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!