![]() ![]() … eyes were of a steel gray, reflecting a strong and loyal character, filled with fire and initiative. We all loved him, and our slaves fairly worshipped the ground he trod. He seemed always to be laughing and he entered into the sports of the children with the same hearty good fellowship he displayed toward those pastimes in which the men and women of his own age indulged or he would sit for an hour at a time entertaining my old grandmother with stories of his strange, wild life in all parts of the world. What’s especially frustrating is how utterly different this is from the more engaging hero Burroughs sketched on the very first page of A Princess of Mars: Not only is he not interesting, he isn’t particularly appealing or sympathetic. When we meet him, he’s a bitter, disillusioned, eccentric coot roaming the Arizona wilderness searching for mysterious, ancient lithographs marking the location of a cave he believes is full of gold. More crucially, Carter in the movie is not Everyman. With its dusty, rocky desert terrain, Barsoom isn’t even all that different from the Southwestern landscape Carter leaves behind when he’s mysteriously transported to the red planet. Airships, ray guns, multi-limbed beasties - this isn’t terra incognita anymore. He ought to be as nearly as possible Everyman or Anyman.īut in the first place, the movie’s sights are no longer strange to us. … To tell how odd things struck odd people is to have an oddity too much: he who is to see strange sights must not himself be strange. Hence Gulliver is a commonplace little man and Alice a commonplace little girl. Lewis explains in “On Stories”:Įvery good writer knows that the more unusual the scenes and events of his story are, the more typical his persons should be. Fantastic fiction has traditionally featured resolutely uninteresting heroes, as C. The title hero (played by the whimsically named Taylor Kitsch), a Civil War veteran who walks into a mysterious cave in 19th-century Arizona and finds himself on an alien world, makes a boring hero here - though this requires some perspective. Yet John Carter is more intriguing than interesting, more respectable than exhilarating. who is either a madman, a liar, or just who he says he is” (and the parallels don’t end there). Some of the Christological resonances in subsequent mythologies (notably Superman and Star Wars) crop up here as well, as Jeffrey Overstreet pithily notes by invoking “another J.C. There’s a primitive ur-text quality to John Carter, as if it really is happening here for the first time. When a Thark gets in another Thark’s face and they lock tusks, or when a massive, stumpy Woola takes off like the Road Runner, one has the sense of Barsoom as a place unto itself, alien and incalculable, unencumbered by self-consciousness of other worlds and franchises. ![]() ![]() Yet somehow it feels credibly ripped from a larger mythology rather than being cobbled together from spare parts, like Star Wars or Avatar. What’s more, the dense political back story, with Zodangans, Heliumites, Tharks and Therns all hugger-mugger, is pretty impenetrable to the newcomer. It’s true that Wall-E director Andrew Stanton’s $250 million extravaganza - based mostly on A Princess of Mars, the first of the Barsoom novels - doesn’t do anything we haven’t seen before. Haven’t we seen it all before, from the bestiary amphitheater bloodsport of Attack of the Clones to Princess Leia’s metal bikini? As for Avatar, the long list of parallels would arguably run into spoilers. Isn’t all this a technicality, though? Hasn’t Burroughs become so successful and imitated that he’s essentially redundant? Earlier efforts to bring Carter to the screen have failed, but storytellers have gone back again and again to the well of the Barsoom novels (so called for the name the inhabitants of Mars - where Carter’s adventures take place - give their own planet). Buck Rogers, James Kirk and Luke Skywalker are all his descendants, and Jake Sully - the hero of Avatar, which really is a patchwork borrowing from everything Burroughs inspired - is perhaps more indebted to John Carter than any other character in history. Carter’s closest literary ancestor may be Sinbad from One Thousand and One Nights, which is saying something. Burroughs is better known as the creator of Tarzan, who has enjoyed more success in his own right - but John Carter is the more influential of the two.īurroughs didn’t invent science fiction, but he perhaps created a genre of serial sci-fi fantasy adventure, with an idealized action hero going from one extraterrestrial adventure to another. The irony, of course, is that Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter stories, the first of which was published exactly 100 years ago, are the predecessors, not the successors, of all those tales. ![]()
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