John Carter

IMDB
First time viewed: Yes
Current Release: Yes
Watched With: Mum

I never read Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan series but they have been adapted countless times since 1918. Since around that time there has also been some form of John Carter adaptation in the works that have always failed or fell through. It was even going to beat Disney's first feature animation by a few years to be the first animated feature but again it was abandoned and deemed to complicated and ambitious. It's certainly a much harder concept to get on film than a guy in the jungle and some monkeys.

But this adaptation, although a long time coming, is every bit a 30's pulpy fun adventure. I hope there's more as it certainly has left room for more adventure and now all that annoying exposition has been dealt with (a little clunky in the middle but, there's a lot to get across) we can just get in to the fun times.

And this one works best for me during the action. There's some pretty spectacular sequences and visuals throughout. I saw it in 2D first, (I'll go to see it in IMAx on Sunday) it was shot on film and it has that classic look about it. You can tell Laurence of Arabia was a big influence, Michael Giacchino pretty much just quotes the theme in his score (as for the rest of it, it was pretty unmemorable the first time though).

The Tharks are great. Willem Dafoe, Samantha Morton, Thomas Haden Church all deliver great characters with the aid of motion capture mumbo jumbo and computer voodoo magic. All the creatures (and those flying machines) are done really well.

More questionable however are these two untested new stars, Taylor Kitsch and Lynn Collins. I think they do a pretty good job but they have a very hard task to sell the reality of this fantastic world to us and there's more than a little bit of forced emotion in that script. Collins certainly looks like she stepped right out of a Frank Frazetta painting.

While this looks like a pretty derivative sci-fi/fantasy adventure it's important to note that all the star wars and avatars and half a dozen others owe a great deal of their inspiration to the original source material for this. It's great to see this is finally in cinemas after about 100 years of trying and it's a very enjoyable and action packed spectacle which I hope to see more of. Can't wait to check it out again on the big screen and see what the 3d is like.