John Carter -- Screw the Fanboys!

[PepperElf]

The movie I saw was pretty damn good, but the critics seem to think it was the next installment of Attack of the Killer Tomatos.

this is why i don't read reviews.

I look at the movie and the trailers and pretty much decide if it's worth seeing now, or waiting for DVD.

For John Carter I kinda forgot about it and had to do the DVD but ... I rather liked it.

[Andara Bledin]

My guess (having not seen it) is that for fans it's good but not great, and for non-fans it's kind of hit or miss, with a lot of people wonder what the hell Disney spent all that money they threw at it on as many complain that it looked rather less than what they expect with the price tag it had.

I check reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, and then check what the audience things over the critics. Plus, the top and bottom can tell you a lot about what either group was expecting, which will tell you whether their ratings were fairly earned or based on false expectation.

^-.-^

[fireheart]

They're in the public domain and available in a variety of formats at Project Gutenburg.

I'm LOVING Project Gutenberg at the moment. In addition to the Barsoom series, I also have a handful of other books that I found through them, including a couple I used as test novels to get an idea of how to use them.

I just checked Project Gutenberg Australia and I found the rest, but I'm not sure how to put them onto my iPad, if I can even put them on there at all. I have up until the Chessmen of Mars at the moment and I'm reading my way through the Warlord of Mars.

[wolfie]

Was it a perfect recreation of the Burroughs masterpiece? Nope. But if you are honest with yourself, most of what got changed would have come across as incredibly cheesy, or even insulting, in light of modern knowledge.

This was a fun bit of Victorian pulp adventure that does a good job of capturing a 100 year-old book for an audience with a century's worth of science between it and the source material.

Haven't seen the movie (or read the book) but I hope the changes weren't along the lines of some in the Richard Chamberlain (been a while, but I believe he played Quartermain) version of "King Solomon's Mines". Those changes involved adding a few offensive stereotypes about natives, and having the Nazis chasing him (the latter definitely NOT appropriate for a book written in the late 19th century).

[fireheart]

Haven't seen the movie (or read the book) but I hope the changes weren't along the lines of some in the Richard Chamberlain (been a while, but I believe he played Quartermain) version of "King Solomon's Mines". Those changes involved adding a few offensive stereotypes about natives, and having the Nazis chasing him (the latter definitely NOT appropriate for a book written in the late 19th century).

From my understanding, a few of the books were melded together into the film. The female characters were given some more assertive traits, rather than always being the damsel in distress.

And on top of that, ALL of the characters on Barsoom had clothing. There's a reason for this: in the books, most, if not all, of the characters on Barsoom are butt nekkid. Do you really want a 10-year-old going "Look mummy, Dejah Thoris has bigger boobies than you do!"