I’ve had a few days to mull over the trailer and re-watch it a few times, and i’d say i’m cautiously optimistic.
I don’t think any reasonable person could have expected a big-budget Hollywood movie where the cast all run around completely nude all the time, so the costuming doesn’t bother me. Given that the book is 100 years old and VERY racist by today’s standards, I imagine that most all of the Martians are going to be indistinctly Caucasian rather than being divided into “Red” and “Black” and “Yellow” and so forth, so costuming is going to play a major part in distinguishing the different groups from each other if they end up adapting the sequels.
Mars doesn’t look Martian, but I can see the parallel the director is trying to make between the Old West Carter comes from and Barsoom - the former is a virgin frontier ripe for conquest and plunder, the latter is an empty, barren wasteland, the last remains of a civilization that peaked and fell while Carter’s ancestors were still drawing on cave walls. The music they picked for the trailer fits perfectly with that feeling of emptiness and isolation, and if the rest of the movie’s soundtrack is like it then it’ll be brilliant.
I’m surprised they’re keeping the “Burroughs as literary agent” part of the framing tale - it’ll be interesting to see how that gets worked into the story. I got the impression that movie-Carter is deliberately transported to Mars by the Martians, which, if true, would be an improvement over the unexplained “No shit, there I was” moment the book uses to get him there.
In the end it’s just a sword-and-sandals epic in a fantastic setting and with a heaping helping of political intrigue and religious mystery, and as long as they manage to keep those aspects intact, i’ll probably enjoy it.
I am cautiously optimistic about this film. I have realized that I like the idea of the Barsoom stories much better than I like any of the stories themselves. (I read them all so long ago that they have all blended together into a general impression of swashbuckling and derring-do in a world of swordfights and remnants of super-science.)
You’re right, casual full frontal nudity all around is not a likely thing for any major studio to back, much less freaking Disney. However, Starz’s “Spartacus” and HBO’s “Game of Thrones” are both sword and sandal/sorcery epics that make very good use of occasional nudity, and have both been very successful … so it’s not like this is an unthinkable, unheard-of thing. It’s been thought of AND heard of!
That said, a thong bottom and a skimpy bra top with the right barbaric ornamentation would still have been pretty durned sexy, much more in keeping with the tenor of the original stories, and quite doable by any studio … but Disney. And it would have been a hoot to hear the stilted Victorian romance dialog coming from mostly nekkid characters.
As to the racism, IIRC there were differently colored Martians with different characteristics, but they were not a mirror of Earth races … for instance, the white Martians IIRC were a fairly rare species, and not in charge of much of Mars at all. It’s been a while since I read it, but I don’t remember anything like the obvious racism against Asians in H.P. Lovecraft’s novels.
Barsoomians might have worn articles of clothing at times. In the book Princess of Mars, though it was only mentioned one time, John Carter was wearing a cape of all things.
I think anyone who thinks that was the best thing about them probably isn’t really much of a fan. Unlike the Conan stories, the nudity wasn’t made a big deal of. It was just a background detail.
That’s one of the things I really like about Burroughs. The stories are full of nudity and violence, but unlike Howard’s Conan stories, nothing feels prurient. On the contrary, it’s all pure and noble and grand. Where Howard makes Conan the embodiment of the Id and the antithesis of civilization, the Mars stories are a celebration of the humanizing power of the Ego and of the triumph of civilization even in its decline.
While I can’t deny that it would be lots of fun to see Barsoom in all of its naturist glory, it’s also true that it simply couldn’t be done. Given the options of re-creating Princess Leia’s bikini and reinterpreting the original artwork Oswald Bastable linked to, I have to say that the latter is the indisputably correct choice. I’d far rather Barsoomian fashion be alien and exotic than titillating and pedestrian.
My biggest concern is that the Green Martian I see in the preview looks gangly and silly rather than savage and frightening, but I can’t really judge from the split second shown. To me, that’s a big part of what will make the movie succeed or fail–are the Green Martians convincing? If we get Tars Tarkas-Binks, all the tits on Cinemax won’t come close to saving it.
They wore articles of clothes at practically all times – leather strap-harnesses, mainly – but showed zero concern for covering the naughty bits. (Barsoom is a lot warmer than Mars.)
Irrelevant to biology he’s making up. Why shouldn’t another planet’s humanoids lay eggs?
Still, I do kinda stick at the part where a Martian female lays an egg the size of a hen’s egg and then it grows to human-fetus-size before it hatches, apparently just by absorbing matter from the air.
At the impressionable age at which I first read the stories, it was a background detail that colored everything else that was happening.
As an adult, I’d have to say, no, I’m not really a big fan of Burroughs. I read them again and found them tedious, preachy, naive, repetitive, shallow, and inconsistent. There was still a certain level of pure adventure-tale excitement, but I would expect a modern author or screenwriter to be able to redo Burroughs’s work much better than he did.
I’m not sure what the roll-eyes was for, especially since you go on to admit that I was right.
I think it’s fair to say that if someone thinks the best feature of any novel is that some characters (or even nearly all the characters) are incidentally nude, that either they don’t think much of the novel or they have extremely low standards.
