Princess of Mars, the movie

I borrowed Princess of Mars, along with a pile of other DVDs, from a friend over the weekend. I hadn't heard anything about the movie, but like the Burroughs book, so thought it would be fun to watch.


Man, was I ever wrong.

This is not a fun movie. The adaptation is bad, and the acting is pretty atrocious. The sets are not good, and everything about it just pretty much screams "bad."

I am usually a big fan of seeing how a text from an earlier period can be adapted to suit our modern sensibilities. This is especially true for sci-fi flicks, as the science can be dated pretty quickly. That was, of course, the case with this story. That was the one thing that was perhaps done reasonably well, in that the explanation for why we find life on Mars like that depicted in the film was reasonable enough (well, relatively speaking). But the handling of it took the mythopoeic vision completely out of the story, and left us with... well, nothing, really.

It's sad, because I have a pretty high tolerance level for attempts at re-imagining a text into a context more suitable for modern audiences. But this one just doesn't cut it, and was not an enjoyable film on any level, for me.

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