Book vs. Movie: John Carter
By Russ Bickerstaff
March 14, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
And in this corner: the Movie. A 112-year-old kid born in France to a guy named Lumiere and raised primarily in Hollywood by his uncle Charlie "the Tramp" Chaplin. This young upstart has quickly made a huge impact on society, rapidly becoming the most financially lucrative form of storytelling in the modern world.
Both square off in the ring again as Box Office Prophets presents another round of Book vs. Movie.
A Princess of Mars
Somewhere in the early 20th Century, a guy name Edgar Rice Burroughs was having some difficulty with his business prospects. Things just weren’t working out for him and he had a wife and kids to support. He was in his mid-30s in the summer of 1911 when he began to write fiction, surmising that he could write every bit as awful as most of the authors who wrote for pulp fiction publications. If normal business doesn’t work out you can always fall back on work as a fantasy author. This wasn't the most rational line of thinking (it's downright backwards, in fact), but Burroughs made it work in a very big way.
One hundred years after he began work on what was to become Princess of Mars, Burroughs’ work is hugely successful and immensely influential in the world of genre fiction. While he may not necessarily have originated every idea in the book, nearly every element of Burroughs’ Princess of Mars has appeared elsewhere in nearly every major market sci-fi movie from Star Wars to Avatar. So, it’s only natural that the film would be adapted into a major big-budget motion picture. Can a 100-year-old fantasy pulp fiction story still resonate with today’s audiences? Here’s a look.
The Book
The novel begins as an account that had been passed on to Burroughs personally. It's kind of a cute intro to what quickly becomes fantasy. John Carter, a Confederate veteran of the Civil War, has found a vein of gold. He’s run into some kind of trouble with the local natives and he attempts to get away from them by hiding in a sacred cave. Things get kind of weird from there. He is mysteriously transported to Mars. He knows for a fact that it is Mars. There is no question in his mind that it is Mars. So he gets up to look around and promptly finds out that, in the light gravity of Mars, he’s immensely strong and can jump ridiculously long distances.
Okay, so the science here is really, really suspect. Burroughs was a business man who had a love of storytelling. (The man ended up writing dozens and dozens of novels in an era before the electric typewriter. You didn’t do that if you didn’t love storytelling.) He didn’t have a whole lot of experience with science, though. In an era before we had grainy video of astronauts bouncing around on the moon, the idea of microgravity probably seemed really, really fantastic. And it’s used as a device here to make one man seem almost godlike in what is a very, very dangerous world.
Carter immediately falls in with a group of Tharks. They’re really, really tall, green-skinned warriors. They lead a warlike life. It’s a very brutal life that Burroughs outlines. They seem kind of inspired by legends of Sparta, actually. And though they know Carter is a soldier, he didn’t live the life of a Thark, which makes his physical prowess absolutely essential in getting along with them. He masters them in a few prominent combats and quickly rises in the Thark ranks - all while managing to learn their language. So he’s a go-getter. But things get a little complicated for him when he runs into a woman who looks a lot like him. She’s shorter than he is. And her skin isn’t green. And she’s only got two arms. It’s all a bit confusing. Her beauty transcends the confusion and he becomes quite taken with her.
Turns out she’s Dejah Thoris, a Princess who was captured by the Tharks on a diplomatic mission when in fact she was as a spy for the Rebel Alliance ferrying plans for the Death Star... okay, maybe not exactly, but she’s a very strong character. And she wears very little. Almost nothing, actually. This is kind of a weird bit about life on Mars that Burroughs tried to justify. I guess it would make sense if every place on the face of the planet was really, really hot from being so close to the sun, but clothing isn’t exactly in fashion in this world. So it’s kind of sexy. In one conversation between Thoris and Carter, she talks about how they’ve got lenses that they can use to see people walking around on all of the other planets. So they know that on earth people wear clothes and well... it’s disgusting. So part of the visual palette that Burroughs is working from here is one of naked aggression and naked passion.
Thoris is a member of the “red” Martian race - a race that symbiotically coexists in a state of aggression with the Gungans… or whatever (I could point out just how much James Cameron ripped-off the spirit of these novels for Avatar, but there isn’t much point. Cameron very, very rarely has an original idea with respect to storytelling.)
In any case, Carter manages to help out the people of Mars and win the hand of Deja Thoris in marriage. Things are all well and good until the factory that provides much of the air for the planet is breaking down. He manages to get inside the factory in the company of an engineer who comes to fix it. Carter dies of asphyxiation in the process... only to find himself quite alive back home on Earth, wondering what might have happened to Mars and the woman he loves. (Okay…that kind of sounds like the end of last summer’s Thor, actually.)
The Movie
The film establishes a quick shot of Mars right away for the sake of locking in the fantasy element of the film, which is a pretty good idea considering where the film goes from there. The three credited writers (one of whom was director Andrew Stanton) evidently wanted to spend a great deal of time establishing the character before they got him to Mars. Spending as much time as we do with the character on Earth, the establishment of some pretty fantastic imagery and an otherworldly swashbuckling combat sequence was a step in the right direction. The production designer Nathan Crowley had worked on the Dark Knight movies, but this seems to have been a much bigger project for him. Coming up with fashion and architecture for a whole planet had to be a lot of fun and the world presented here visually is really well-realized.
The film shifts from Mars to old-timey period US. There’s Daryl Sabara as author Edgar Rice Burroughs dealing with the estate of John Carter and finding out just what a remarkable life he’s led. We then delve into a lengthy introduction to the character that seems a considerable expansion on what little appears in the book. Here we get a stronger feel for the character. Burroughs let the fantasy of the world bleed in right away. The film spends quite a bit of time establishing Carter as a fighter and a rugged individualist who is looking to make his fortune. There’s actually a great deal of back story here. It doesn’t appear to help the rhythm of the story at all, but it does establish mood.
Somewhere inside the first half hour of the film, Carter, does, in fact find himself on Mars, but not because of death or near death due to asphyxiation in a cave. No, *this* journey to Mars happens courtesy of some kind of magic jewel, which robs the story of some of its mystery. It’s all well and good to throw magic into the equation, but I think that the journey to Mars seemed that much more interesting when it seemed to be him going to the afterlife after a fight with natives. Here, he’s drawn to look more sympathetic to modern audiences and as a result, there’s more delicate rendering of the character needed 100 years after the character was created.
Then, things drift over to the red people of Mars, and while the costuming is really nice, it lacks the raw, naked sensuality of the original narrative. It’s kind of weird seeing the concept of fashion imposed on the culture - Lynn Collins is really beautiful and passionate in the role of Dejah Thoris, but the drama of the story detracts from the overall journey of discovery we find in the book. We’re not actually seeing the world through the eyes of someone like us. We’re seeing it through the uninspired lens of a group of filmmakers who didn’t seem terribly interested in taking the heart of the story to the heart of the movie.
The story of the original novel is intact here, but it’s buried underneath a heavy layer of storytelling that simply seams unnecessary. A big part of the appeal of the novel is the fact that it’s an introduction to a strange new world. Here, they seem to be ignoring that element of the film in favor of a more traditional fantasy sci-fi film. Princess of Mars isn’t bad like that. John Carter just is not terribly inspired.
The Verdict
The original novel was a breezy read that helped popularize space fantasy a t the dawn of the science fiction genre. It may not have originated everything that the genre consists of, but it was a powerful echo of certain aspects of fantasy that have remained popular to this day. A contemporary adaptation of the film doesn’t have the benefit of being an original. There have been so many other echoes of this story in so many other movies that it ends up feeling like a weak imitation of them.
The film cost $250 million. The early numbers roll in as I write these words and it looks very dismal for what could have been a much better film had it simply been framed a little closer to the heart of the book, which had its heart in exploration of strange new cultures rather than cheap drama.