…and can its marketing staff.
Like many people, I don’t go to movie theaters anymore.
I’m selfish. With access to a friend’s good satellite service and decent home theater, the only things I’m missing out on are screaming kids in movies too adult for them, people talking over the movie, overpriced tickets, even more overpriced snacks, and sticky floors.
So I waited for Disney’s John Carter to hit Dish Network and watched it tonight, albeit with apprehension. After all, this movie got panned by critics and lost Disney a ton of money. People complained it was too long, too complicated, and tried to do too much.
Others bitched that it seemed to steal from Tolkien, Star Wars, and other more recent great epic fantasy writers…not realizing that Burroughs is one of the wellsprings of modern fantasy.
But Disney actually pulled out all the stops and got this movie right. It follows the feel of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom books, it tells a fast-paced story very well, it has brilliant props and CGI, and the actors were not horrible. Dejah Thoris is still a princess being bartered as a political prize, but she’s a warrior and a scientist in her own right. John Carter falls into this bizarre new landscape with a realistic amount of mental adjustment. Good or evil, the side characters are great additions to the mix.
As for the criticisms that it was a jumped-up B-movie? Go read the original books. They were not One Hundred Years of Solitude. They were happy, raucous pulp penned by a master.
So far, IMDb seems to agree with me, in that the post-theater movie is getting far more positive reviews than during its initial release.
It’s too bad there probably will never be a sequel, but the story has its own neatly-woven closure. Burroughs wrote far more than A Princess of Mars, though, and I’d love to see what Disney could do with return trips to this version of Mars.
In the meantime, I’m suddenly a lot more hopeful about what Disney will do with the ‘Star Wars’ franchise.
And if you really, really want to see how good John Carter actually is, go to RiffTrax LLC and sync up their commentaries of *truly* bad sci-fi movies.
(The aforementioned is a paid link: if you click and order any of the RiffTrax commentary streams, I’ll get a few cents back to help run this ridiculous blog.)