I’ve mentioned A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs before. It’s an awesome book. I love it and it’s the inspiration for my own Princess of Amathar. I just watched the movie Princess of Mars (2009). It’s not bad as B movies go. It’s not even the worst movie based on a Burroughs book. Some special effects were even okay. It was missing three things thought that ARE Edgar Rice Burroughs.
1. Mystery. John Carter never knows how he got to Mars. Was it somehow related to his immortality– pretty mysterious in its own right. In the movie… neither. It’s some wacky government experiment. There are no dead/lost cities– maybe THE best parts of any Burroughs book.
2. Relationships. Though the friendship between John Carter and Tars Tarkas was okay, there was no hint of the emotional conflict of Sola, the only thark to know her father. And one of the best parts of the book is Dejah Thoris’s anger at John Carter when she thinks he wants her only as his slave rather than his mate.
3. Beautiful women. Tracy Lords turns out not to be too bad an actress and she is attractive enough in a “rode hard” sort of way– not surprising really, but she’s hardly “the most beautiful woman of two worlds.”
Of course there is a BIG budget, BIG name, BIG studio version of this story coming out in 2012. I can’t wait.
City of Amathar 