John Carter

[Felon]

Ah. You see, there's a middle ground between being slavishly loyal and all things that are included are so for specific modern reasons. It's called "trying to be generally faithful". In this mode, it is the *changes* that are what you have to justify, rather than the things you keep. Did they have a good reason to remove Woola? No? Then they try to do a good job of portraying the spirit of the character.

I'm sure kids will like Woola, but in the film, the creature plays roughly the same role as in the book - telegraphing the fact that John Carter, while maybe not perfect, is a basically good human being. It's a fairly standard trope - the love and loyalty of animals (and usually children) comes to those of good heart. So, while Carter is spending effort claiming that he's mercenary, and only after his cave of gold, Woola's loyalty tells us otherwise.

Well, I don't know anything about the creative team behind John Carter. I know that the kind of respect that Peter Jackson had for LotR or Nolan has for Batman is nothing to be taken for granted. Usually, it's just an attempt to leverage an IP, and it gets distorted and retrofitted into something whose primary purpose is to target a demographic. Anything that doesn't serve that purpose gets cut.

But your reasoning behind Woola's inclusion seems valid. Movie protagonists tend to be cast into the roles of one of Dorothy's companions from "The Wizard of Oz". That gives the character some blatant personal flaw to overcome by the movie's climax. In this case, I guess we're supposed to have a Tin Man who needs to find that some things (and people) are worth fighting for.

 

[Relique du Madde]

[MENTION=8158]Felon[/MENTION]

My previous reply went off track somewhere between your and Hobo's and Umbran's replies (It's hard to tell who exactly it was originally aimed at). I might have miss aimed it at you particularly due to your use of "adorable" to describe Woola (since for some reason it using adorable to describe a cgi character in sci-fi seems to toss it into the "Jar Jar/Ewok" category of 'should never exist and must be ripped out of popular culture asap).

Sadly, like many things in the movie, Woola's importance to the story was diminished as a result of the streamlining the John Carter's plot. Like mentioned before Woola served to show that John Carter was a caring individual (in terms of how he treated animals and sentient species alike), but it also served to humanize his character prior to his meeting Dejah and learning to speak in the Martian tongue and served as one of the first members of John Carter's support network. Sadly because John Carter learned to speak Martian all of 10 minutes after appearing on Mars we never got to really appreciate Woola and John Carter attachment to each beyond a cursory moment of "Hey look it's Woola, the good guys are near" and the "Hurray for Woola's decision to bite that BBeG!!"

 

[Deuce Traveler]

Do you notice that no one ever works hard in the movies anymore? They basically pull a 'eat the pill' moment just like in Limitless. John Carter doesn't have to work at the language like he had in the book, he just drinks the magic water and BAM!, he understands the language.

I liked the movie, but I think it was sloppily done. I also noticed that he was not ageless, like he was in the books. I never read past book four, but does anyone know if John Carter is a Orovar or White Martian?

I never found out in the books what froze him and transported him to Mars, as they left it a mystery in the four I had read. If he was a lost Orovar wandering Earth, it would explain his agelessness and much else.

 

[Hand of Evil]

Do you notice that no one ever works hard in the movies anymore? They basically pull a 'eat the pill' moment just like in Limitless. John Carter doesn't have to work at the language like he had in the book, he just drinks the magic water and BAM!, he understands the language.

I liked the movie, but I think it was sloppily done. I also noticed that he was not ageless, like he was in the books. I never read past book four, but does anyone know if John Carter is a Orovar or White Martian?

I never found out in the books what froze him and transported him to Mars, as they left it a mystery in the four I had read. If he was a lost Orovar wandering Earth, it would explain his agelessness and much else.

I don't think it was ever explained in the books, he was the right person in the right place and ended up being called to Mars.

 

[Mercutio01]

I also noticed that he was not ageless, like he was in the books. I never read past book four, but does anyone know if John Carter is a Orovar or White Martian?

I never found out in the books what froze him and transported him to Mars, as they left it a mystery in the four I had read. If he was a lost Orovar wandering Earth, it would explain his agelessness and much else.

I don't think it was ever explained in the books, he was the right person in the right place and ended up being called to Mars.

He looked pretty ageless at the end after killing the Thern on Earth. I didn't see a change in age, and there was a picture from his time in the Civil War in the background of one of the shots where he looks identical there as well. Also keep in mind that in 1881 he looked to be about 30, which would have made him far too young to have served in the Civil War, at least not as anything other than a drummer boy. But that wasn't the case, obviously.

Yes, I think it was more subtle than in the Burroughs books, and maybe it's only because I was looking for those kinds of things, but I thought it was at least hinted at that Carter didn't age.

In later books Carter finds that he isn't the only human to have been able to make the journey to Mars. I don't think it's ever hinted at that he may be one of the White Martians--just that he's a strange sort of immortal with vague recollections of a past and the feeling of never having aged. (In that, he's a bit like Wolverine... )

 

[fanboy2000]

After the forward by ERB, the first two sentences of Chapter 1 are:

I am a very old man; how old I do not know. Possibly I am a hundred, possibly more; but I cannot tell because I have never aged as other men, nor do I remember any childhood. So far as I can recollect I have always been a man, a man of about thirty.

This can be an easy thing to forget because ERB never, ever, touches on it again in the whole of the book. Or the next one. Or the one after. It's like plot insurance. It's there in case anyone complains about Carter hanging out with beings literally hundreds of years old who never die except by violence.

There's another bit of plot insurance in the books. The second book starts off with John Carter handing ERB a new manuscript and saying that he's figured out a way to move between Earth and Mars. This discovery doesn't happen during the course of the book, or the next one. Or, if it does, it happens off screen and not alluded to again.

This doesn't bother me, it just amuses me because it's the opposite of the kind of advice one might normally get about writing fiction.

 

[Hand of Evil]

This doesn't bother me, it just amuses me because it's the opposite of the kind of advice one might normally get about writing fiction.

He was writing pulp, serial novels...in a way he was inventing or at least helping to invent the genre. I think that is why it was so easier for the material to move to radio and then the movies.

 

[Mallus]

Do you notice that no one ever works hard in the movies anymore? They basically pull a 'eat the pill' moment just like in Limitless. John Carter doesn't have to work at the language like he had in the book, he just drinks the magic water and BAM!, he understands the language.

In the book, Carter doesn't just learn the language, he learns telepathy, and it happens, like everything else in the novel, really, really quickly/effortlessly. He also ends up a far more powerful telepath than your average Martian (as is demonstrated by his espying the combination to the Atmosphere Plant's door from the guardian, without even trying to).

I never read past book four, but does anyone know if John Carter is a Orovar or White Martian?

That's my take on it -- but I also think that's the result of me being a genre-savvy reader today and Burroughs being a genre founder writing 100 years ago. I wouldn't be surprised if that connection never crossed his mind.

 

[Felon]

Do you notice that no one ever works hard in the movies anymore? They basically pull a 'eat the pill' moment just like in Limitless. John Carter doesn't have to work at the language like he had in the book, he just drinks the magic water and BAM!, he understands the language.

Well, they want it to be a big-budget affair, which means you have to commit to targeting big audiences, which means you keep things fast and familiar. In short, you really have to engross viewers to get them to invest in a thinking-man's action film with variable pacing.

 

[Relique du Madde]

In the book, Carter doesn't just learn the language, he learns telepathy, and it happens, like everything else in the novel, really, really quickly/effortlessly. He also ends up a far more powerful telepath than your average Martian (as is demonstrated by his espying the combination to the Atmosphere Plant's door from the guardian, without even trying to).

Not just that he was more powerful because no one was able to detect his thoughts because he didn't have the same mental pattern or something as everyone else on mars had.

What's funny is that he essentially was Reverse Superman.

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