John Carter

[Greg_phpbb3_import1]

You have to feel bad about the reception of this film. It's not bad. It just has a lot of things working against it.

First off, is the premise. When the original books were written, Mars was a big mystery. But it was firmly believed that there were canals on Mars, evidence of civilization. A hundred years later we have explorers on Mars and we know that is patently not true. It would almost have been better if the series had been set on another far flung planet. I kept thinking well this is all well and good to have these civilizations but I know they can't exist. And Mars has such a bad response in movie titles from audiences they removed it from the title.

It is amazing what $250 million can buy you. You can have armies of four armed aliens running around in every scene. You can have huge detailed cites with flying space ships. One of the cities even walks the dirt of Mars. It all looked really beautiful. But again I kept thinking wow those are really beautifully rendered CGI cities. They never seemed part of the environment. And because of the 3-D some of the John Carter actor shots looked bad. He almost looked like he was up against a rear screen projection.

The story was fine. I thought the first twenty minutes or so was really good. They had some good character and action stuff in a fort in the southwest, I really liked. When he gets to Mars, he's just a prop for the set pieces. He does have some funny interaction with a giant dog/hippo thing that becomes his pet. The film could definitely use some more humor. Everybody took themselves a bit too seriously.

All and all, it was fine. It didn't overwhelm me. But it wasn't as terrible as the press made it out to be.

[cranefly]

A writer friend of mine, Lucius, reviewed the movie in F&SF, and he had pretty much the same reaction. Not good, but not really bad either. He also noted that the director's cut of the film was much longer, but the studio made him trim it way way down for release. The question Lucius then had was, is it mediocre because of all the chopping the director was forced to do, or can't the studio be blamed for that? He concluded that we wouldn't know the answer until the movie came out on DVD and offered the option of seeing the original cut.

So, Greg. Do you know which version you watched? Just curious.

[thatguy]

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John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood - free Kindle edition
Mark Frauenfelder at 8:54 am Wed, Feb 6

For a limited time (until midnight Thursday PST), Michael D. Sellers' book about the making of the giant flop John Carter is free in the Kindle format. I can't wait to read it. I hope it's as fun as Julie Salamon's The Devil's Candy: The Anatomy Of A Hollywood Fiasco, about the disastrous story of making Bonfire of the Vanities into a movie.

It took 100 years to bring Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars to the big screen. It took Disney Studios just ten days to declare the film a flop and lock it away in the Disney vaults. How did this project, despite its quarter-billion dollar budget, the brilliance of director Andrew Stanton, and the creative talents of legendary Pixar Studios, become a calamity of historic proportions?

Michael Sellers, a filmmaker and Hollywood insider himself, saw the disaster approaching and fought to save the project – but without success. In John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood, Sellers details every blunder and betrayal that led to the doom of the motion picture – and that left countless Hollywood careers in the wreckage.

John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood examines every aspect of Andrew Stanton's adaptation and Disney's marketing campaign and seeks to answer the question: What went wrong? it includes a history of Hollywood's 100 year effort to bring the film to the screen, and examines the global fan movement spawned by the film.

--tg

[Drunk Monk]

Princess of Mars was direct-2-DVD with Traci Lords playing Dejah Thoris.

No, I haven't seen it. But the dvd box looks good.