This Sci-fi film entertained me. It is not great, but I watched it once on a late night with insomnia, and it looked "otherworldly" beautiful from start to finish. (Perhaps the late night and the insomnia may have added something to the viewing experience.) Even when it looked hokey and cheap, it worked. There was something about the light, the atmosphere and the mood of it that worked for me. All of it just "looked" right.
On the plus side, Sabato is a believable hero as John Carter. I liked him as Carter. This is not high acting, but he portrayed an athletic guy with a hero-mindset. He worked in the context of the film, as did most of the rest of the cast. Don't expect acting like in "The Departed" or something like that. This is a science fiction B-movie on a low budget. Again, I have to emphasize that the whole thing looked good, even when it looked cheap.
Here's where it was fun but could have been improved: Carter going to Mars, and not even our next door neighbor Mars, but to a different Mars in a different solar system, left him with super strength in the very light gravity. Apparently this "other Mars" is even smaller than the one we know, with incredibly light gravity, given the strength he had. The 200 foot jumps he made could have been played up more. They looked good. The couple times when Carter took an adversary as large or larger than him and threw him 50 feet at high velocity into the side of a rock wall was very impressive, and should have been done many more times. They needed to play that up more. The sword fight at the end was rather weak, but the lack of skill of the actors was hidden by camera flash cuts and changing camera angles. It did not ruin the story, but it could have been done better.
Here's where the movie kind of failed: I hate to criticize a beautiful woman (I adore them!), but Traci Lords was miscast. She did not seem to be an exotic alien princess. What is worse, she still has a great body, and didn't take off her clothes. (That's probably my biggest gripe. Go with your strengths, Traci.) In casting, I think they could have had a more convincing princess just getting some hot girl off the street in Brazil or Colombia and giving her a couple hundred bucks a week to look gorgeous and say a few lines. Traci had a bunch of close-ups that should have shown a princess's horror and dismay, and instead gave us the look of a soccer mom having a really bad day. (Don't get me wrong, she's a soccer mom with a great body, but she just didn't nail this.)
Liberties were taken in regard to the script to update the book. Most of the update was OK, but when they went to the trouble to say the wounded soldier Carter, on Earth, at the beginning of the movie, would have "all his atoms" downloaded to a 16 gig memory stick to transport him to Mars, they lost me for a while. They tried to explain something beyond our tech that they should have left alone. If they said they would just download his consciousness and project that through a man-made, microscopic Einstein-Rosen bridge that opened for a fraction of a second in a supercollider as an anti-matter conversion byproduct, and sent just the consciousness to another dimension, I'd have bought that. The whole "every atom" thing with the 16 gig stick just made me shake my head. If you are going to stretch credibility and jump the shark, make it Jaws. Don't hold up a 16 gig stick.
This film, which I found totally by chance, is a good guilty pleasure on a late night. If you can get it as a rental, or buy it cheap, check it out.
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M. Steedman
not what it says on the label
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