hit big iconic stuff from the books and doing it in 2 hours. If there's a big overarching plotline to the thing it's that Carter, who's lost everything in the Civil War and drifted west as a prospector, finally makes conscious choices to be true to his basic nature as an idealist. But there are so many other plotlines - the Tharks having compassion, exploring Tars Tarkas' personality, Deja's science project interfacing with a really big worlds-shattering conspiracy, Deja's attempt to save Helium, whatever - that it would get muddied even if the story wasn't also bouncing through weird monsters, cool chases and badass fight scenes. A Peter-Jacksonian, how-many-hours-have-I-been-in-this-theater-anyway length film might be able to do justice to everything the movie was trying to do, but I really wish they'd gone for a much simpler story. I can see why they didn't - a movie lighter on plot might fall into the trap of being yet another big effects thing - but as it stands they managed to make a movie where I didn't give a crap about the main characters. I thought Deja's rakish lieutenant and Tars Tharkas were 'way more interesting than Carter or Deja herself.
I've actually never read the Barsoom books. My Grampa suggested that I try reading the Tarzan books when I was about halfway through my Dad's collection of them, as a kid; my Dad had all the Pellucidar books, and there was even a Venus book in the public library. I mean, I know the basic ideas as a cultural byproduct a little like how someone could know what Deep Ones and Cthulhu are without having ever flipped open a Lovecraft story. I'm confessing this heresy publicly because I'm basically judging the thing as a movie, without being desperately disappointed that It Isn't That Way in Burroughs' Originals Damnit.
I've read criticisms of the movie being a little like the Star Wars prequels, but this didn't bug me at all - I figure that elements like trekking through endless desert full of savage quasi-nomads, big arena fights with monsters, princesses pleading for the future of their home, and one-man speeder bikes are all either really basic storytelling or stuff which Burroughs had established long enough to stick in Lucas' noggin. There are visual similarities - Iain McCaig gets pulled for projects because he's talented - but there's enough difference to be worthwhile. Again, really fun to watch.
The whole southern gentleman bit grates, because I'm an expatriate southerner and really don't like the monomyth nor why I think we have it. But hey, it was pretty irrevocably in ERB's original, so I can suck it up. There's this plotline about the Tharks dealing with feelings of (gasp) compassion which I think is bullshit, but which might have been in the books. There's a villain who's just too much of a standard stomping militaristic conqueror to be believable or interesting, but for all I know he was pretty unavoidably that way in the books. The plotline about the eeeeevil bad guy planning to marry the nice good princess and being foiled at the last minute is ridiculously hokey, but for all I know it was irrevocably in the books as well. There's a hokey plot about Burroughs himself helping Carter, who's his uncle, defeat the bad guys and help him return to Mars and Deja Thoris, which I am pretty sure wasn't in the books and it wasn't very good either.
What I didn't like about the movie was basically pacing, because the movie had a huge number of plotlines going and was trying to hit big iconic stuff from the books and doing it in 2 hours. If there's a big overarching plotline to the thing it's that Carter, who's lost everything in the Civil War and drifted west as a prospector, finally makes conscious choices to be true to his basic nature as an idealist. But there are so many other plotlines - the Tharks having compassion, exploring Tars Tarkas' personality, Deja's science project interfacing with a really big worlds-shattering conspiracy, Deja's attempt to save Helium, whatever - that it would get muddied even if the story wasn't also bouncing through weird monsters, cool chases and badass fight scenes. A Peter-Jacksonian, how-many-hours-have-I-been-in-this-theater-anyway length film might be able to do justice to everything the movie was trying to do, but I really wish they'd gone for a much simpler story. I can see why they didn't - a movie lighter on plot might fall into the trap of being yet another big effects thing - but as it stands they managed to make a movie where I didn't give a crap about the main characters. I thought Deja's rakish lieutenant and Tars Tharkas were 'way more interesting than Carter or Deja herself.