I saw John Carter so you don't have to

As a kid, I was a huge fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs. I read everything he wrote, and the covers of the Grosset and Dunlap editions of Tarzan with the fabulous dust jackets still have a Proustian "madeleine in tea" power to evoke the memory of the high shelf in the stacks of the Parkside Library in San Francisco where the books were kept. To be honest, the Mars series were my least favorite Burroughs, but still, how could I not see a movie that would feature "the hurtling moons of mars"?

And after seeing +Andrew Stanton's TED talk about film storytelling, I was really hopeful. http://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_stanton_the_clues_to_a_great_story.html

Well, I was disappointed. Here are a few reasons:

1. The character of John Carter was all wrong - brutish and stupid, far from the chivalrous Virginia gentleman of the books. They abandoned the unabashed romanticism of Burroughs in favor of a modern anti-hero whose tortured path to falling in love with Dejah Thoris, a Princess of Mars, was completely unconvincing.

I wonder at this failure to grasp the simplicity of emotion that suffused the golden age of science-fiction. George Lucas nailed it perfectly in the first Star Wars trilogy. Nobility of purpose, idealism, the pure romance of a boy (or girl) who hasn't yet experienced the complications of the real thing, adventure and the chance to make a big difference against impossible odds: these are the motivations of the genre.

2. Too much spectacle, not enough attention to character and story. And what spectacle there was was undistinguished. There was a certain steampunk grandiosity to the way they did the flying ships of Barsoom that I liked, and there were some stretches of Lake Powell as the River Iss that I found visually compelling.

3. A faux subplot involving manipulation by "the Gods of Mars" that was absent from the original, and unnecessary. I hate it when filmmakers adapting books that have been loved by millions don't trust their material and decide to "improve on it."

4. The depiction of John Carter's strength and leaping ability in low Martian gravity defied all laws of physics, and was depressingly inconsistent with gravity 1/3 that of earth. At times he looked more like superman. We know this is a fantasy, but consistency is what makes that plausible. The scene in which he first came to grips with his new abilities was like an amateurish rip-off of the awakening to power scene in the first SpiderMan movie (which was absolutely brilliant - the scene by which other superhero movies should be measured.)

Oh yeah, and "the hurtling moons of Mars" pretty much stood still. (Of course, Burroughs was wrong in his depiction. Per Wikipedia "Phobos rises in the west, sets in the east, and rises again in just eleven hours, while Deimos, being only just outside synchronous orbit, rises as expected in the east but very slowly. Despite its 30 hour orbit, it takes 2.7 days to set in the west as it slowly falls behind the rotation of Mars, and has long again to rise." But in the imagined world of John Carter, images like this matter.)

5. The Tharks looked and acted like four-armed versions of Jar-Jar Binks. In short, this movie is in the science-fiction tradition of late George Lucas, when it should have emulated his early brilliance.

I rest my case.

That being said, per Rotten Tomatoes, audiences liked it better than critics, and there were people in my theater in NYC who clapped at the end, and several bursts of audience-wide laughter or amazement. So if you're not a purist, YMMV.