![]() ![]() Then there are the Holy Therns, a group of interstellar meddlers led by Matai Shang (Mark Strong), who has been airlifted in from the third “Barsoom’’ novel. Sab Than (Dominic West) is the head bad guy and Tardos Mors (Ciarán Hinds) is the leader of Helium his daughter Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins) is the fetching fighter princess the villain intends to take as his betrothed. They inhabit the vast wastelands of the now-dry planet, but over in the fertile sector, the peace-loving humanoids of Helium are having their behinds handed to them by the bellicose humanoids of Zodanga. Carter lands amid the Tharks, a warrior tribe of tall, green, four-armed Bugaboos lorded over by the Jeddak, or Chieftain, Tars Tarkas (voiced by Willem Dafoe). ![]() Kitsch is decent company - manly, muscled, noble, sardonic - but there’s nothing unique about him, and we follow him by default.Īlso, it takes a while to sort out the others. Since it’s impossible to put Harrison Ford into the Wayback Machine, though, we’re stuck with the unfortunately named Taylor Kitsch (TV’s “Friday Night Lights’’) as John Carter, the burned-out Civil War veteran who finds himself mysteriously transported to the Red Planet while searching for gold in the caves of Arizona. #BARSOOM AND FLASH GORDON MOVIE#If the movie had a leading actor with the galactic charisma necessary for the task, we might even be talking classic sci-fi. I say that as a grown-up moviegoer behind me at a recent screening was a row of 10-year-old boys who were ecstatically in from the get-go. (ComicCon wouldn’t even exist without Burroughs.) It has been retitled “John Carter’’ with almost perverse banality and brought to the screen by some surprising worthies: director/co-writer Andrew Stanton of Pixar fame (“Finding Nemo,’’ “WALL-E’’) and co-writer Michael Chabon of literary immortality (although if writing “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay’’ doesn’t qualify him for this adventure, I don’t know what does).Īnd, against the odds, “John Carter’’ is itself pretty amazing - an epic pulp saga that slowly rises to the level of its best imitations and wins you over by degrees. #BARSOOM AND FLASH GORDON TV#So here’s the movie version, sprung upon a 21st-century public that has long forgotten the source in a pop-culture flood of Saturday afternoon serials, comic strips, junk TV shows, computerized digital effects, and fanboy fantasy blogs. “A Princess of Mars’’ has set a million dreams in motion. Astronomer Carl Sagan confessed to being a lifelong fan. #BARSOOM AND FLASH GORDON SERIES#“Princess’’ was Burroughs’s first published work - the “Tarzan’’ series that sealed his fame came later - and it is a direct influence on everything that ensued: “Flash Gordon,’’ Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles,’’ “Babylon 5,’’ and, yes, George Lucas’s and James Cameron’s little space operas, as those directors would be the first to tell you. ![]() Edgar Rice Burroughs debuted “A Princess of Mars’’ in the pages of the pulp-fiction magazine the All-Story almost exactly a century ago, following it up with no less than 10 novels in the “Barsoom’’ series (Barsoom being his Martians’ name for their home planet). It only seems like the pureed hash of “Star Wars,’’ “Avatar,’’ and every other interplanetary rocket rodeo since the genre was invented.Īctually, the movie’s based on the book that invented the genre. “John Carter’’ only appears to be a $250 million space turkey named after a chartered accountant. ![]()
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