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I... went to... a movie?
Just came back from watching John Carter of Mars!
And for the record, if you are the sort of person who would be interested in seeing a movie about John Carter of Mars, you will probably enjoy the bejeezus out of that movie.
If you are the sort of person who would not be interested in seeing a movie about John Carter of Mars, well... that was very definitely a movie about John Carter of Mars.
(If you can't tell yet, I am definitely the sort of person who would enjoy that movie.
...I even dug out my John Carter and Dejah Thoris action figures to take with me!
...yes I own John Carter and Dejah Thoris action figures.
And a first edition 1918 copy of The Gods of Mars, passed down from my fangirl ancestresses.
Yes, I know you're jealous.)
It's been ages and ages since I read any Barsoom books*, though, so I am shaky on a few of the details, but I think that, as part of coming up with a plot that would work for a movie without deviating too much from the spirit of the books, they folded bits of the first two books together, and they seem to have given bits of Thuvia's characterization to Dejah Thoris. Which means loss of awesome femslash potential, alas. (Sola is still my favorite though!)
We went mostly because a friend had free movie tickets to use up, and, well, John Carter of Mars. But I have to say, dear movie industry, if you want people to keep going to see movies, you might want to put a little more effort in making sure the picture quality at the theater is better than they can get at home. I mean, maybe it's just every singe theater I've been to in the past ten years, but if I go to see a movie in the theater, it's because I want a big sweeping clear view of the scenery, not because I want to be able to see every bit of dust on the projector and random lines and circles on the screen. They're lucky I've gotten used to consuming my media as downloaded files on a tiny laptop with a cracked LCD, or I might have even gone to complain about the GIANT GREEN SQUIGGLE on the screen for about half an hour of the movie.
(It's possible we would have had better projection quality if we'd gone to a 3D showing, but why would we want to do that? Actually it was amusing, the person selling tickets was apparently instructed to ask people buying tickets to 2D showings of 3D movies if they'd rather see 3D instead, and every single person ahead of us in line told her um, no thanks, they deliberately avoided 3D whenever possible.)
Notes on the previews:
Has anyone written Fury/Loki based on the new Avengers preview yet? And if not, why not?
Battleship is going to be really really gloriously bad. It looks like they might even have managed to figure out how to come up with a 'plot' in which they actually have to play battleship with real battleships, guys.
Anybody heard anything about the new Pixar movie "Brave"? It looked interesting. And the 3D animation of the archery was really, really cool; somebody did their physics homework.
*Unless you count The Number of the Beast and A Wizard of Mars, obviously. ...I still want to write that crossover.
And for the record, if you are the sort of person who would be interested in seeing a movie about John Carter of Mars, you will probably enjoy the bejeezus out of that movie.
If you are the sort of person who would not be interested in seeing a movie about John Carter of Mars, well... that was very definitely a movie about John Carter of Mars.
(If you can't tell yet, I am definitely the sort of person who would enjoy that movie.
...I even dug out my John Carter and Dejah Thoris action figures to take with me!
...yes I own John Carter and Dejah Thoris action figures.
And a first edition 1918 copy of The Gods of Mars, passed down from my fangirl ancestresses.
Yes, I know you're jealous.)
It's been ages and ages since I read any Barsoom books*, though, so I am shaky on a few of the details, but I think that, as part of coming up with a plot that would work for a movie without deviating too much from the spirit of the books, they folded bits of the first two books together, and they seem to have given bits of Thuvia's characterization to Dejah Thoris. Which means loss of awesome femslash potential, alas. (Sola is still my favorite though!)
We went mostly because a friend had free movie tickets to use up, and, well, John Carter of Mars. But I have to say, dear movie industry, if you want people to keep going to see movies, you might want to put a little more effort in making sure the picture quality at the theater is better than they can get at home. I mean, maybe it's just every singe theater I've been to in the past ten years, but if I go to see a movie in the theater, it's because I want a big sweeping clear view of the scenery, not because I want to be able to see every bit of dust on the projector and random lines and circles on the screen. They're lucky I've gotten used to consuming my media as downloaded files on a tiny laptop with a cracked LCD, or I might have even gone to complain about the GIANT GREEN SQUIGGLE on the screen for about half an hour of the movie.
(It's possible we would have had better projection quality if we'd gone to a 3D showing, but why would we want to do that? Actually it was amusing, the person selling tickets was apparently instructed to ask people buying tickets to 2D showings of 3D movies if they'd rather see 3D instead, and every single person ahead of us in line told her um, no thanks, they deliberately avoided 3D whenever possible.)
Notes on the previews:
Has anyone written Fury/Loki based on the new Avengers preview yet? And if not, why not?
Battleship is going to be really really gloriously bad. It looks like they might even have managed to figure out how to come up with a 'plot' in which they actually have to play battleship with real battleships, guys.
Anybody heard anything about the new Pixar movie "Brave"? It looked interesting. And the 3D animation of the archery was really, really cool; somebody did their physics homework.
*Unless you count The Number of the Beast and A Wizard of Mars, obviously. ...I still want to write that crossover.
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Really that says horrid things about the current state of story-telling while saying good things about that particular movie.
(Is this going to be a movie about a princess who explicitly doesn't want to marry anyone ever, and then doesn't? I... I have wanted a movie like that all my life.)
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I KNOW. The fact that no male is highlighted in the trailer is just spectacular. (And sad as a sign of what we expect.) But spectacular!
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...because if so, yes please.)
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And... no, this isn't what all of published SF would look like if we had a public domain again (there would still be that weird but fascinating segment of published SF that is written by people who have apparently never read an SF story before), but it's what an important fraction of SF would look like.
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(Also, the first time Carter tried and failed to use the Helian flying machine was the first time I wished for John Shepard of Mars. Shepard would have instantly known how to fly that thing.)
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And for the record, I'm still re-reading the books, and they did in fact take a metric thoat-load of the original racism out. There were no repeated scenes in which someone was enthusiastically welcomed home by his house-slaves, who love him and want only to serve him! There were no pitying descriptions of the deformed, outcast and cursed half-breeds! Etc. etc. etc.
I agree with you on the cringeworthiness of the "Virginia" chant, though. I wonder if there wasn't some tone-deafness going on? Partly that in the original (and for me, because it's a family name) that registered first as "They're calling him a girl's name", but I suspect most people associate it first with the state, rather than the given name, these days.) And his going from "John Carter of Virginia" to "John Carter of Mars" is a major bit of the character development, so maybe they wanted to show him becoming actively uncomfortable with that? I don't think they managed it, though, if that's what they were going for.
...and I really wish they'd gotten more actors of color to play the Red Martians, too. Fake tanner on a white lady does not Dejah Thoris make.
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Yeah, I think you're probably right about the Virginia thing being tonedeafness. And it did seem, the first time the joke was made, that it was just the girl's name thing, but with the whole crowd of Tharks chanting Virginia to praise a Confederate veteran whose narrative arc is discovering that he needs to find a cause worth fighting for... that was a bit too much for me.
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I want to marry Dejah Thoris. My husband is in favor of this plan. There must be someplace that will allow my polygamous union with a fictional character, right?
Also, omg BRAVE. I have been anticipating this movie for so long and that trailer fills me with SO MUCH GLEE.
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I want to marry Dejah Thoris too! And I'm pretty sure she eventually ended up in the Long family, so polygamous marriages with fictional characters are totally on! (That's what the Long family is about, after all.)
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So if it's been eons since I've read Barsoom, is this movie a go-to or an avoid?
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...but the neon-green squiggly line that went the entire length of the screen for about a quarter of the movie went beyond interesting, past distracting, and on the way to headache-inducing, alas. (And hey if I want random degradation I can come home and watch it on my cracked laptop! :P)
Did you like Barsoom when you read it? Do you think there's a reasonable chance you would still like it if you re-read it? Was your only problem Burroughs' prose stylings, but you liked the story itself?
If so, yes, you should go! If not, mmm, I don't know. If you have major problems with Barsoom, you probably shouldn't, but all of my analysis of this movie has been in the frame of "is it going to do justice to the source material?" so I honestly have no idea beyond that, I was just in it to see the Tharks and the thoats and the airships and the low-gravity swordplay, honestly.
(oh if you like airships et. al. you will probably like it, come to think of it, and Barsoom fandom comes by its airships honestly.)
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