John Carter of Mars (2009)

This Sci-fi film entertained me. It is not great, but I watched it once on a late night with insomnia, and it looked "otherworldly" beautiful from start to finish. (Perhaps the late night and the insomnia may have added something to the viewing experience.) Even when it looked hokey and cheap, it worked. There was something about the light, the atmosphere and the mood of it that worked for me. All of it just "looked" right.On the plus side, Sabato is a believable hero as John Carter. I liked him as Carter. This is not high acting, but he portrayed an athletic guy with a hero-mindset. He worked in the context of the film, as did most of the rest of the cast. Don't expect acting like in "The Departed" or something like that. This is a science fiction B-movie on a low budget. Again, I have to emphasize that the whole thing looked good, even when it looked cheap.Here's where it was fun but could have been improved: Carter going to Mars, and not even our next door neighbor Mars, but to a different Mars in a different solar system, left him with super strength in the very light gravity. Apparently this "other Mars" is even smaller than the one we know, with incredibly light gravity, given the strength he had. The 200 foot jumps he made could have been played up more. They looked good. The couple times when Carter took an adversary as large or larger than him and threw him 50 feet at high velocity into the side of a rock wall was very impressive, and should have been done many more times. They needed to play that up more. The sword fight at the end was rather weak, but the lack of skill of the actors was hidden by camera flash cuts and changing camera angles. It did not ruin the story, but it could have been done better.Here's where the movie kind of failed: I hate to criticize a beautiful woman (I adore them!), but Traci Lords was miscast. She did not seem to be an exotic alien princess. What is worse, she still has a great body, and didn't take off her clothes. (That's probably my biggest gripe. Go with your strengths, Traci.) In casting, I think they could have had a more convincing princess just getting some hot girl off the street in Brazil or Colombia and giving her a couple hundred bucks a week to look gorgeous and say a few lines. Traci had a bunch of close-ups that should have shown a princess's horror and dismay, and instead gave us the look of a soccer mom having a really bad day. (Don't get me wrong, she's a soccer mom with a great body, but she just didn't nail this.)Liberties were taken in regard to the script to update the book. Most of the update was OK, but when they went to the trouble to say the wounded soldier Carter, on Earth, at the beginning of the movie, would have "all his atoms" downloaded to a 16 gig memory stick to transport him to Mars, they lost me for a while. They tried to explain something beyond our tech that they should have left alone. If they said they would just download his consciousness and project that through a man-made, microscopic Einstein-Rosen bridge that opened for a fraction of a second in a supercollider as an anti-matter conversion byproduct, and sent just the consciousness to another dimension, I'd have bought that. The whole "every atom" thing with the 16 gig stick just made me shake my head. If you are going to stretch credibility and jump the shark, make it Jaws. Don't hold up a 16 gig stick.This film, which I found totally by chance, is a good guilty pleasure on a late night. If you can get it as a rental, or buy it cheap, check it out.

If you are looking for a great adaptation of "Princess of Mars," you're going to have to wait a while longer because it is NOT here. That doesn't mean this DVD should be immediately discounted, though.This film is pretty incompetently made. The shots are weak, the editing is poor, and the acting is very stiff. It does, however, provide an interesting adaptation of "Princess of Mars," considering that a 200+ page novel with a lighting quick pace was slimmed down to 90 minutes with a shoestring budget. They did a good job picking a choosing which story elements to focus on and which to cut out. The also did a decent job stringing all of these together in the plot (I hesitate to call it a "story"). It does not feel as if scenes are missing from the flim, like in some of the "Harry Potter" films where scenes from the novels are kept to appease the fans, but crucial setup FOR that scene is omitted. The addition of spiders is somewhat confounding, though...What works particularly well is the integration of the air pumping station, which I feel is weak and disjointed in the novel. In the book, John Carter stumbles upon it when he escapes from the Green Martians, and later it also serves as a strange, second climax at the end of the book. The scene is totally disjointed and literally takes place 10 years after the rest of the central conflict. In this adaptation, the station serves a more central role in the plot and the central conflict is resolved here. I think the best touch in this adaptation is the distrust the Tharks have of the station. The Tharks think it is a lie when the Red Martians say all life Barsoom depends on this air pumping station; a lie told only to hold power over the Tharks. I like that spin on the source material.The reason to own this DVD is the great "Making of" featurette that runs about 10 minutes. It shows the shortcuts they used to get this film completed with twelve, yes, TWELVE days of shooting. "Little Miss Sunshine" shot for a month and that was considered an insanely short shooting schedule. Watching the film with the context given in the featurette serves as a very interesting learning tool for aspiring filmmakers such as myself, showing what can be done with a shoestring budget and how to do it.So overall, the film gets a nice 2/5, saved only by its good story-editing choices.The DVD features get a 4/5 for the featurette.Average, 3/5.

The people who gave low ratings for this movie do not seem to understand the appeal of B-movies. I read and loved every book in the John Carter on Mars series. Although the books are quite wonderful, let's be honest. They are B-SciFi and that is a HUGE part of their appeal. This movie is certainly not an A-list movie. It is most definitely a B and that puts it very much in the spirit of how the books were written. I enjoyed Princess of Mars much more than the John Carter movie because of this. The atmosphere, acting, production quality is a perfect match for these stories. My only complaint is that the Princess was not red.

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very happy and much easier than looking in the store for the movies I want. Click and wait a few days and comes to my door.

This one is near the bottom of the barrel, if you, like I, enjoy B-Movies you might enjoy this one if you ignore all reference to ERB and pretend it is something else .... because it pretty much is. The acting an such though is pretty bad if you can pick it up for say $5 or less you might get a chuckle out of it. But for what I paid, I was very disappointed :-( OH and it constantly looked like the Thark's face masks/makeup were starting to peal off.

This is a typical si fi romp, it bares a passing resemblence to the book of the same title, but not really enough.Forgetting the novel it is supposed to be based on and you get the usual human superhero saving a planet. The dialogue at times is poor, the acting stilted, and the plot thin. Overall it works though and although the ending has sequal stamped all over it, none yet appears to have been made, which is a pity as it certainly deserves one.Although the film is decidedly "low budget" it excepts that limitation and works within it, no masses of poor animated aliens getting shot to peaces, just close ups of the hero blasting away then looking at the wall of dead.I did enjoy this film.Finally for those who can remember the Star Wars film, Return of the Jedi, that bikini is given pride of place here.

This is a low budget version of ERB's novel of the same name, remarkably filmed in less than a fortnight. It's been adapted for film, so John Carter is transformed from a civil war vet to an active US agent in the near east, "Mars" is a planet in another solar system where the injured Carter is sent by a secret US agency rather than our mars in the past that he's been drawn to by mystic means - one expects such things when a novel is adapted for film - but personaly I think ERB's original was a better story. The low budget means there's none of the novel's 6 limbed wariors or 8 legged steeds or red egg-laying humans (shame), nevertheless it is an entertaining SF action romp, and worth more than a single viewing. It merits a viewing just for being the only adaption to film of ERB's Mars series. All in all it's a good DVD if all you're expecting is entertainment, but a huge disapointment if you're expecting ERB's novel to be brought to life. Maybe one day someone with a budget like Avatar and adaption skills like Lord of the Rings will give ERB's Mars Saga the treatment it deserves, but in the meantime we've got this to keep us fans ticking over.