[SFRA-L] John Carter redux

Mon Mar 26 12:10:51 EDT 2012

I agree that the movie was poorly advertised.  I buy that they may have
wanted to underplay the source novels for the reasons stated.  However, it
also they also shied at the "of Mars" connection.  And this seems odd given
that we live in the world of *Avatar* and *Star Wars*, etc.  And it
worked:  I've heard that some people walk out of the film having missed
that the strange new world of the adventure is Mars.  Naturally the
attentive would have figured it out during the solar system map sequence.
And the film has underperformed.

It all seems like another wasted opportunity.  Sigh.

De Witt

On Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 8:23 AM, Gail Bondi <damereading1 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> My husband and I saw the movie last night. The movie was poorly
> advertised. After seeing the trailers, I was fully prepared to miss it.
> They didn't look that good. However, I am not sure pushing the books would
> have helped. Disney may have been concerned that their implied racism and
> sexism would hurt the movie. I remember the Tarzan books better, but even
> 40 years ago I recognized that ERB's Victorian belief in the superiority of
> the white man irritated me. I enjoyed them but I was also embarrassed by
> them.
>
> I thought the part about the Apaches was more to show that Carter was a
> person who fought for a cause (or at least thought before he fought) rather
> than a political statement about the struggles on the plains. Since we
> don't know what the Apaches were saying (that part wasn't translated),
> Carter may have been saying a plague on both your houses. I don't think
> politics was a major point here.
>
> Gail Bondi
> damereading1 at yahoo.com
>   ------------------------------
> *From:* Sue & Bruce Rockwood <clan.rockwood at gmail.com>
> *To:* Richard Erlich <ErlichRD at muohio.edu>
> *Cc:* "sfra-l at wiz.cath.vt.edu" <sfra-l at charlemagne.cddc.vt.edu>
> *Sent:* Sunday, March 25, 2012 7:16 AM
> *Subject:* Re: [SFRA-L] John Carter redux
>
> We have seen both John Carter and now The Hunger Games (which I have not
> read but my son enjoyed reading first). My son felt that the story of John
> Carter was not widely known and that explains why it may have been less of
> a film success than The Hunger Games appears to be. Maybe Disney or film
> makers in general, if they are going to mine old stories and legends for
> projects, need to consider marketing the source book or story(stories)
> somehow prior to the launch of the film, or do something to make viewers /
> nonreaders more aware of the story line and get interested in it. The film
> trailers for John Carter we saw in the theaters last summer, for example,
> did not give any hint of its source, and merely adding "by the author of
> Tarzan" might have got people looking into the stories prior to the launch.
> I find it amazing they can spend this much money, make a movie I as a fan
> enjoyed, and miss the point of putting the project in context for the
> general viewing audience if they want it to be a commercial success. I
> think John Carter will pull in money overseas, but I think Disney needs an
> embassy from SFRA to explain some of these basic points to them!  I know
> the coherence of the story line and quality of the film making of these two
> films is not much different, in my view, and so the success of only one in
> the marketplace has to be explained by the lack of a prepared audience.
>
> Bruce Rockwood
>
> On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 8:45 PM, Richard Erlich <ErlichRD at muohio.edu>wrote:
>
> On 24/03/2012, at 16:59, pierceqfpl at ewwpi.com wrote:
>
> 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
>  _______________________________________________
>
>
> Did you find the politics of the film coherent, John? It seemed to be
> saying something on war and the destruction of the Plains Indians, but for
> me that got lost.
>  (I also wasn't sure how I was supposed to respond to a chastened but
> possibly unReconstructed Confederate, but that's a problem I have with
> several movies [plus bumper stickers, mud guards, state flags, politicians
> …].)
>
> Rich E.
>
>
>
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> - Chris Lehmann quoting Nel Noddings.
>
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>
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-- 
De Witt Douglas Kilgore
Associate Professor of English, American Studies and Cultural Studies
Indiana University
812-855-4148

" ... remind people of reality, which is that we are all stuck in a big SF
[science fiction] novel now, and there's no escape; might as well accept it
and dive in."
-- Kim Stanley Robinson
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