John Carter: Well Worth Seeing

Well.. I thought it was a near perfect movie adaption. And liked the movie lots!

Its an old story.. but unless they make it adult version it is what I expected. This is how a John Carter movie should look like. I had fun at least. And it would be a shame if there was never a sequal.

I went to the midnight showing last week, partly because I was up anyway. It wasn't the book, which is one of my favorites. I went in knowing it could never live up to that, and so I wasn't disappointed. Indeed, I found it very entertaining.

The high point for me was the portrayal of the Green Men, almost exactly as I had imagined them. I understand the director was primarily an animation guy, so I suppose this makes sense.

The low point was the performance of the actor who portrayed John Carter. Aside from his just being rather wooden, you know something's off when a character who proclaims himself a Virginian at every possible opportunity is the only character in a scene without a Southern accent. Again, with a director unused to working with live actors, this, too, makes sense.

A disappointing but extremely necessary point to make the movie work were the changes to the villains, Carter's transportation to Mars, and even Carter's backstory. I can't imagine a film audience, or even a literary audience, for that matter, accepting these things in the form Burroughs wrote them originally (villains as almost unnoticeable characters, totally unexplained, and being a mysteriously ageless soldier, respectively, for those who don't know the novels). Story conventions have just changed too much over the past century. I was disappointed to lose the original version here, but I thought the changes were handled well.

On the last point, (the literary) Carter's unexplained agelessness, my personal pet theory has always been that Carter is, in fact, the basis for the legends of the god Mars himself. Burroughs never gives any hint of having even thought of this, let alone written it into a story, but I still enjoy the idea. What do you think?

Saw this yesterday. I thought it was fairly entertaining. There were times where I was genuinely surprised at how much it seemed everyone bought into this movie, from the amount of CGI that no doubt shot up the budget like a rocket to the lines that were at least half Martian verbage. At the very least you can say that the movie has some heart and imagination for such a big budget spectacle. It could have used some polish in areas, but it did quite a bit right and received laughs and even applause for all the right moments.

Still, with this CGI epic that's essentially introducing a new generation to a space-based franchise I can't help but be reminded of how WB bastardized Green Lantern by giving it neither heart or imagination and I worry about the future of DC movies post-Bat-Nolan.

#1. For understanding how messed up the movie business is you should watch movie bob's explanation on hollywood history and such on the escapist.com. Not to bring in economics and such into this or anything but the shady business practices of these massive conglomerates is what is damaging them everything from how they treat the customer to the talent that creates the work is so irrational and illogical to obfuscate loses and gains so that they can grab every cent from every where that it is in end destroying their entire world.

#2. The movie was decent, but considering I've seen several renditions of this movie, I don't think that this needed to be made if the weren't going to give us anything really different from the others.

#3. The change they made to use technology rather than mysticism while it is interesting, ultimately cripples the story as it makes it less believable and makes it so if there are sequels they'll have a ripple effect causing tons more changes that aren't for the best.

#4. On the plus side it has made me look into getting the audiobook form of these books and I'm going to listen to them as they sound interesting.

Green-lighting that kind of budget for that kind of source material was insane

The wife and I loved it. Definitely want to see it again on the big screen.

-LR

Just returned from seeing it in 3D - There were a few cringe worthy parts while getting used to the John Carter's acting style, as well as a few parts with Dejah that felt off. I'd chalk it up to inexperience directing live actors - the body language was just a little off, inflection on some lines needed a tiny bit of tweaking, etc. This only really came out in the quiet lulls between moving the plot along, so it wasn't too jarring.

With that out of the way I was very, very entertained. I love old serials, old sci-fi, "Humans are superior!" silliness, and it hit all of those beautifully. The visuals, costumes, and gadgets were stunning and looked like someone had made a full movie set in Asgard from Thor. And the story pieced everything together in a fun, entertaining, and engaging way.

I'm generally an easy to please movie-goer, but John Carter was just all around good, even excellent outside of the small, slow bits of relationship drama during the beginning of the film. I have no regrets paying the obscene cost to watch a 3D film in theaters for this one - I'll probably even see it again with a friend who hasn't seen it yet. It's close to my perfect movie with a touch of camp, drama, action, and a "save the world" plot; it's interesting and entertaining, and doesn't try to shoe-horn in the pretense of trying to challenge or send a message to the viewer.

I'm praying that the film will somehow surge in viewings. I'd love to see a sequel.

So yea, I just saw this tonight myself. I'd kind of despaired of it being any good once I started seeing the commercials and once the reviews started popping up I'd pretty much written it off as not being any good. Still I went to go see it out of the same sense of morbid curiosity that keeps on dragging me to Michael Bay movies and I have to say I'm rather happy I went.

It's certainly not a cinematic masterpiece by any stretch, but it's a lot of good solid fun in the same vein as movies like The Rocketeer or the '93 version of The Three Musketeers. It manages to have a decent amount of character development and plot mixed in with its action scenes and the special effects were quite well done. I'd give it about a 7/10 with 5 being a completely average 'meh' film.

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Originally Posted by Durakken I've seen the same name or nearly the same name as it so yeah... It's still nothing really different from that previous movie from my recollection.

The only other version I'm aware of is Princess of Mars. It's kind of a terrible film, which makes sense since I believe it's done by The Asylum, and I'll grant that it's not bad for one of their films but it's still pretty horrible. They do have the same general plot since they're mostly based on the same book, but aside from a couple similarities they're pretty different I thought.

I think the point being the Barsoom novels have been mined over the decades and various elements are found in stories and movies like Flash Gordon, Star Wars, Avatar, and other space operas.

It's sadly humorous that people wrongly think John Carter stole from those stories and movies. But like I've said, everyone knows Tarzan, few know of John Carter or David Innes (Pellucidar series).

They know the trope, but do they know it as a means of interplanetary travel? I think that's beyond the limit of the suspension of disbelief.

Neither my wife nor I had ever read the books. My wife knew *nothing* about the movie heading into it, and I only knew a little from a brief synopsis I read of the Barsoom novels.

We both thought it was really well done. The female lead was weak, not in acting skill, but because (I imagine) that was how she was written. You can see they tried to spice her up a bit by giving her some sword fighting scenes, but she was clearly designed to be the 'damsel in distress' to be saved by the 'big strong man'.

I hope they do a sequel or two, because it really was a fun movie. I may have to go hunt down a novel or two to read as well.