Ay Dios Mio...

This is bad--just bad. I can think of no other way to say it. It's an Asylum picture, so I wasn't exactly expecting anything remotely resembling a great film. I was HOPING FOR something slightly competent though. Then I watched this and saw how much of a fantasy world I'd been living in. John Carter with a lower back tattoo?!!!! All right, I get the fact that he's updated to be a Special Forces Marine, but was the lower back tattoo really necessary? Conveniently the Mars of the title isn't the Mars we know but a supposedly newly discovered world half way across the galaxy. A bit too complicated maybe? (Considering the Asylum had previously made a version of H G Wells' War of the Worlds explicitly indicating the Martians came from our Mars, I have no clue why they felt the need to do this.) In the book, John Carter is interesting because of his immortality, which this doesn't even hint at. He's also averse to abject cruelty, a bit of characterization untouched in this movie. Traci Lords is obviously far too old to play Dejah Thoris and lacks the appealing sympathetic nature of that character, not to mention the copper skintone, dark eyes, and black hair. The plotline seems to be a crude attempt at melding Otis Kline's plot device for transporting his heroes to Mars and Venus and Burroughs' story together with some technobabble nuances that do nothing for the story. Needless to say, none of this works out very well. The animals ERB introduces in the series are far more interesting than the ones in this movie. Action scenes are bland. Camera work is poor. Nothing that appealed to me in the original stories comes across right. I could go on, but I'm sure you get the idea, Unfortunately I think the big-budget John Carter of Mars will be just as bad. I hope I'm wrong, but I see how well hoping worked out with this film.

Carthago delenda est.