John Carter

John Carter is shaping up to be the mega-flop movie of the year, if not of the decade. That's a huge shame, because while I think the movie is well short of perfect, it's still very, very good.

I'm a huge fan of planetary/lost world romances in general and of the Barsoom stories in particular, so I walked into the theater with a positive bias. I had high hopes but low expectations. That wasn't because I disliked the trailers but because I have so much scar tissue from earlier incidents of Hollywood digging its cheese-stained fingernails into cherished novels.

As expected, the film diverged from the original. That used to anger me, but it doesn't anymore. Films and books need to tell stories differently. I'm now willing to give filmmakers a lot of leeway, as long as they preserve the heart and feel of the characters and their story. In that, I think John Carter succeeds admirably--with one glaring, gut-wrenching, near fatal exception.

Most of the changes were positive. Elements from later books were brought in so the world would make a bit more sense. The therns became an interesting menace. For a modern audience, the thern medallion was a better deus ex machina for transporting Carter to Barsoom than Burroughs's mummified witch. The filmmakers added some equality between the sexes; men and women seemed to be mixed about 50/50 in the Red Martian armies. Barsoom seemed even more alien from sexually partitioned Victorian America thanks to this change.

The Green Martians were everything I could have wanted. They were violent and brutish but also intelligent and curious. The Tars Tarkas-Sola-Sarkoja triangle was handled nicely. I was ecstatic to see that the designers found ways to subtly differentiate the genders without pasting breasts on the females. Showing the warhoons dropping down and running on four limbs instead of two was a nice nod to a tiny reference in the novel.

The ending was excellent. I won't spoil the details for anyone who hasn't seen it, but it was just right.

Other changes were OK but hardly necessary. There's no reason, for example, why the city of Zodanga should walk around. The walking served no purpose, other than to confuse the audience for a while.

The graphic designers did an admirable job. There was much of Michael Whelan in the costume and set designs, and Whelan's vision of Barsoom is my favorite. I'd have liked to see the Red Planet a bit more red, but I can live with brown. The Green Martians shrank from Burroughs's towering 15 feet to a more manageable 8-10 feet. Plenty of characters, Red and Green Martians alike, wore mantles of white ape fur. The white apes were far too big, of course, but that's to be expected in the era of CGI. They can be 30 feet tall for the same price as 10, so why wouldn't you go with 30? In some quarters, that passes for logic.

What of the nearly unforgivable change? It was the addition of John Carter's tortured past and murdered family. Why oh why must Hollywood torment every male hero with the ghosts of slain wives and lovers? We've been swirling up to our eyeballs in this melodramatic by-the-numbers claptrap for years, and I'm sick of it.

What's worse is that here, this cliche utterly misses the point of John Carter, especially when it's placed front and center during his battle against the warhoons.

John Carter loves Dejah Thoris. That's the crux of his character. It defines John Carter. He's possessed by Dejah Thoris, and that love drives everything he does. In the novel, Carter stays behind to fight a suicidal holding action against the warhoons so that Dejah Thoris might survive. He does this even though at that point in the story he has no reason to think that she felt, or could feel, anything more than gratitude toward him for helping her escape. And he prevails despite the hopeless odds because he must, to save Dejah.

By making that fight about Carter's dead wife and child--going so far as to clumsily intercut shots of them between slashing swords and gnashing tusks--the film completely, utterly drops the point. I nearly wrote it off in disgust as a total loss during that scene.

But I didn't. Ultimately, the good in the movie was so good that I swallowed that lump of thoat dung and carried on. And I'm glad I did.

I'm sure that I'll go back for a second and maybe even a third viewing. I'll buy the DVD when it comes out, too, and I don't buy many DVDs. If I could edit out Carter's wife and child and pretend they never existed, I would. Sadly, I can't, and my only other option is to live with them. If John Carter can do it, I suppose I can, too.