{"id":2196,"date":"2011-07-16T12:52:53","date_gmt":"2011-07-16T12:52:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=2196"},"modified":"2011-07-16T12:52:53","modified_gmt":"2011-07-16T12:52:53","slug":"about_that_john_carter_trailer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2011\/07\/16\/about_that_john_carter_trailer\/","title":{"rendered":"About that John Carter Trailer&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The trailer for Pixar&#8217;s adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs&#8217; classic Barsoom stories, <i>John Carter<\/i>, made its online debut two days ago, so probably everybody and their cat has seen it by now, but just in case you haven&#8217;t:<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><iframe src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/6Rf55GTEZ_E\" allowfullscreen=\"\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"314\" width=\"500\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m very, very pleased and excited by what I&#8217;m seeing here. Oh, I could quibble about some of the details. I don&#8217;t remember any magic blue glowing rocks from the books (although it has been decades since I&#8217;ve read them, so maybe they&#8217;ve just slipped my mind), and the airships of Helium are far different than I imagined them (which was pretty much like Jabba&#8217;s sail barge in <i>Return of the Jedi<\/i>), and Tars Tarkas&nbsp; (the green guy at about 1:09) is neither as tall nor as buff as he ought to be&#8230; but I don&#8217;t want to be another damn Comic Book Guy griping about an otherwise enjoyable movie because it doesn&#8217;t take into account the <i>critical<\/i> events of issue #327 or whatever. The fact is, this trailer is showing a lot more things that are faithful to the books than not: the opening scenes with Edgar Rice Burroughs himself as a character; John Carter&#8217;s origins as a Confederate veteran and a cowboy; Barsoom being a dying planet kept alive by great machines; Carter&#8217;s ability to make superhuman leaps (Mars has lower gravity than Earth, so his Earth-trained muscles are more powerful there); and most of all, the grandeur and brutality of an alien word populated by ancient, decadent civilizations. And even if Dejah Thoris isn&#8217;t walking around mostly naked as she was described in the books, the costumes nevertheless look <i>right<\/i>. Consider, for example, the harness and breast plate Carter is wearing in some scenes, and then look at Michael Whelan&#8217;s definitive <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/images\/princess_whelan.jpg\">cover art<\/a> from the 1970s paperback edition of <i>A Princess of Mars<\/i> (i.e., the one that I read as a kid). Based on this trailer, at least, the people behind the movie <i>get it<\/i>. They understand what was cool in the books, what appealed to the 12-year-old boys who loved them. And if they had to change some details to match modern sensibilities &#8212; remember, <i>A Princess of Mars<\/i> was first published in 1912, a full century ago &#8212; well, I&#8217;d rather they get the overall spirit right than make a slavish but lifeless adaptation, or one that rips off a few key ideas and bears no real resemblance to the source material. <\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been cautiously optimistic up until now. Now I&#8217;m downright giddy&#8230; I want to see this in a way that very few movies of the past few years have appealed to me&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The trailer for Pixar&#8217;s adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs&#8217; classic Barsoom stories, John Carter, made its online debut two days ago, so probably everybody and their cat has seen it by now, but just in case you haven&#8217;t: I&#8217;m very, very pleased and excited by what I&#8217;m seeing here. Oh, I could quibble about some [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film-studies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2196"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2196\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}