Jack LesCamela

Here's another review from the guy I attended the second screening with. His review is more in depth (without spoilers) and more thoughtful than mine. He's a huge Burroughs fan, and loved the movie.

Thanks for the kind words, both of you. Almuric, I do have Facebook, and have posted said review on the Swords & Planet League page there. I've posted it to IMDB who has yet to okay it, and Andrew Stanton retweeted an earlier version of it.

I wrote a review and posted it on IMDB. Here it is:

'I HAVE BEEN TO BARSOOM'

I am a man of obsessions. For months, a movie I hadn't seen was the thing. Not Peter Jackson's THE HOBBIT, not Joss Whedon's THE AVENGERS, not even the upcoming Sam Mendes directed James Bond movie SKYFALL (which I'm excited about but it hasn't really sunk its hooks into me yet)...

No, it was Andrew Stanton's JOHN CARTER.

My excitement was not the universal feeling. Disney advertising had dropped the ball and the trailers seemed lackluster to most. Yet something within directed me toward it like a compass points to True North. There was something special about it, something just out of view in the trailers that wouldn't let me go. I trust my obsessions, always, but at some point I got to feeling a bit exhausted and just wanted to know if I was right or maybe a total loon.

I've now been to two advance screenings of JOHN CARTER.

And?

Holy Living Thark! The bar on science fiction and fantasy movies has Officially Been Raised.

JOHN CARTER is based on Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars --a novel first published a century ago. I expected to come out of the movie with my head full of comparisons to all the things Burroughs' imagination inspired: STAR WARS, AVATAR, FLASH GORDON, etc. Understandably so, as I'm much more familiar with all of them. That didn't happen. Put simply, if STAR WARS is a kids' science fiction movie franchise that adults enjoy (and it is), then JOHN CARTER is an adult science fiction movie that kids will enjoy.

CARTER was such an immersing experience. Every moment reveals something new about Mars; about the exotic alien races and cultures that call it home, or about their individual characters. James Cameron's AVATAR showed us a world we've never seen before and it was wondrous to behold, but Andrew Stanton's JOHN CARTER is a movie so rich with detail that it left me feeling like I had been somewhere. JOHN CARTER feels like nothing so much than as if David Lean had made a science fiction epic of love and war set on Mars.

This movie has a confidence to it you won't be expecting. It's unafraid to linger over the characters, and give them time to breathe and reveal themselves. My favorite decade for movies is the 1960s, and JOHN CARTER has some of the epic adventure movies of that time running through it like a seam of gold. There's a bit of LAWRENCE OF ARABIA in there as I alluded to before, and perhaps a touch of ZULU and SPARTACUS is mixed in with the Martian airships and predator cities. Old fashioned storytelling magic and 21st century movie sorcery have combined into a film that's a pulp sci-fi masterpiece.

To the ERB faithful: please relax. Yes, there are changes from the novel; no, they are not the arbitrary changes made in inferior movie adaptations where the filmmaker just wants to do his/her own ideas. Every change is made to tell Burroughs' story or reveal some aspect of Burroughs' characters in a way more befitting a movie instead of a novel.

Going into this, I had absurdly high expectations. A friend of mine told me he was worried the movie wouldn't live up to them and that frankly I was starting to sound a little crazy. Well, the movie went and exceeded my expectations. I love it, and give it a 10/10. I'm definitely going to see it at least six times in the theater, and will finally buy a Blu-Ray player just to watch it at home.

I realize this review sounds over the top. That's just how excited I am about the movie. Perhaps in a previous life I was an ancient Greek by the name of Hyperboles? Anyway, see the movie. I guarantee that even if you don't like it as much as I did, you'll see where I was coming from with this gushing review.

I just talked with some friends, including one in financial business who I thought might have heard of Disney's possible earnings issues due to the film, and none of them had heard of it.  The marketing has definitely been botched, including the utter panic over using the word Mars, which has made things worse if you asked me.  But what may save it is the fact that all reports are it's just a plain old good movie.  My thinking is if it does OK at the worldwide box office, then does good business on home video and streaming, a sequel could get greenlit with a lower budget to make profitability easier.

John Carter of Mars has stood the test of time.  Even if it's intitially a box office disappointment, if it's a great film, it will surely become a classic.  I do think they made a mistake by not calling it John Carter of Mars, though.  Too clever by a half.

I saw the movie over the weekend at an advance screening. The movie is phenomenally good. If any of you have been putting off buying complete sets of the John Carter series in an old paperback edition, or Burroughs stuff in general --I suggest you do so before the movie comes out. Afterward and you'll be paying much dearer prices for it.

I have read A Princess of Mars three times. Once in the 1970's, once in the 1990's and last year when I ordered a Frazetta edition from Amazon and received a blue hardback instead. Be that as it may... Considering how many books I have read since, the story is a little vague, but! I remember it well enough to know there were no offworlders who fed off dying planets -- and earth was next(!), if John Carter didn't stop them, as a preview I saw showed...

Which preview was that?

It looks like another "Burroughs had some good ideas, but we took it in another direction..." Hollywood crap. Yes, book stories have to be rearranged to fit flick stories as they are different, but to totally change the story itself... While I know to the cgi-is-more-important-than-story crowd the bells and whistles will make it the greatest flick ever, to me it's sad that we finally have a way to bring such great stories to the silver screen, but no one who has the real ability to do it in Hollywood.

You might want to wait until after you've seen the movie to come to that conclusion.

I may have egg on my puss here. Last night I watched a couple of previews and am positive in one a man says, "We feed off dying planets;" followed by Dejah Thoris saying, "Our world is at war and  Earth is next." Now I find the latter line, but not the first in all the previews I've watched. Nevertheless, just hearing again that the earth is next... I'm left to wonder.

Here's the tv spot where Dejah Thoris says, "and earth is next."

Here's the tv spot where Matai Shang says they feed off dying planets.

I don't have any problems with the changes because thus far all the changes I know about were made out of wanting to get as close to the novel as possible, being unable to, and doing something to make up the shortfall; i.e. the tattoos on the red men. The filmmakers were unable to make the actors any more red without it looking bizarre and distracting, so they went with tattoos to set them apart a bit more.

As far as the two things you bring up that are in the tv spots, I'm quite willing to suspend my judgment until I see the movie. There is no doubt sound dramatic logic behind it that's not a million miles away from Edgar RIce Burroughs' writings.