The Case for John Carter

I think literary, REH Conan is still readable and engaging today (not that I'm suggesting that very many people do, in fact, read it), but I only got through one of John Carter books, and even that felt like a chore because the book felt more like a chronicle than a novel.

Yes. To pretty much everything everyone said. Why are we talking about John Carter though? Did I miss something in another thread?

It's not a very relevant intellectual property for all the reasons stated. I tried reading the first book before the movie came out but couldn't finish it. My wife read a couple of the books and enjoyed them, but she likes more older literature than I tend to. The movie already had all that working against it, so a good marketing campaign could have helped it of course. Taking off the "of Mars" and leaving the title "John Carter" doesn't tell you anything about the movie. Could be a movie like Jack Reacher or John Wick for all anyone knows. In the end the movie isn't that great. It wasn't terrible, just forgettable.

It was a good movie in the same way that Independence Day was. It delivered exactly what it meant to.

Black Barney wrote: I think John Carter was the cause of my first (and only?) fight with Jeff White. I remember having a major beef with the trailer for the movie and how it was clearly marketed to dumb people.

I've never seen the movie.
.

You must be wrong about it being marketed to dumb people, then.

It's one of my favorite movies.

Maybe I'm dumb.

I'm going to watch it again tonight.

It was entertaining. Given the lavish production values, clearly the studio and fan base were expecting more, so I can understand the disappointment associated with the film, but reading the comments at the fort, you get the impression that it was Transformers level bad. It wasn't nearly that.

Now, going into the film I had no idea who John Carter was, and having seen the film, I have no idea who John Carter was, so that is something of a problem. But I have a soft spot for lighthearted, swashbuckling, scifi/fantasy type movies, so I wasn't at all disappointed.

For most of what I just said, you could replace John Carter with Jupiter Ascending.

I see Barnes is spreading his usual hyperbole again. John Carter isn't a terrible film. It's better than a lot of dreck that has fared better. There are problems with it, but nothing on the order of "bad filmmaking."

But I'm not an apologist who blames the marketing team. I think it was smart to take "of Mars" off the title, and i wish they had taken it out of the film altogether. Have it simply named "Barsoom" and leave it at that. Maybe John Carter calls it "Mars" because that's the only reference he can relate to, but there's no need to actually explain what the planet is called or where it is in the universe.

The real problem, I think, is with the source material. I read a great article about this a while back, but I can't recall where. The problem is that it was *such* a source. The leaping and strength and powers by being on another world are all clearly Superman, and everybody already knows Superman. The alien species, spaceship battles, and rescuing a princess are all clearly Star Wars, and everybody already knows Star Wars. It would be like trying to market a movie adaptation of Ellison's Demon with a Glass Hand, even though everyone is already familiar with The Terminator.

Now, I'm not saying that old, original, source material couldn't be made well and entertaining and relevant. But I think Stanton got so wrapped up in his own love and nostalgia for the material that he lost that perspective. He spends time showcasing these aspects of John Carter and Barsoom as if they're new and wondrous things, when his audience is already way ahead of him. That's why people find it boring. I suspect (but don't hold me to it) that a young child who didn't already know all these other properties might actually share that thrill of discovery.

The other problem, as I said in the previous thread, is pacing. This is the one area on which i can agree with Barnes. The first half-hour is kind of a mess, and that can be the death knell for any movie. I think with some better editing choices, this problem goes away.

By the way, I'm not a John Carter fanboy. I read the first book in anticipation of the movie, and really didn't like it (it pales in comparison to Howard's Conan). Still, I eagerly saw the movie in a deserted theater after the terrible reviews, and I liked a lot of it. Not great, but far from terrible.

Michael Barnes wrote: Heh, I said Andrew Bird...I meant Andrew Stanton. Somehow conflated him with Brad Bird. Who probably would have made a better movie out of this.

Andrew Bird is a fine musician, and I was puzzled that he would have any connection to the John Carter movie. Thanks for clearing that up.

I think the movie was just poorly done and, as Gregarius notes, not really original for the modern audience. The reason that Conan still has appeal is that it's core fantasy: swords, barbarians, some sorcery, occasional demons, fini. There's a certain relevance there for people looking for a film of that genre in the same way that Lord of the Rings works (swords, elves, dwarves, orcs, dark evil guy who is evil just for the sake of being so. And some ring or something.)

John Carter/Barsoom, OTOH, is early science fiction without any of the really basic components attached. It's not a Time Machine. It's not a War of the Worlds. It's not 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Instead, it has elements of a lot of things but no real hook that says: "If you've seen this, you'd like John Carter!" Now, many of us go to see films that specifically aren't that (like, say, Blade Runner in the early 80s...) But John Carter doesn't aim that high. It's not attempting to deliver a message any more than Burroughs was. It's just an adventure tale and a pretty fantastical one, at that. In that respect, it can't really compete with all of the other movies out there, except on a nostalgic level. And among the set of us who've actually read the books, you'd make a lot more headway with an Elric movie than you would with a John Carter one, mostly because the main character would be interesting, rather than just the "northern European guy among the natives" pastiche that is John Carter. It's just not a good story concept, in general, and I say that having read all of the books You can, uh, get them for free on Kindle, but I had most of them in hardcopy as a a kid. Because that's when it's good to read them. As a kid.

Yeah, I was kind of trying to avoid saying it, but the John Carter stories are...not really very good in the first place. I admire them. I like the notion of them. I like Tars Tarkas, Deja Thoris and the pulp SF tone. I bet reading these in the 1920s was just amazing. I went back to re-read these about ten years ago and I was pretty shocked at how uninteresting and badly aged they are. They are embarrassingly racist/imperial (white man goes to foreign land, is better than they are, takes their naked women). The SF concepts are cool only because they are early, not because they are well-developed or because they have any kind of significance. It's empty, escapist fantasy. Which is fine, but you can get more out of reading an old Alex Raymond Flash Gordon comic than the John Carter books. And they aren't nearly as well-written as Howard's stuff, which is kind of the high water mark for early 20th century genre fiction.

So there, I finally admitted in public. The John Carter books actually kind of suck. I think I liked the 1970s Marvel Comics adaptation a lot more.

Gregarius wrote:

The real problem, I think, is with the source material. I read a great article about this a while back, but I can't recall where. The problem is that it was *such* a source. The leaping and strength and powers by being on another world are all clearly Superman, and everybody already knows Superman. The alien species, spaceship battles, and rescuing a princess are all clearly Star Wars, and everybody already knows Star Wars. It would be like trying to market a movie adaptation of Ellison's Demon with a Glass Hand, even though everyone is already familiar with The Terminator.

The book linked upthread describes that as a problem; you might have read an excerpt. By Mr. Sellars' lights (the linked book's author), a lot of SF adventure tropes were original to Burroughs, but movies using later source material beat Burroughs' Mars books to the punch. Again, though, that guy loved him some John Carter books, and could very well have been trying to sell this notion pretty hard.

ETA: There's a pretty good section in Sellars' book on why it got beaten to the punch. IIRC, it was a combination of stuff falling through, and the Burroughs estate not wanting to see their name on a crappy product. By the time it got bought by someone who could do it right (Disney), it was too late.

That is an interesting point. There is so much of John Carter that would be iterated upon later that it is almost a kind of ur-story (regardless of its lack of quality or timelessness). However, if that were the case, then Campbell is totally wrong and the hero myth is no longer interesting to modern audiences. Dudes leaping 100 feet or whatever does not start with John Carter. "Superpowers" or whatever all have origin in myth and folklore, which are the REAL source stories.

You're dead to me, Barnes.

The books lit my imagination during my childhood. And not the Boris covers. They didn't hurt though.

"Barsoomian Maiden" is synonymous in my family with "big breasted, disproportionate chick". My dad would always say "Hey, check out that Barsoomian Maiden" to my brothers and I never got it until I was 10 or so and read them all.

I liked it, but I have to admit I was partly hypnotized by the awesomeness of Lynn Collins thighs (well, all of her actually). I'd not heard of the books, nor had any preconceptions, "bad" I suppose it was a bit of a mess but only in the same way that a whole host of other films are. It was enjoyable pap. It didnt seem to pretend to be anything else, like Interstellar for example, which was unenjoyable pap but much higher "rated"