I just got back fro seeing it. While I liked it, I'm undecided how much I did; I didn't read the books - apart from the first twenty odd pages of the first one - so I left it up to the filmmakers to tell me the story. I don't know how well they did that; it felt a bit lumpy, the narrative...
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"I'm not smart so much as I am not dumb." - Harlan Ellison
I saw this movie last Thursday and I rather enjoyed it. I didn't love it but I didn't hate it either.
It's a shame though that it isn't doing well at the box office
I would really like to see a sequel to John Carter because I feel like they could improve on the storyline and make it better.
You know all that stuff about Issus, and the river and whatnot that didn't make sense or come of anything? Well, it's very important in the next book. And it's pretty freakin' awesome...
They really shouldn't have made it such a huge budget movie, honestly. It was a little too much. But it's made 101 million so far worldwide... keeping fingers crossed... has it been released everywhere yet or are there still some places it hasn't opened?
Standard practice is half of all grosses go back to the studio; the other half is kept by theatre owners.
We'll see if the spike in box office from Saturday continues this week, and it actually gains more audience in North America. But it is really up to the overseas markets to push this into profitability - or at least respectability. So far it's positive news there.
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"I'm not smart so much as I am not dumb." - Harlan Ellison
Gender: Female Location: When in Doubt, Go to the Library.
The Lorax has already doubled this in profits.
Plus it's a better movie.
Disney can do goofy violence, like Jack Sparrow being swung around on a rope, trying furiously to skewer Davy Jones, and "scan away" at Will's Death, but John Carter is about straight on war, that's why he goes to Mars, that the whole idea of it. He comes from earth to help the good guys on mars. that's like, shoving spears into people, sword fighting that isn't, you know, the disney style of stick person, person falls, no blood.
I think that may be a dragging down factor to this film. Like, everybody on here is talking about it, but no one in RL knows anything. Plus, it's a war movie. That's going to take away a lot of people, what could've been a family movie is not, so there goes that revenue.
I think that when people heard Andrew Stanton was directing, they all thought "PIXAR!!!" and Finding Nemo and WALL-E, and really all Pixar films because those guys are very close.
But the movie wasn't a fantasy of cute noises and overcoming not that tragic of circumstances. It wasn't "Andrew Stantony" enough.
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I agree. It doesn't belong with Disney. Definitely brings it down in quality. I say lower the budget, go to Universal or something and make it a stronger PG-13 or lower the budget more and make it R. That would make me as giddy as a schoolgirl.
RL? Real Life?
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Last edited by Patient_Leech on Mar 12th, 2012 at 01:31 AM
I think for all the talk of it being Disney I thought John Carter was pretty violent and showed quite a bit of gore. At one point you see John decapitate someone while covered in blood. That doesn't scream too little violence to me.
It's not that there wasn't enough violence. It's how the violence was handled because it's Disney. Yes, it's fairly violent for Disney, but the blood was BLUE, and they sort of shy'd away from the violence. The decapitation was edited so as to almost hide the fact that he cut his head off.. and the big massacre was edited so as to remove the sound effects and to keep cutting back and forth to some flashback on Earth, thus taking the focus off of the violence.
Watch Immortals, and you'll see what I mean. That's how it should be done.
Read the book. The first or second chapter explains how he is drawn to Mars because he is so used to war (Mars = Roman god of war). Like siriuswriter pointed out, it's kind of the core of the story. Therefore the violence shouldn't be shy'd away from.
And that's fair I've never read the books, but having not read them I don't see where showcasing mountains of gore would have made the story they were telling in the movie any better.
It doesn't need lots of gore, necessarily. But the intensity wasn't really right. Like the anti-climactic decapitation scene. That has nothing to do with the book. It just should have been drawn out a bit more, making it more compelling. And then the decapitation would have been a better pay off. It just happened too quickly, in my opinion.
I'm gonna see it again, at some point, to see how much these things bother me the second time..
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Last edited by Patient_Leech on Mar 12th, 2012 at 03:19 PM
Me too. It's a better way to examine the structure of the film, the second time around. Like the arena sequence; that's something I would have expected to be in the first third or half of the film, instead of where it got placed.
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Mar 11th, 2012 06:57 AM
