The trailer for Pixar’s adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ classic Barsoom stories, John Carter, made its online debut two days ago, so probably everybody and their cat has seen it by now, but just in case you haven’t:

I’m very, very pleased and excited by what I’m seeing here. Oh, I could quibble about some of the details. I don’t remember any magic blue glowing rocks from the books (although it has been decades since I’ve read them, so maybe they’ve just slipped my mind), and the airships of Helium are far different than I imagined them (which was pretty much like Jabba’s sail barge in Return of the Jedi), and Tars Tarkas  (the green guy at about 1:09) is neither as tall nor as buff as he ought to be… but I don’t want to be another damn Comic Book Guy griping about an otherwise enjoyable movie because it doesn’t take into account the critical events of issue #327 or whatever. The fact is, this trailer is showing a lot more things that are faithful to the books than not: the opening scenes with Edgar Rice Burroughs himself as a character; John Carter’s origins as a Confederate veteran and a cowboy; Barsoom being a dying planet kept alive by great machines; Carter’s ability to make superhuman leaps (Mars has lower gravity than Earth, so his Earth-trained muscles are more powerful there); and most of all, the grandeur and brutality of an alien word populated by ancient, decadent civilizations. And even if Dejah Thoris isn’t walking around mostly naked as she was described in the books, the costumes nevertheless look right. Consider, for example, the harness and breast plate Carter is wearing in some scenes, and then look at Michael Whelan’s definitive cover art from the 1970s paperback edition of A Princess of Mars (i.e., the one that I read as a kid). Based on this trailer, at least, the people behind the movie get it. They understand what was cool in the books, what appealed to the 12-year-old boys who loved them. And if they had to change some details to match modern sensibilities — remember, A Princess of Mars was first published in 1912, a full century ago — well, I’d rather they get the overall spirit right than make a slavish but lifeless adaptation, or one that rips off a few key ideas and bears no real resemblance to the source material.

I’ve been cautiously optimistic up until now. Now I’m downright giddy… I want to see this in a way that very few movies of the past few years have appealed to me…