It boggles the mind (well, mine at least) that it took nearly a century for one of the most important works in all of science fiction to be adapted for the big screen. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “Barsoom” novels, starting with 1912’s A Princess of Mars, have influenced everything from Ray Bradbury’s “Martian Chronicles” to James Cameron’s Avatar. The novels have pretty much everything you’d want in a grand epic. Action, adventure, romance, and spectacle, all in an exotic (but still understandable) setting. Admittedly, depicting giant, four-armed, reptilian warriors on any screen would be a problem – but nothing that you can’t use an Artistic License to work around. Ordinary two-armed people in latex head masks will do fine.

That’s the method chosen by Asylum Pictures, the rulers of the “direct to DVD” domain, in their 2009 adaptation of the first of the novels. They must have gotten wind that Disney was going to throw megabucks at their own version, and figured “Anything you can do, we can do cheaper and faster.” With some $300,000 at their disposal, they set to work.

The introductory act, of getting John Carter to Barsoom, cannot be ignored. You’ve got to show that Carter’s has military training and experience, and is just a little “above average” in all your basic RPG stats before you zap him away. Here, Carter (Antonio Sabato Jr.) is an American soldier somewhere in what is presumably Afghanistan. His mission of stopping an opium deal goes belly-up, and Carter is badly wounded. This makes him a perfect candidate to have his “data” (which laughably fits on a mere 16 GB flash drive) sent off to the alien planet for “reasons”.

OK, whatever, it’s just to give us the background.

On “Mars”, Carter quickly finds that while he might not be faster than a speeding bullet or more powerful than a locomotive, the low gravity makes it pretty easy for him to leap moderately tall buildings in a single bound. Following the story, he meets up with Tars Tarkas (Matt Lasky) of the Tharks, earns his respect and admiration by helping them fight off a swarm of cheesy giant bugs, comes upon Dejah Thoris, Princess of Helium (Traci Lords) who is being held captive….

Look, if you don’t know the story, go read the books – at least the first few – RIGHT NOW, ok? They’re old enough to be in the public domain; you’ll have no trouble finding copies. I’ll be here when you get back.

One thing I’d like to point out is how the movie deals with the fact that Carter doesn’t speak the local language, as it rarely gets touched on in sci-fi / fantasy milieus. In Tolkein’s “Middle Earth”, it’s clear that while cultures may have their own language (e.g. Old Entish), they’ve developed a common language for general conversation. In Star Wars, you can assume that as the Republic grew and spread, it imposed its own primary language across its domain – though isolated cultures may keep their own languages, and regional dialects are possible (allowing for minor variants in things like units of measurement). Star Trek handwaves the problem away entirely with a magical “universal translator”.

In Princess of Mars, Asylum went with the “Babelfish” option from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. After some attempts at trying to work out a simple pidgin, Carter is given a centipede to eat that gives him the proper linguistic abilities. Happily, the Tharks communicate through sounds of a sort that Carter can reproduce. It would be strange if they “talked” by smell! I’ll leave it to the xenobiologists to work out how an intelligent species can carry on a conversation and leave records when they don’t have a language based on sounds, or some way of writing things down.

As an even further aside, I wonder how long it actually does take to develop a working “pidgin” language between two cultures that have never met and have nothing in common. It shouldn’t take too long; Cortez didn’t have much difficulty leading a rebellion against Imperial Tenochtitlan despite the Aztecs and Spanish having essentially no contact at all prior to his arrival.

As far as I can tell, the movie follows the plot of the novel reasonably well. It’s been a while since I’ve read it, and it always must be pointed out that any movie should be a self-contained entity. If you have to read the book to figure out what happened in the movie, then the moviemakers did it wrong.

Sabato is a passable Carter. He looks tough enough, and seems like he’s enjoying the proceedings. He is the hero, after all. The same cannot be said for Traci Lord’s Dejah Thoris. She gives the impression that she’d Very Much Rather Be Somewhere Else. Either it’s a commentary on the movie, or an honest characterization given that she’s a prisoner being used as a piece in a political game. But the latter would imply acting skills which I’m not sure she has.

There’s little special about the special effects. You see every dollar that they didn’t have to put into them. I have to comment on the landmark Vasquez Rocks. It’s nice to use such a distinctive landform in your background, but when they keep showing up after Carter and the Tharks have been traveling for hours if not days….

Anyway, what you really have here after all is said and done is on the order of one of those “peplum” / “sword and sandal” films that Italian studios churned out by the dozens in the 50s and 60s. A human adventurer with demigodlike strength, coming to the rescue of Royalty In Trouble, doing a bit of swordfighting, stopping a supervillain’s scheme to take over the world…. A few tweaks, and you’ve got Maciste and the Martians, or something like that.

Great Saturday afternoon fare for the kids.

Which, arguably, is what the “Barsoom” novels were in the first place.