"John Carter" vs. "A Princess of Mars"

Cinema buffs may disdain me for liking John Carter, but hey, I was entertained.

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A version of this story originally appeared in the March 2012 issue of the George C. Marshall high school newspaper Rank & File.

Edgar Rice Burroughs worked as a clerk in a stationery company in 1912 when his first novel, A Princess of Mars, was published. Little did he know that the book and its sequels would make him one of the grandfathers of science fiction.

A Princess of Mars did not simply help invent science fiction; it single-handedly introduced audiences of the time to the subset of sci-fi known as planetary romance. Planetary romance typically takes place on one non-earth planet and prominently features swashbuckling adventure. Because what Burroughs wrote was completely new, he assumed that the reader would take nothing for granted. This caused him to painstakingly describe the alien society, the way Mars was slowly dying and everything else bizarre about the setting.

Does Disney’s movie adaptation of A Princess of Mars—named John Carter after the titular character—do justice to such a revolutionary novel? Well no, not entirely. But that is all right. Disney has an advantage that Burroughs did not.

Disney’s advantage and the reason it could successfully compress this complex narrative into two hours is the growth of viewers’ familiarity with science fiction. When one of the antagonists says “Mars is dying,” the viewers do not need a multi-page explanation of the phenomenon. They accept it as a convention of the sci-fi genre and move on.

This effect allowed the screenwriters to cherry-pick most of the interesting, emotional and awesome scenes from the novel and string them together in order with a more linearized and driving plot. The result is very entertaining indeed.

Would I still recommend reading the book? Yes, it is a completely different experience. Does the movie need to be a carbon copy of the book to be good? After a 100-year wait, the answer is no.