My Favorite Martians

So, saw John Carter this weekend, and I have to say it was pretty impressive for a Disney action flick. Edgar Rice Burroughs's world comes to CGI life and it's a hell of a ride.  Carter, played by Friday Night Lights Taylor Kitsch, is a brooding Confederate vet, tired of war after it cost him his family.  In the Arizona Territory the US Government wants him to fight for the country against the Apache nation and he resists (violently).  His escape leads him into a series of events that put him on Mars, smack in the middle of a civil war between a moving city-state crawling across the blasted landscape and the last free city-state left. 

Mars is known as Barsoom by the natives, including the red-skinned human inhabitants, and the 9 foot tall reptilian four-armed Tharks, and Carter is even less inclined to find himself in yet another civil war under any circumstances.  Only the problem is being used to Earth's gravity, John is a titan on Barsoom, where he can make 100-foot leaps and smash people to flinders with his relative super-Barsoomian abilities.  Everyone wants John Carter to fight for them, including the beautiful Princess Dejah Thoris (played by Lynn Collins), the vicious Sab Than (played by The Wire's Dominic West) and the Tharks led by Tars Tarkas (voiced by Willem Dafoe).

Things get a hell of a lot more complicated when Carter discovers that a group of powerful Barsoomians with advanced technology are behind this civil war and their leader Matai Shang (played by Mark Strong) is pulling the strings.  It's a fun film, high on adventure and not terribly preachy about the horrors of war, but the entire movie shows that even when Burroughs was writing these stories a hundred years ago that the horrors of war will always be a rich source of material for entertainment.

We're just wired that way.  John Carter is worth a early bird matinee show at least.