[SFRA-L] John Carter redux

[pierceqfpl at ewwpi.com]

My wife Marcia and I just got around to seeing it this afternoon, and we're glad we did. I'm more familiar with the original story, of course, so I could tell that the movie followed its broad outlines but was a lot different in detail. One thing that impressed me was that CGI has reached the point that the tharks could be individualized, even when there were a lot of them on screen. I don't think most of the $250 million budget went into that, so we can look forward to movies with puppeteers and other aliens -- if Hollywood suits have the nerve to make them. The stars were good, and I don't mind in the least that Dejah Thoris was made into more of a modern woman. She should have been redder than she was, however (ditto the rest of the people of Helium and Zodanga), and not had conventional Terran makeup. The biggest problem with Carter is that they went too far with his feats under Martian gravity -- it's one thing to leap ten feet into the air, quite another to leap a hundred. The thoats were good, but I thought the calot was too big and too cute. Designs for the cities and the airships were too busy, and the landscape too much like Arizona -- no helping that. Making the therns the brains behind everything may have been better than using astral projection to get Carter to Mars, but it also ate up screen time with the prolonged prologue and the epilogue, and there was a lot of story on Barsoom itself that had to be crammed in tighter as a resullt. Making ERB a character was a tad too precious.

Just my two cents.

--John J. Pierce


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