PRINCESS OF MARS

I don't know that anyone was waiting impatiently for my next blog entry. But on theory that someone may have been, I should apologize once again for a lengthy absence. Between working on my next novel, some other projects, and attending to my online teaching gig, I just couldn't get my act together to blog.

But I finally found myself inspired by Princess of Mars, a release from The Asylum that aired on SyFy Saturday night. I've never made it all the way through a movie produced by The Asylum, so as you can imagine, my expectations were modest. But when I was a kid, I thought Edgar Rice Burroughs was the greatest writer who ever lived, and since the movie is based on his novel A Princess of Mars, I figured I'd give it a shot.

It turned out to be fairly bad, but not as bad as the other Asylum movies I've tried to watch. It deserves some credit for trying to incorporate many elements of the original story. It serves up a seemingly dying John Carter transported to an arid world where low gravity makes him a superman, marauding green men wandering the wasteland on monstrous steeds called thoats, flying ships, and the threat of death on a planetary scale if somebody can't get the atmosphere plant working again.

And Antonio Sabato, Jr. makes a pretty decent John Carter. With the arguable exception of Tarzan, a somewhat more complex character, Burroughs's heroes are all pretty much the same guy. They're handsome, muscular, fearless, virtuous, have a great capacity for love and friendship, and possess a wry, down-to-earth sense of humor. Sabato delivers all this. He even looks quite a bit like John Carter as he was depicted on the covers of the Ballantine paperback reprints where I first encountered him.

While I like Traci Lords, her Dejah Thoris is a harder sell. Martians of her race are supposed to have coppery skin and black hair, and Dejah herself is supposed to be not just beautiful but flawlessly, astonishingly beautiful. (When reading the books, I imagined Sophia Loren or Raquel Welch with the appropriate pigmentation.) Attractive though she is, the blond Ms. Lords just diverges too far from my mental picture, and I suspect most of Burroughs's readers would say the same. She also does a fair job of portraying Dejah's royal hauteur and strength in adversity but doesn't do as good a job of revealing the human warmth and passion we're eventually supposed to see inside.

A bigger problem, though, is a story that often fails to make sense. Sometimes, perhaps, this is because it doesn't supply the exposition that would explain why things happen. Other times, I'm pretty sure, it's because shit just doesn't make sense.

Now admittedly, portions of the novel don't make sense, either. But some of those elements are overtly mystical, and that makes it somewhat more acceptable that we can't explain them. By providing more of a conventional sci-fi explanation for how Carter is flung to Mars and then drawn back to Earth again, but doing a lousy job of rationalizing how and why it all works, the movie ends up making itself look less plausible, not more.

As I mentioned previously, I do give the movie credit for using a fair amount of Burroughs's original story. And given that this is a low-budget film, I understand why the green men aren't fifteen feet tall and don't have four arms and eyes on stalks. But there are some other unfortunate changes that seem unrelated to questions of cost.

For example, in the book, the green men are dour and unemotional. In the movie, Tars Tarkas, the green man who eventually becomes Carter's friend, is your typical rough, laughing, boisterous barbarian. Carter has to encourage him to think outside the box of blind obedience to tradition and authority, but doesn't have to help him discover his capacity for emotion. Considering how movie and TV SF never seems to tire of humans teaching cold, aloof aliens how to feel, it seems odd that the filmmakers dumped this bit of the story (which wasn't such a cliché when Burroughs used it back in 1911.)

The movie also only has one swordfight in it, whereas in the novel, most battles are swordfights, and Carter is the greatest swordsman on two worlds. If you're a fan of the book or of swashbuckling action in general, you have to deplore that change, although to be fair, it does make sense. Since the movie Carter is a modern soldier, not an immortal warrior, it would be odd if it turned out that he just happened to fence like d'Artagnan.

Some bits of the book are simply tossed in in a way that's inconsistent, wrong, and annoying. When she first appears, Dejah Thoris is introduced the princess of Helium (her city-state), which is correct. Later, though, she is repeatedly identified as the princess of all Mars, which is both incorrect and confusing. It would make no sense for the green men to be her enemies if she were their princess, too. The word "jeddak" is used as though it means "warrior." Not according to Burroughs, it doesn't. It means "emperor."

But for me, the biggest disappointment was that Burroughs's Mars is an ancient, dying, alien world full of wonders, mysteries, and strangeness. In the movie, that rarely comes through, although there are a couple moments. I liked the thoats, the big flying ship, and the green men's odd-looking rifles. But by and large, when the story moves from the Middle East to Mars, you'd be hard-pressed to tell the difference from the scenery or the tone.

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Speaking of books with lots of swordplay, The Captive Flame, my new Forgotten Realms novel, is now available. I hope you'll check it out.