Wednesday, February 6, 2019

By the Gods!

Lynn Collins, as Dejah Thoris, is being prepared for a marriage in JOHN CARTER (2012)

How many times have we seen scenes like this in PEPLUM films? Even though this movie is billed as science-fiction/fantasy, it's strictly a PEPLUM film. Even the review at LE MONDE called it a 'cosmic PEPLUM'. I'm sure Lynn wished she hadn't agreed to star in this since her career (and everyone else involved with this film) went nowhere. Personally, I didn't like her character in it. Very underwritten.

5 comments:

Scott Ochiltree said...

This movie was a big disappointment.

Its elaborate CGI could not compensate for a weak script.

David C. Matthews said...

As a fan of the Edgar Rice Burroughs novels, I was disappointed as well. Especially when it as announced that Lynn Collins would play Dejah Thoris. She's supposed to be the "most beautiful woman of two worlds", yet I find Collins rather plain-looking.

And I hated the tattoos.

TC said...

"John Carter" was a lousy title. For all you knew (if you were not already a fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs), the character could be an insurance salesman or a postal clerk. I would have called it something like "Warlord of Mars."

Sword & Planet (e.g., John Carter, Flash Gordon) is, like Sword & Sorcery (e.g., Conan, Kull), a subgenre of Sword & Sandal, so I would agree that John Carter is just as much peplum as something like Hercules or Maciste.

Richard Svensson said...

Of course it's a Peplum :) You can compare it to something like "Atlantis, the Lost Continent", or "Giant of Metropolis", which also have scifi tropes, but they don't overshadow the Peplum standards in the stories.

I had high hopes for this movie, since I am a huge fan of the books, as well as Marvel's 1970's comic book adaptation. But this movie just left me cold. They downplayed everything that made the texture of the world in the books so enchanting. Filmmaker and special effects expert Jim Danforth pursued the rights for the books during the 1960's and 70's, but never got them. He has talked quite a bit about his planned version, and had that been made with his technical expertise in, say, the late 1960's, we would've had a remarkable genre movie classic. By the way, Danforth worked as a matte artist on "Conan the Barbarian", and a stop-motion animator for many of the flying Pegasus scenes in "Clash of the Titans."

Anonymous said...

Danforth was nominated for Oscar awards twice: for The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964), and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970). He lost to Disney movies both times (Mary Poppins and Bedknobs and Broomsticks).