Inter Mundos.

If you are here because you Googled "WHAT DOES INTER MUNDOS MEAN?", it means "BETWEEN WORLDS", and you're very welcome.

They say that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, and I suspect that John Carter is the result of a similar process.

To someone who's not familiar with the original material, John Carter may not be a bad movie, although box office results to date would seem to indicate that Disney's interpretation may not be able to stand on its own merits. However, from the perspective of a long term fan, it was almost puzzling in its broad departures from the story as written by Edgar Rice Burroughs a hundred years ago.

But I can see what happened - again, good intentions. Burroughs' original story suffers from some very fundamental problems, the first of which is exactly how it is that Captain Carter gets to Mars in the first place. In the text, it's an unarticulated, mystical process, seemingly based on the connection between a fighting man and "the god of his vocation", as Burroughs puts it.

In his defense, this sort of mystical/magical transition is fairly common in the fantastic literature of the time - it's a literary tool, like falling down a rabbit hole or going through a looking glass. E. R. Eddison does it ten years later in The Worm Ouroborous, H. P. Lovecraft uses the same approach, Lord Dunsany does it on innumerable occasions, as does Clark Ashton Smith, and so on. I attribute it quite simply to the lack of any popular concept of space travel: after all, Burroughs is writing in 1912.

The people behind John Carter are hampered by a knowledge of space programs and a century of speculative fiction. As a result, they obviously felt that the audience would require some kind of hardware, something based in science rather than fantasy. So Carter's transition becomes the result of a sort of transporter beam.

But where would such a thing come from? The writers decided that it would be an alien mechanism - but would the Martians have such a thing? So the writers create a more advanced alien race to be the creators of the transporter.

But why would there be a hidden conduit between the two planets? Aha, the more advanced aliens are plotting to take over Earth! No, wait, Earth AND Mars! No, wait, they're already taking over Mars!

And so on, and so on, and so on. The result of all this is a confusing, poorly explained mess of a plot that uses all of the names from the books, but that leaves out too many of the things that made the original story so entertaining. The sad thing is that they didn't need to do any of that. If handled properly and with some appreciation of the original material, John Carter could have been a fantastic steampunk adventure, a charming historical/futuristic adventure with a quaint lack of scientific accuracy.

The glimpses of that potential make the movie all the more disappointing. The artistic direction makes a good attempt at evoking an alien culture, the four-armed green Martians aren't too bad, and I give full marks to Lynn Collins as the incomparable Dejah Thoris - she comes very close to being the Princess of Mars that I had imagined, the woman whose love inspires a castaway from another planet to fight his way across an entire world in order to rescue her.

However, for the most part I was too distracted by all the lost opportunities.  Disney, if you wanted to make this movie, that's fine - but why couldn't you see that everything you needed was right there in the original book?

- Sid