Major Disappointment

[smofbabe]

I'm not sure whether my decision to re-read the Burroughs Mars books before seeing John Carter was a good one: I suspect it made a messy movie script seem even messier.

Good stuff first: the look of the film was great and the acting ranged from fairly decent (Taylor Kitsch almost, but not quite, managed to overcome his tragic miscasting) to quite good in the cases of Mark Strong as the head thern and Lily Collins as the kick-ass heroine. The only change I completely approved of from the book to the movie is that they made Dejah Thoris less of a wuss in need of rescuing all the time.

The extremely bad stuff: My big complaint is the change in John Carter's character. In the books, he's a talented fighter and a Southern gentleman with a strong sense of right and wrong. In the movie, he's an embittered troublemaker with a tragic past. The whole opening with him threatening the bartender and fighting the federal officers was a complete departure from his character as established in the books. He did plenty of fighting but only for a cause, not just because he was a pissed-off loner.

The script seemed thrown together with murky motivations on nearly everyone's part and confusing half-allusions to things that were never spelled out.

• What was the therns' motivation? ("We like to manipulate people on planets to destroy themselves because we're immortal and bored"?) And what was it with the therns, anyway: in the books they don't go popping around from Earth to Mars and they are strictly Mars based, not some sort of immortal interstellar malevolent gang.



• What was the purpose of the wedding? If the villain has an invincible blue-ray weapon, why does he need to marry the Helium princess? Why not just conquer the country?



• And what was all the whinging from Dejah Thoris, anyway? In the books, she's kidnapped by various villainous cretins who want to marry her. In the movie, her father has agreed to marry her to a fairly presentable ruler of another country to save their own country from further violence. Suck it up, honey, just like princesses throughout history have had to do.



• How did John Carter know that Sola was Tars' daughter? He couldn't have known enough about thark body language to guess. (BTW, best line from the reviews I've read was from Richard Corliss at TIME, who said that the tharks seemed like a cross between Avatar's Na'vi and Jar Jar Binks :-> )

I can't blame some of the other inconsistencies that come straight from the book, like why if you have high-powered deadly rifles you still fight with swords, or how John Carter does not break his legs when he lands from a giant height, especially when carrying Dejah, or why you traverse the desert for many days on thoats when there are airships.

As usual, my problems with plot inconsistencies overshadowed for me whatever positive points were to be had from this mess.

Comments

Rereading of any

[dragonet2.livejournal.com]

ERB's books has caused me despair. I crashed into all of them when I was the appropriate age - 12-ish, I was not male but I was into adventure stories, etc.

In some cases it is too simplistic. In Tarzan's case, the racisim ignored by the 12-year-old me who was being dragged along by the adventure story, was a smack into the face for an adult.

I have no desire to see the John Carter movie.

Re: Rereading of any

[smofbabe.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I had forgotten about the unceasing violence and complete unrepentant glee related to it in the books. The body count is pretty impressive!

[fringefaan.livejournal.com]

I agree that the motivation of the therns doesn't make any sense at all. Major flaw.

The purpose of the wedding, according to the head thern, is to create a grand public spectacle in which the princess of Helium is murdered before the eyes of the whole city-state, thus crushing the will of the people. Mwa-ha-ha! Twirl mustache!

I really didn't like the complaining of Dejah Thoris either. It would've been better for her to simply defy her father's plan and head for the hills.

I think there's an implication that John Carter recognizes Sola's relationship to Tars Tarkas because he had a daughter of his own and recognizes a fellow father's feeling for a daughter. This is certainly underdeveloped.

Unlike you, however, I really enjoyed the movie a lot despite its flaws. I liked this version of John Carter better, and find the John Carter of the books pretty unbearable. To me ERB's Mars books are most interesting for the world-building, and most of the good stuff is in the first two books. I liked how the movie integrated the therns into the storyline from the get-go, and I'm curious how a second movie would have dealt with the books' anti-religious stance.

[smofbabe.livejournal.com]

Regarding John Carter in the books, I had completely forgotten until re-reading them how positively gleeful he is about whacking away at perceived enemies or scary creatures, and how unrepentant he is about killing random unsuspecting guards, people who get in his way, etc.

I agree with the worldbuilding comment: I've been telling people that ERB would have been a great travel writer.