Musings on John Carter…

Just got back from the 3D version last night. I wanted to love this movie but ended up just liking it. I will be picking it up on DVD though.

They did get some stuff just right. I loved the green martians and though I’ve heard some people complain I think Dejah Thoris was close to perfectly cast. I was so afraid they’d go with some Hollywood blonde with big plastic boobs. Though making her some sort of scientist really confused me, making her a warrior woman I can understand but that had me scratching my head.

And it’s nice to see a movie that says war and violence is right when used for a good cause. Still I’m sick to death of the whole relectant hero BS, why do we have to wait over half the movie for Carter to get over his bellyaching.

Anyway, I’m rambling – as I said good movie but not a great movie IMHO. And yes a $300 million budget is insane outside anywhere but Silliwood.

Is the world ready for a cross-dressing action hero? That’s probably why they didn’t go with John Carter – Princess of Mars as the title.  It also didn’t help that a lot of the dialogue was horribly silly, and not in a good way. It’s hard to hear stuff like “let’s go save helium” and not think “why don’t you go save hydrogen while you’re at it”.

They may have avoided the Princess title because there was a direct to video John Carter movie released a couple of years ago, titled PRINCESS OF MARS. The film claims a certain achievement by being the first Carter film to actually get made after decades of attempting such a project, and it maintains a certain amount of cheesy B-movie charm for using so many familiar locations such as Vasquez Rock, Bronson Canyon, and what looks like that water treatment plant that Reb Brown always finds himself running around in. They probably hoped that casting Traci Lords as the titular figure would help sell a few copies as well. The resultant film is sort of fun, but hardly worth going out of the way to see. The film also departs from Burroughs’ text quite a bit, due mostly to budgetary concerns. One weird element, though, is that they changed the planet from Mars to some other world on the other side of the galaxy -yet characters on that planet still refer to it as Mars!!!! And this is purely through lazy scripting. One moment the planet is Barsoom, but later Lords calls it Mars without any explanation!

At any rate, Disney probably didn’t want to have two films out there called PRINCESS OF MARS. It would be confusing, and it might give extremely unobservant people the impression that the Lords film was a Disney product.

On the other hand, I would have thought the name of John Carter would be deeply trenched within the pop culture enough to work on its own. One would think the name would have as much public recognition as, say, Sherlock Holmes, or Tarzan, or James Bond. But then, I keep overlooking the fact that the youth market takes pride in being artificially ignorant to the point that they’ve become fully (willingly) stupid.

 Rock, I don’t think John Carter has much recognition outside hardcore Burroughs fans or people interested in science fiction/pulp history.  Sure, he was in (I think) ten books all told, but those wouldn’t have been read by the general public for probably forty years or so.  It would be the same case with Travis McGee, another beloved character who’s been in a lot of books, but mention his name to a Norm and they wouldn’t know who you were talking about.

As Murray Hamilton might have said, “You say, ‘John Carter’ and people go, ‘Huh?’ “Wha?”  You add ‘Of Mars’ and you’ve got fanboys at the box office.

There’s not a single thing here that any reasonable person could disagree with from a production/marketing standpoint.  Which is why Ken won’t be running his own studio anytime soon.

Seriously, though…you would think in a personnel infrastructure that includes thousands of people, exactly these ideas must have been brought up sometime.  So why didn’t they rise to the top?

Also, Holmes, Tarzan and Bond have constantly been in the public eye. TV shows, Disney movies, saturday morning cartoons, parodies, and so on. “Tarzan” gets 14 title matches on IMDB, “Sherlock Holmes” gets 23, and there are, what, 24 James Bond movies even if his name isn’t in the titles? How many John Carter movies have there been besides this one? How many video games or shows?

You can say “Elementary, my dear Watson” or “Shaken, not stirred” or do that goofy tarzan yell and pretty much any American will know exactly what you’re referencing. John Carter is, frankly, obscure. Sure, the stories were influential, but that means nothing for market awareness. Neuromancer was hugely influential, and much more recently so, but you wouldn’t just slap that name on a feature film and expect it to coast to success despite a truly inept marketing job. I can’t even get John Carter at my local library!

It’s fun to blame the kids, but it isn’t always accurate. This is all Disney’s fault. The movie could have been better, should have been cheaper, and was hugely mis-marketed.

Heh, or how people apparently don’t like movies with question marks in the title – hence “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”.

I’ll grant that. Although the producers of PRINCESS OF MARS, who rushed their film into production when Disney solidified their plans to tackle the property, evidently assumed the character would have enough pull in the public mind to justify the film’s production. Otherwise, they could have just filmed any old space opera. The property has been ALMOST made into a movie for decades now, including a Bob Clampett project that, had it gone beyond the test reel, would have been the first animated feature film. The fact that none of these projects prior to PRINCESS OF MARS got off the drawing board WOULD seem to support your position.

-I’ve been thinking the movie should have been called “Warlord of Mars”,(1) but Terrahawk’s “Barsoom” is a really good suggestion. The advertising could have gotten across the idea that Barsoom was an exotic alien planet.
-I thought some of the changes made to the story – the transmission mechanism and longtime presence of the Therns on Earth stuff, the reluctant hero weighed down by his tragic past stuff – made the movie weaker. The former elements made it look like it was imitating “Stargate”. The reluctant hero element made Carter less likeable, and was in conflict with the likeability of Kitsch’s Carter when he was chivalrous and heroic. I wondered if the filmmakers had been misled by the idea that a hero has to go on a character journey.
-The film didn’t make enough of the romance. The reluctant hero stuff even detracted from it, because for a while after he’d met Dejah Thoris he was still refusing to be a hero and mainly preoccupied with getting back to Earth.
-Possibly the film had pacing problems. I think the battle with the apes should have been an earlier climax in the film.
-Tars Tarkas would have had a more interesting storyline if he had not been the Thark Jeddak at the start and had won the position by killing Tal Hajus, to avenge his mate. It’s a while since I read it, but I think that’s what happens in the book.

My objection isn’t that the filmmakers made changes, but that changes they made didn’t work well enough. I thought the content didn’t come across as dated at all. I don’t blame the filmmakers for making Dejah Thoris a modern heroine, but I think they didn’t figure out how to give her a strong role in the story.

1) Carter doesn’t become Warlord of Mars until bk 3, but they could have put that in.

Another problem I have with the title:

Wouldn’t millions of E.R. fans have been scanning the trailer and asking themselves, “Wait a minute, where’s Noah Wyle?”

 Of course, if they’re REALLY been faithful to the book, as far as the costuming went….

I’m not that clever. Besides, this was well after her days as a porno queen. When she made PRINCESS OF MARS, Lords was just an aging B movie queen, and I got the feeling from the behind the scenes segment that she was getting pretty bitter about it.