When I found out they were making a John Carter movie, back whenever that was, I decided to read the book. I read Tarzan a long time ago at my mom's suggestion and it was surprisingly good, so I thought I'd give another of Edgar Rice Burroughs's books a chance. It was pretty good, especially if you like old school sci-fi, and I even read the next few books in the series. I never got around to seeing the movie when it came out, but everyone said it was horrible. I assumed it was horrible because they had a hard time adapting the book. Some of the technology and crazy alien races (green people with 4 arms, red people), not to mention everyone being naked all the time, would be pretty hard to re-create. The movie was on TV last week and I finally saw it. It was terrible, but not for the reason I had assumed. They actually did a really good job with the special effects and making the aliens look how they were supposed to. They solved the nakedness thing by obviously just having everyone wear clothes. But for some reason they totally messed with the plot. They changed some things and put other things in the wrong order. They brought in elements from the second and third books that just made it confusing. Yet another example of movie people thinking they know better than the author.
I wonder what they were thinking. Maybe something like, "I am such an awesome writer. Even though this author has sold millions of copies of these books over the last 100 years my ideas are definitely better. Instead of sticking with the plot that has made this story so popular for so many years I am going to substitute my own awesome ideas that will totally make more money." So if you saw the movie or heard it was terrible, please don't judge the book by that. Ditto with Tarzan and every movie version ever made of that book. Also Peter Jackson's version of The Hobbit, but I can't talk about that yet because I'm still too upset.
