![]() I admit that I was thinking of Flash Gordon a lot while I was watching this, although there’s nowhere near the same level of camp.Ī lack of camp isn’t necessarily a good or a bad thing. It definitely harkens back to an earlier time and place (not just chronologically), delivering a flick which is meant to be more fun than thoughtful, more mobile than philosophical. ![]() Until the end of the flick, which poorly bookends the flick with scenes on Earth dealing with Carter’s nephew Edgar Rice Burroughs (in the clumsiest nod to the author himself of this series of books that probably started a lot of teenage boys off masturbating something like 90 years ago), it’s an enjoyable enough action flick. This film is entirely buccaneering and derring-do, and it’s not the poorer for it. Yes, pussy clearly makes the universe go round, and so it should. But once he spots a Princess, in fact a Princess of Mars called Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins), he gets all patriotic and concerned as to what happens to this red planet. John Carter, of Virginia, doesn’t give a tinker’s dam about the Barsoomian issues going on, being some villain (Dominic West) trying to take over the city of Helium by hook and by crook, because all he wants is to get back to his cave of gold. Sure, I know they’ve got a completely different physiology and such, but their brutal approach to selecting which hatchlings live and which die makes our culture of helicopter parenting and co-sleeping seem positively precious in comparison. Which brings me to another point: their parenting skills leave much to be desired. The green many-armed Martians, or Barsoomians, I guess, at first marvel at him, then they want to kill him, then they want to kill him more, then they love him and want to have his babies. ![]() Someone else comes along and explains to him later that it possibly has something to do with his body being accustomed to the higher gravity of Earth, which means that he’s like some kind of goddamn superhero on Barsoom, jumping like a hypercaffeinated monkey all over the place. John Carter notices something strange about the planet, being the fact that he seems to treat it like one great big trampoline. It’s too difficult to unpack the racial implications of much of this stuff, so it’s easier to just drop it on the ground, and back away quietly.Īt the very least it’s not as obviously retrograde as that other paragon of science fiction, being Dances with Avatars. And on Barsoom, there are really tall green four-armed Martians, some other reddish looking ‘white’ human types, and some shapeshifting shitstirrers, who look like whoever they want. Without him knowing it, he’s turned up on Mars, which the locals call Barsoom. In the pursuit of a cave full of gold, he mysteriously appears somewhere else. The American one, not the one in England, or Liberia. It’s just about a guy, called Herman Merman, no, sorry, he’s called John Carter (Taylor Kitsch), and he was on the losing side of the Civil War. At the very least, it’s not robots and star ships and ethical dilemmas about helping lichens on distant planetoids. Maybe Flash Gordon is a better example of where it’s coming from. Even if it’s meaningless semantically, I’m still going to use it because I think it’s totally applicable. ‘Old-school science fiction’ is one of those phrases that seems like it’s too oxymoronic to be allowable to be used in common parlance and polite company.
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