Princess of Mars

Clearly "Princess of Mars" is The Asylum's cash in on the "John Carter" movie that was out in March 2009, as "Princess of Mars" came out in December of the very same year. Is that a trademark of The Asylum, to take something that others made famous and then just sponge and leech of that success?

At any rate, and regarding the motivation behind this movie, then The Asylum actually managed to pull of a fairly decent movie here, compared to some of the other more questionable releases they have spewed out.

The story, if you are familiar with either the "John Carter" movie or the E.R. Burroughs novel, is about John Carter, a man from Earth, who end up on a distant red planet, where he have to save their world from impending doom.

Pretty straight off the copy and paste storyboard here, without anything new or overly interesting to be added to the story. But still, the movie was enjoyable for what it was. A word of warning though; if you have seen the "John Carter" movie that was out earlier in 2009, then chances are that you might want to stay clear of this version. Imagine a weird hybrid of the 1980's "Flash Gordon" movie mixed with Disney's "John Carter" movie, and you have the end result coming out as "Princess of Mars".

One thing that did puzzle me, though, with the technology and resources available to the human-like race on this red planet, why would their princess be clad so scantily like a common... Well, you get my meaning. It just didn't make sense. Or did it? Well, you have Traci Lords in the role as the princess, so of course, why wouldn't the director be having her running around half naked?

The creature effects were adequate to look at, except for those bipedal reptiles that they used for mounts. They were just horrible to look at. Awfully animated CGI and they walked like they all had bad indigestion.

I will say that The Asylum did put out a fairly enjoyable Sci-Fi movie here, but in the wake of Disney's "John Carter", then the movie pales in comparison.

It's just not too clear where the movie makers were trying to go with this adaptation of the Edgar Burroughs story. At first glance, it looks to be a tribute to the style of old drive-in sci-fi features, where an intrepid astronaut pioneers unchartered space. Along the way, our space hero will bravely fight giant creatures, duel bad guys, establish friendship with the Martian locals, romance a blonde alien, bring about peace between warring tribes, overthrow a despot, and so on.

They give us all that old school sci-fi stuff, but there's no cohesion to anything. The "plot" is just a parade of unlinked chapters. The story is modernized, which is a mistake. Yes, everybody knows the Rovers have found nothing up there, but who cares? Keep the naive retro feel of a mysterious and foreboding Mars. That was the fun of the source material. But now, the action doesn't even occur on Mars! The 19th century soldier turned Spaceman Spiff has been redone as a Gulf War Marine, and sports millennial tattoos. The Princess herself is Xena Warrior Princess one moment, and helpless fairy tale princess the next.

Still, those Martian green celery-head guys were lovable (even though you can see skin poking out from beneath the masks). The indigenous bug creatures, and the fights against them, are amusingly cheap, yet done with gusto. Overall, an amateurish film, but has a bit of odd charm to it.

I can't tell you how badly I wanted to like this movie. Wait...let me start again. I can't tell you how badly I wanted this to be a movie I liked. It's like they didn't even try.

The character of John Carter is all but unrecognizable. The character of Dejah Thoris is like some Mad TV parody only not funny and who is that old lady they got to play her? Are you kidding me?

A lot of people have compared this to other movies, particularly Avatar. It's a bad comparison. Better to compare it to the original offerings from the Syfi network then at least we would know what league we were playing in. This could still have been salvaged had it at least not been boring, but it was.

I will not call it the worst movie ever as so many others have, but I will say that even within the obviously limited budget the creators of this film had to work with, they could have done far better.

I personally think it's great that you don't have to go back to the monster movies of the 1950s - the fact that they're still making movies like "Princess of Mars" today is fine with me. Surprisingly, the makers must have read the E.R.Burroughs novel, some elements of the story are recognizable with John Carter's arrival on Mars, being able to jump very high (due to lower gravity), meeting Tars Tarkas and Dejah Thoris, and fighting for the atmosphere station. Everything is put up to date, sometimes well (Carter being in Afghanistan instead of Nevada) sometimes not (the, uh, "technically explained" data transfer to another world, and that Mars not being our red neighbor planet, but a different planet accidentally also called Mars). Fortunately they did not use the Great White Apes, because how silly would that look nowadays with men in costumes? Despite the low budget, a funny flick if you have the sense of humor for trash sf.

I'd read some pretty brutal stuff about this flick and was happy to find an entirely competent and often clever b-movie. Admittedly, I was a huge Edgar Rice Burroughs fan as a kid, but I'm not sure that didn't prime me to dislike the movie.

It wasn't a big budget movie, but I think the money they had was well spent. The special effects were not the center of the film but they didn't detract from the story either. The acting was surprisingly unembarrassing and I personally found the dialog very good. The updating of the story was subtle and funny.

One of the other reviewers said this isn't the film we were waiting for, and I suppose that' right. It is, though, the film we got. All in all, it struck me as a sincere labor of love that did credit to the memory of Burroughs himself, the master of the pulps.