I generally have a lot of respect for the opinions of Roger Ebert. There’s no question the man knows his movies… their history, their industry, their overall aesthetic. He understands how they’re put together and what about them makes them work, and what doesn’t. But when it comes to science fiction, fantasy, and superhero movies, especially those adapted from some other source, he can say some mind-bogglingly ignorant things.

It’s pretty obvious he doesn’t really care for such films. He plainly considers them unsophisticated and even silly, and he admits in many of his reviews that he simply doesn’t know how to approach them. And that’s fine with me, it really is; I don’t expect everyone to be a fanboy like myself. (In fact, I enjoyed being a genre fan much more back in the days when SF&F wasn’t so mainstream.) But I would suggest he try exploring the source material a little more thoroughly — or at least hire a research assistant who can spend 20 minutes on Wikipedia and then give him a brief before he writes the review — so he doesn’t always appear so… well… out of touch to people who know and understand this stuff. Case in point: his review of John Carter.

I haven’t seen it yet, so I’m not going to question Roger’s judgment as to the film’s quality. (Full disclosure: he gave the movie two-and-a-half stars out of four, so he wasn’t being all that harsh, or at least not as harsh as I expected.) He complains the plot isn’t as tight as it ought to be and the CGI is occasionally dodgy. Fair enough; he may well be right about those problems. But what raised my hackles were the offhand remarks he made that indicate he just doesn’t know much about where this character comes from, and he can’t be bothered to find out. For example, here’s the paragraph that really made me grit my teeth:

When superior technology is at hand, it seems absurd for heroes to limit themselves to swords. When airships the size of a city block can float above a battle, why handicap yourself with cavalry charges involving lumbering alien rhinos? …

 

Such questions are never asked in the world of “John Carter,” and as a result, the movie is more Western than science fiction.

Roger, I respectfully counter that being more Western than sci-fi is actually a feature for this film, not a flaw. That means it’s at least somewhat faithful to A Princess of Mars, the first of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novels about John Carter. For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been reading Princess out loud to The Girlfriend, one chapter per night, just before bed, and she observed very early on that the story is essentially a Western with giant, four-armed green men standing in for Native Americans. But of course that’s what it is. Consider the book’s history. It was originally published in serial form in 1912. Wyatt Earp was still alive in 1912, and I’m pretty sure Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show was still touring then. The Old West occupied a tremendous amount of real estate in the popular imagination, Western stories dominated the pulp magazines that Burroughs was trying to break into, and science fiction as we now understand it did not really exist. (Indeed, Burroughs practically invented the sci-fi genre, or at least a certain subset of it.) Plot-wise, Princess actually starts off as a Western, with Carter fighting Apaches in the Arizona Territory just after the Civil War, before Burroughs unleashes his imagination. To complain that a movie based on this seminal, century-old story doesn’t fit so neatly into our modern generic pigeonholes indicates to me that you’re missing the point.

As to the issue of swords on a world that also boasts gravity-defying airships, it’s very plainly explained in the books (but, I grant, perhaps not in the movie) as a cultural thing. The peoples of Barsoom are violent, in constant conflict with one another, and they prize physical prowess and bravery above all other virtues. In addition, their world is dying and in many ways they have regressed into barbarism (some of the races, such as the green men of Thark, moreso than others, such as the more human-appearing red race). They fight with swords because skill with a blade is more impressive to them than merely shooting someone from a distance. Besides, this is a pulp adventure story — swords just come with that territory. The armies of Ming the Merciless fly around in rocket ships and blast people with ray guns, but they have sword duels as well. And what are the lightsabers of our generation’s touchstone pulp adventure, the Star Wars saga? Swords. Just swords, with a disco-era makeover.

One last thing: near the end of his review, Ebert makes this really silly remark:

The Tharks are ingenious, although I’m not sure why they need tusks.

At risk of sounding snotty, they have tusks because that’s how ERB imagined them!

Look, I know movies should stand or fall on their own merits and if you have to refer constantly to the source material to explain away flaws, the movie can be considered a failure… but it just strikes me as silly to nitpick this sort of thing in the case of an adaptation. It sounds to me like Ebert is criticizing the very things that make this movie recognizable as Burroughs’ creation. And isn’t that what it’s supposed to be? Burroughs’ Barsoom brought to life? That’s what I’m hoping to see, at least…