I can’t remember the last time I watched a Disney movie-oh yeah, it was Tron 2. Shudder.
John Carter of Mars is the story of a US Civil War vet who ends up transported to Mars, where he has amazing adventures and wins the heart of a Princess. The CGI is good enough, it looks exactly the the CGI used to animate the last three Star Wars films and there is a strong Star Wars feel to John Carter. Hordes of computer generated aliens, a chase scene that stole a couple of moves from the Speeder scene in Return of the Jedi and sounded a lot like the pod races in Phantom Menace.
But then, George Lucas says that Edgar Rice Burroughs was one of his many inspirations for Star Wars, so maybe these little similarities are intentional.
And since it was a Disney film, even when our hero John is butchering dozens of aliens, there is no real sense of violence and the gore is just gallons of odd colored blood-so John looks more like a loser at paintball than a blood thirsty killer.
I have to admit that it has been a good thirty years since I read Edgar Rice Burroughs and I have no idea if this film is true to the source material. The alien villains are pretty familiar though, their The Watchers from J.J. Abram’s Fringe.
John Carter was not all that great or all that bad. It was just one more formula driven film cranked out of the Hollywood movie machine.
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