Burroughs got his story off to a brisk start: after a quick account of how Burroughs obtained the manuscript, Carter and Colonel James Powell are prospecting in Arizona, they are attacked by Apaches and forced into a cave, and Carter finds himself mysteriously transported to Mars. Now, a contrarian might simply advise filmmakers adapting such a story to begin with a disclaimer: “This film is based on a novel written in 1912, it reflects the commonly held views of an American adult of that era, and if this is going to bother you, please leave the theatre now.” But, I suppose, the film’s financial backers would not be pleased, and so, the perceived racism and sexism in A Princess of Mars had to be diligently expunged. So, what went wrong? Part of the problem is that the novel was, after all, written one hundred years ago, and social attitudes have changed a lot since then. A key quotation from the novel – “A warrior may change his metal, but not his heart” – is artfully deployed in the script someone made an effort to have Carter’s journal, and the pages of writing seen in the closing credits, resemble Burroughs’s own handwriting and every detail of the film’s Barsoomiana seems accurate, right down to use of the proper Barsoomian names for the Martian moons (Thuria and Cluros) and planet Earth (Jasoom). No one can complain about the way that the story has been visualized, included a perfectly cast John Carter (Taylor Kitsch) and Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins) and the well-rendered, four-armed Tharks Carter’s doglike pet calot, Woola, is a special delight as in the novel, Thark babies emerge from eggs in hatcheries (though the film fails to note that the women of Dejah Thoris’s race also give birth in this fashion) even the iconic image of Sleeping Beauty’s Castle that opens every Disney film is here given an appropriately reddish tint. Indeed, all of Burroughs’s major characters are included in the film, correctly named and appropriately characterized. Despite the changes to be noted, the film as a whole is remarkably faithful to the novel for example, I never imagined that Burroughs’s subplot involving Sola (Samantha Morton), the secret daughter of Thark warrior Tars Tarkas (Willem Dafoe), and her rivalry with the evil Sarkoja (Polly Walker), would make its way into the film, but the women are if anything more prominent in the film than they were in the novel. But let the record show that director Andrew Stanton, and writers Stanton, Mark Andrews, and Michael Chabon, worked very, very hard to make this a Burroughs adaptation that his most fervent fans would appreciate and embrace. One wishes that someone had mandated one more script revision, and/or a little more reshooting, to address the flaws that should have been apparent to anyone familiar with the novel. The frustrating news is that John Carter comes close – so agonizingly close – to being the film that Burroughs’s novel deserved, fitfully emulating its mythic power but ultimately succumbing to the effects of several unwise decisions to update and “improve” its story. But like Burroughs’s heroes, science fiction filmgoers always remain optimistic, despite the odds against them. It is a novel, in other words, which should receive a well-crafted, respectful adaptation, something that nobody has any reason to expect from the contemporary film industry. But for science fiction readers, this film is a matter of greater import, for the novel that it adapts, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars (1912, 1917), is one of the genre’s great holy texts, the evocative story that launched Burroughs’s career and engendered ten sequels that maintained the imaginative energy of the original far better than any of the author’s other series, while also inspiring scores of distinguished imitators in the subgenre it defined, the planetary romance. For Hollywood insiders, of course, John Carter is merely this week’s attempt to garner large profits with a big-budget, special-effects extravaganza, and their only concern will be tracking the box office receipts to see if they validate the enormous amounts of money the Walt Disney Company spent on this film and perhaps justify a sequel.
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