Page 1 of John Carter of Mars

Caught this trailer on the front of POTC4 and for the first time in years I got the hairs on the back of my head standing up.  I want to see this.  Now.

I thought John Carter was a character in ER!

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Not one to be cynical, but did you hear how many references there were to Mars in that trailer? You`d have thought with previous films featuring Mars bombing that Disney would have opted to avoid mentioning it...

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Well, I always thought John Carter was that genial older gentleman from the Holiday programme in the 1980s.  Which could possibly make the bronzed Martian Princess Dejah Thoris the tangerine Judith Chalmers....

J Mark Oates

The movie`s currently being touted as Disney`s tent-pole picture for March in spite of (alleged) reshoots and an increasingly embiggening budget.

J Mark Oates

This item was edited on Friday, 24th February 2012, 04:04

watched the trailer before ghost rider and if i hadnt seen the name would have sworn it was the star wars universe....cool trailer tho

I watched the trailer and proper wasn`t interested.

Didn`t even think much of it, BUT there is a fan edit of the trailer that`s been getting massive reviews.


Everyone saying they need to pay whoever did it £1million and get it put out as the official trailer.

Sells the film a lot better.

I hope people aren`t falling victim to some kind of Curse of George Lucas - no matter what somebody comes up with in another franchise, they`re going to see it as a ripoff of the Star Wars universe. 

It would be awful if a chunk of the audience saw JC as a Star Wars ripoff, because JC is the granddaddy of Space Opera - written just under a hundred years ago, a good twenty years before Flash Gordon (which inspired GL because he couldn`t get the rights to make a Flash Gordon movie).  I`d love to see a revival of pulp sci-fi of this sort, because it`s a genre I`m very interested in, but if you`re going to get people going "pfft - Star Wars ripoff", I can`t see it happening.

I think the main reason people are making these noises is because the trailer leads with the JC-in-the-arena sequence - people are bound to get a feeling of Rancor about it - but there should be more to the movie than that.

I wonder if the problem is that everybody working in front-line CGI will have either trained at or worked at ILM, so there`s maybe a house style creeping into CGI that gives you a Star Wars vibe.  Whatever the reason, I hope JC can rise above it, because I`ve spent over thirty years wanting to see a movie about Barsoom.

J Mark Oates

Caught the pseuds reviewing John Carter on The Review Show, and so far having seen clips of the movie as shot, I`m a little nervous about Disney deciding to post the movie into 3D.  So far I`ve only had one post-3D movie (Spy Kids 4) against two made-in-3D and one animated-3D movies and I wasn`t impressed by the post-3D movie.  It would be a shame if the movie was spoilt by crap 3D (as the pseuds seemed to be indicating).  Of course, although they made a point of how poor the 3D was, I suspect that being pulp sci-fi they`d have hated it if Orson Welles had directed it, William Shakespeare had written it and Marilyn Monroe had sold ice cream during the interval.

I`d really really like this picture to succeed, because it`s pulp sci-fi.  What`s pulp sci-fi, I hear you ask?  It was the sort of bat-sh*t crazy fantasy they used to write before they got hung up on scientific principles and being "visionary" as authors.  John Carter of Mars was created by Edgar Rice Burroughs - the feller that invented Tarzan.  He made a whole series of novels set on Mars ("Barsoom" as the locals called it), and similar series on Venus and in a subterranean world beneath our feet called Pellucidar.  The latter series has only spawned one wonderfully loony movie - 1975`s At The Earth`s Core starring Peter Cushing, Doug McClure and Princess Sweaty-Cleavage herself, Caroline Munro.

Warner Bros animator Bob Clampett drew up plans in the 1930s to make an animated feature of John Carter.  If it had come to fruition it would have pre-dated Disney`s Snow White as the first animated feature.  Over the years, various attempts were made to bring John Carter, or his Venusian rival John Carson, to the big screen but none were successful while Burrough`s other big property Tarzan was regularly plundered by Hollywood.  I suppose jungle is a lot cheaper by the square yard than Martian real estate.

Without John Carter and his Princess of Mars, there wouldn`t have been a Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers or Brick Bradford.  No James T Kirk beating seven bells out of the Gorn.  No Obi-Wan Kenobi, General Adama or maybe even that chap with the blue box.

Don`t get me wrong, there were other pulp sci-fi writers as well but ERB was the highest profile and without him sci-fi might have stayed on its purely visionary course.  As entertaining as that may possibly be, I readily confess to a preference for sci-fi and fantasy that at least looks at possibilities beyond the understanding of present-day scientific theory.  Pulp sci-fi embraces those possibilities, offering us universes full of weird and wonderful worlds, of travel at speeds categorically denied us by Einstein, of scantily-clad princesses, bug-eyed monsters and square-jawed idiot heroes acting out the kind of epic sagas that once would have been told around the fires of medieval great halls about long-dead heroes or Gods.

Could you resist a story that includes a ten-legged critter the size of a Shetland pony, with a head like a frog and three rows of tusks that follows you around like a particularly soppy mongrel?

J Mark Oates

This item was edited on Saturday, 3rd March 2012, 03:17

Rave review from the Grauniad - and pretty much for the same reason I`m hot for this movie.

J Mark Oates