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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.

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