Rover Picture Makes a Point That Has Bothered Me……

Art

I’m on record here and elsewhere as defending Andrew Stanton’s John Carter and nothing about that has changed.  I think by and large he dealt admirably with the material.  But I’m also on record as not being in complete agreement with all of his choices.  One of the things that perplexed me from the first trailer was the apparent willingness to accept earthly Utah images and simply allow them to “play the role” of Mars with little enhancement or manipulation.  I know that Stanton was going for a more realistic look, and I’m okay with that.  But these images of the Mars Rover on the actual real deal Mars illustrates a lot of what I felt about the approach to depicting Barsoom.  The first image is an artist’s conception; subsequent images are actual photographs. In all of the images, the sand (and hills) have a more reddish hue than in the movie — plus the sky is never brilliant blue and cloudless. It always seems to have a reddish hue, and frequently there are clouds. I just feel like some very simple fixes in post production could have greatly improved the “atmosphere” of day exterior Barsoom — without sacrificing the “realistic” look. It would be more realistic, in fact, to do these things.

 

34 comments

  • Lynn Collins is part Cherokee Indian. Myriam Acharki played the Priestess and she’s not Anglo-Saxon. And they had a mixed sex military. And Taylor Kitsch is Canadian…. so that must count for something… joking! But this is also a bothersome topic because there were critics who complained that the Tharks all looked alike and we know they didn’t. But we must be careful what we say about those critics who are mentally challenged… most of them who didn’t like JC… the ones who thought the Tharks all looked alike or couldn’t follow the story and thought it should all be dark, depressing, cynical and like almost every other science fiction film of the past 40 years.

  • Interesting topic, but we probably wouldn’t have this discussion if ERB made the Therns Green-skinned, the First Born orange-skinned and the Okarians purple-skinned. After all, that wouldn’t change a thing in Gods of Mars and Warlord of Mars, since it’s not about any specific skin color, and since none of these cultures is modeled after a real-life one.

    But ERB chose deliberately existing, earthen skin tones for his martian people, and that’s saying a lot to me. It’s one of these cases where you have in science-fiction or fantasy setting a “show, don’t preach” element. The original series of Star Trek did that, a lot.

    In that regard, to me, NOT casting people with the matching skin tone, or casting only white-skinned people “painted” would be a nonsense, and missing the point, Carter’s disguises notwithstanding.

  • You make a fair point, Crustbucket, but I don’t think that necessarily affected casting (considering they avoided the disguise issue entirely).

    It also doesn’t really address what I object to, either – that being the racial and cultural diversity of Barsoom being so homogenized. I would sooner buy that a body-painted Carter looked slightly strange as a Zodangan, Thern, Kaolian, or Okarian than if all the races of Mars had genetically analogous facial features. (Yes, I know ERB alludes to this, but I’d venture that his thematic drive to racial equality is more important to emphasize) The richness of varied human ethnicity is not worth trading just to make Carter’s disguises more believable, not for me anyway.

    That said, going that route in a film (all-anglo-saxon-in-red/black/yellow-face) specifically to address how similar we all are under our skin could be interesting if done for the right reasons, but clearly treacherous and my knee-jerk reaction to it is horror. Race is one of the most difficult aspects of adapting Barsoom for the screen, but you can’t just avoid it – which is what I feel the Disney filmmakers did. The lack of a single primary non-white cast member comes across very uncomfortable and, well, bland. Especially in a story about a stranger in a strange land, interplanetary romance, and cross-cultural alliances.

    Many thanks for engaging that topic, no one ever seems willing to.

    But back to the article, have any of you guys with fan-edits tinkered with the color-correction?

  • In the books John Carter was an Anglo Saxon.
    Often he painted his skin red and got away with it because lucky for him
    the facial features of the red men matched the facial features of anglo saxons.

    JC also would paint himself black or yellow and get away with it because
    lucky for him the facial features of the black and yellow men matched the facial
    features of the red men.

    So despite diverse barsoomian racial colors they all just happened to have
    anglo saxon facial features.

    A conveinant plot device for ERB no doubt.

    If would have stuck to literal interpertation of books wonder how well that would have played to modern movie audiences.

  • Landscapes —
    I think it’s possible to have it both ways, an otherworldly Barsoom with believable ‘NASA’ attributes, and I’ve always felt the time travel angle was the key. We know that Mars was once warm and wet, with a thicker atmosphere – but over eons dried up, froze, and lost it’s air into space. The tragedy of Barsoom is only heightened by our present knowledge of Mars once you place the story into the geologically distant past.

    The creators of Disney John Carter were interested in neither of those two ways. Thing is, you could still treat the aesthetic as grounded or ‘documentary’ in such a world — so, technically, they could have had the best of all three if they had wanted to. Instead, the film glosses over all these fascinating possibilities with a prologue line from Dafoe about how ‘you don’t know Mars is just Utah without color-correction’.

    Tharks Don’t Fly ——-
    Pascalahad – that one really kills me. Besides being an eye-roller on it’s own, Burroughs specifically wrote that the Tharks could certainly not pilot flying ships (having no navy), furthermore that they were unable to even operate the unfamiliar deck guns and thus relied on their own (incredibly effective) small arms fire. It’s one of the most on-the-nose examples of ERB putting more intelligence, grace, and imagination into his world than the film.

    Skin Color —
    I don’t mind the tattoos as a concept… but landscapes aside, nothing deflates the exoticism of Barsoom as much as the fact that every race (Caucasian Earthman, Red Martian, Green Martian, White Thern) we meet are played by Caucasian actors in makeup (spray-tan, CGI, powder – respectively).
    Depending on how you look at that decision, one could argue that this is either a stylistic failure of imagination or a socially outdated and thematically appalling example of racial insensitivity. It’s as if Stanton took the Old-Hollywood Guinness/Quinn queue from Lawrence of Arabia instead of the progressive Omar Shariff example. More likely they were trying to hard not to offend anyone that they ended up on the other side of the coin. Not even the four-armed Tharks feel especially alien, with anglo-saxon speech patterns, and the most striking aspects of their society muted. It’s all the more glaring since ERBs Trilogy is such a testament to the diversity of culture, ending delusions of ethnic superiority, and racial harmony. Hearing producers talk about the ‘difficulty’ of making the red men red, it doesn’t sound like they ever even considered expanding their cast to include any other ethnicity of Earth to portray the diverse population of Barsoom.

    I’m still sort of shocked to be the only one bothered by this.

    Thanks for the steak.

  • The background should have been more like Forbidden Planet which was very well done for its time.

  • Hmm–Sola says, “Follow the canal”, but I never saw or heard of any canals before that. I have continued to watch the film an average of once a day since the DVD came out June 5th, not only for the story, but to examine the CGI, actors’ techniques and expressions, the music, the sub-titles, and the narration for the visually impaired (which help explain things that aren’t made clear in the film itself). The only thing I might be getting a little tired of is John’s tangeling with the cavalry, but aside from that, I haven’t tired of watching it, and I still find new things I hadn’t spotted before.

  • It’s a good thing that the moons of Barsoom are stationary. Perhaps the solar panels feed off reflected moon light.

    Clarification. – That was a double sarcasm not a contrived explanation for a
    “Prometheus” sized plot hole.

  • Flying is easy. It’s the landing that’s hard. Everyone from John to the Tharks crash lands. Maybe they highjacked some members of the contingent left at Zodanga to fly them and then tied them up or disposed of them when they got to Helium. Sola yells to John, “Follow the canal, the moonlight will force you to fly low”. so it could also mean he needs to fly low to see the canal in the dark. The airships at least also have a radium drive.

  • The logical flaw that bothered me about this whole final sequence is: Tharks don’t fly. OK, no problem with that. But how did they learn to maneuver airships in what seems like 5 minutes?

  • Perhaps Sola thought the moonlight would reveal JC to the zodangans that were fixing to assault Helium. – Flying lower would decrease the chance of him being detected.

  • Someone brought up “silly solar panels”. At the beginning of the movie while Sab Than’s ship is being attacked a zodangan yells out, “shadow”.Afterwards you would think that being robbed of sunlight is a big deal but yet
    later on in the movie ships have no problem flying at night. It’s a good thing that the moons of Barsoom are stationary. Perhaps the solar panels feed off reflected moon light.

    When John Carter takes off for Helium, Sola shouts out something to him about the moonlight forcing him to fly low.

  • Someone brought up “silly solar panels”.

    At the beginning of the movie while Sab Than’s ship is being attacked a zodangan yells out, “shadow”.

    Afterwards you would think that being robbed of sunlight is a big deal but yet
    later on in the movie ships have no problem flying at night.

    It’s a good thing that the moons of Barsoom are stationary. Perhaps the solar panels feed off reflected moon light.

  • The “red skin” looked like a very poorly applied spray on jersey shore tan that
    was uneven and you can often see were the “red” has chaffed off in numerous scenes. – Check out Dejah’s prominent lily white belly button.

    I cough up big bucks I expect big spectacle. In hindsight I wonder if Stanton ever thought, “Should have mars’d it up super total crazy”.

    I know it’s not in the books but what do banths eat when they are not eating
    green men. Adding a few shots of multilegged prey animals munching on yellow moss and some strange veg would have mars’d it up a little.

    LOTR extended version dvds. On one of the extra features they go into good detail about how they screwed with the color pallette to “middle earth it up”.

  • Dotar Sojat wrote:
    “Except MCR, who could only stomach it one and a half times.”

    HEY! I resent that statement. I stomached it the complete two times I sat through it. 🙂 Still left indigestion though.

    “Okay, so about a third of the posts here are complaining that Stanton’s film is not true to Burroughs’ vision, another third are upset that it’s not true to the actual Mars of our solar system, and the last third are put out because it isn’t 100% original. It can’t be all these things simultaneously, because they are mutually exclusive. I would suggest plugging John Carter into your various video players, enjoying the movie. It’s kvetching like this that gives sf fandom a bad name.”

    OK let me see if I understand this. It is not possible for a movie to both badly botch adapting a novel, be filled with tired cliches (or not be a 100% original) and offer up a poor Mars? Well I hate to break this to you Dave-its not mutally exclusive. It can happen-this film is the proof of that. Stanton bungled adapting it, he made a boring looking Barsoom and he stuffed the film with unoriginal story ideas from other films and books. So yeah it is possible.

    As for everyone kevetching and giving SF fandom a bad name, this is what SF fans do. They do kevetch. They talk about what they do and don’t like about a film. In fact the one thing that gives SF fandom a bad name are those who suggest that we don’t kevetch, that we don’t talk about it, praise it, bitch about it (sorry for the language). The idea that we should just be mindless lambs to the Stanton slaughter and don’t dare question anything he did, that gives SF fandom-or just fans period-a bad name. So just sit back and enjoy the ride. In some cases kevetching about this film has been more fun than actually watching it.

  • My thought was that if Stanton was going for “realistic”, then he should have catered to audience expectations of a realistic look for Mars.

    There’s basically three options for how to portray Mars in a film:

    (1) Realistic NASA style – reddish rocks and dusty butterscotch skies
    (2) Utah Earth-like (exotic desert “realistic”) – minimally doctored desert and blue skies
    (3) Stylized fantasy look – unique dirt/rocks/(moss) and “dreamlike” sky, perhaps salmon-colored

    Most of the people who saw the film were expecting (1), but Stanton’s film delivered (2). If Stanton had aimed for “realistic” according to (1), it likely would have helped the film.

    The Barsoom of the novels is closer to (3). But that approach would not have been in keeping with the documentary look that Stanton was aiming for.

  • I had no problem with the skin color of the Red Men of Barsoom in the movie. I thought in the books they were often described as “copper-colored” or similar to the tone of Native Americans, not a literal “red”. The tattoos…could have taken them or left them. Kinda cool looking I guess.

  • I would suggest plugging John Carter into your various video players, enjoying the movie. It’s kvetching like this that gives sf fandom a bad name.

    Now who’s kvetching? Just relax. 😉

    There’s a context here you may be missing because you’re a new arrival here. I started the thread and I’ve been a staunch defender of the film, Stanton, and ERB. Every once in awhile it’s healthy to acknowledge I didn’t just love love love every single tiny thing about it. And most of the people commenting here have seen it about a dozen times. (Except MCR, who could only stomach it one and a half times. He’s a true blue died-in-the-wool contrarian.)

    And it’s also good to throw some red meat to the contrarians once in awhile.

  • Okay, so about a third of the posts here are complaining that Stanton’s film is not true to Burroughs’ vision, another third are upset that it’s not true to the actual Mars of our solar system, and the last third are put out because it isn’t 100% original. It can’t be all these things simultaneously, because they are mutually exclusive. I would suggest plugging John Carter into your various video players, enjoying the movie. It’s kvetching like this that gives sf fandom a bad name.

  • I didn’t have a problem with the tattoos, it gave the red men a tribal look. Why not, as long as it doesn’t become another major plot point that is not in ERB’s novels!

    But I never bought either the lame excuse of: it was the only way we could do it. As I never bought the difficulties of J.J. Abrams’s team in recreating the “orion slave woman” green look. What, they did it right for the pilot of Star Trek in the sixties, and no make-up guy was able to replicate it in the 2000ies?? Was it too difficult to see that the ST2009 orion girl’s green complexion was too bright, and her hair color wrong? Susan Oliver was painted dark green with a black-haired wig, and it worked wonders. Say they didn’t bother to search too much for a very little-screen time character, ok, but not that it was too difficult.

  • Dotar Sojat wrote:
    “As for the tattoos……do you really think these tattoos are ugly, or you just don’t like tattoos? ”

    I don’t have a problem with tattoos but these were just ugly and poorly designed and placed. It looked like half the people of Barsoom had horrible birthmarks on their faces. It’s also become a tired idea to have alien races with tattoos. If I remember the Na’vi in Avatar had them. The aliens in District 9 had them. The Romulans in JJ Abrams’ Star Trek had them. There had to be a more original approach than just tattoos. Then again what I’m saying. This Andrew “Damaged Goods Hero” Stanton I’m talking about. Originality left the building when he entered it. (I know that’s Contrarian but… 😉 )

  • I have a feeling Mars’ sky will take on its natural appearance once the atmosphere plant fails in the grand finale. I’m hoping they stick to the time travel concept from Konran’s script (?) and have the series end with modern day probes discovering a buried Helium. It would add a tragic element to the story if Carter chooses to remain on the doomed planet instead of returning to the safety of Earth.

  • The boring look of Barsoom, the butt ugly tattoos (I still don’t buy that “We couldn’t come up with a good red look” excuse), the one man fliers looking like ROTJ’s speeder bikes, the idea that the Heliumites and Zodangans can only be told apart by their colors, the silly solar panel wings on the air ships.

    If you take some time when viewing the Blu-ray to really look at Dejah, she is really a whole lot redder (whole body) than you realize. Same for the others. There are a number of shots where, if you freeze it and think about it, they did both — gave them a distinctly reddish hue and did the tattoos for good measure. I’m not saying that they couldn’t have gone a shade or two darker with the red ….. but they did give a more reddish hue to the skin than we might realize. As for the tattoos……do you really think these tattoos are ugly, or you just don’t like tattoos? I think tattoos are generally pretty cool (don’t have any myself) and I find these to be intricate and interesting.

    Re the flyers — yeah, I really think that making them look like speeder bikes was a mistake, just like mounting the coliseum scene in a way that looks just like AOTC was a mistake, and having JC’s wardrobe and long hair look just like Prince of Persia was a mistake. None of these are huge, but they all speak to the issue of differentiation from other movies. For a film that had such a huge chance of being labeled “derivative” ….it was more important for John Carter to achieve differentiation than most films.

    The “need for differentiation” argument is another reason to go more toward a reddish interpretation of Mars — just to make sure it doesn’t look so much like either Prince of Persia or AOTC …..

  • But, would’t the atmosphere, that Mars has in the film, yet not in reality, give it the “blue” hue sky? I’ve read that Mars would actually have a purple, or lavender sky with its atmosphere, so if they’d gone that direction that would have been cool.

    I think this gets to the idea of …. the whole idea is to immerse the reader in a world that seems internally consistent but is different than this world. I read all the Barsoom books multiple times and not once did I ever envision a regular blue sky, “just like Utah” kind of look and I doubt anyone else did either. Even NASA concedes that the public consciousness in this matter in effect demands a reddish hue to the sand and a lavender hue to the sky, which I find pretty interesting. The thing is — if one were making a modern day sci-fi story (i.e. futuristic journey to mars) then it would be easy to make it look the way that Stanton did, and just have the resident science guru on the voyage explain that all the images of Mars through the years have misrepresented the way it really looks, and this is really the scientifically accurate way to portray it. But Stanton didn’t have that luxury — there’s no opportunity to explain it away on that basis (ha, imagine: John Carter: This is Mars? But….but……Percival Lowell says it should be red. Dejah: Really, John Carter? And who might Percival Lowell be? There are Jassomian experts on how Barsoom should look?)…..

    I’ve been intrigued lately by Gore Vidal’s remarks about Burroughs and “daydreaming”, and how Tarzan and John Carter represent our “dream-self”, and I think he was onto something. The mysterious “dreamscape” of Barsoom was just so evocative in my mind, and I’m pretty sure in most other readers, I just don’t think the objective to create a documentary accurate Martian look was really the best approach.

    But it doesn’t stop my intense enjoyment of the film! 😉

  • ” I don’t think it was a budget issue, since they did modify the landscapes anyway, it was an artistic choice, and one I still don’t understand”

    That’s one of the major issues with this movie-Stanton’s artistic choices in the design. The boring look of Barsoom, the butt ugly tattoos (I still don’t buy that “We couldn’t come up with a good red look” excuse), the one man fliers looking like ROTJ’s speeder bikes, the idea that the Heliumites and Zodangans can only be told apart by their colors, the silly solar panel wings on the air ships. The look of the flm just never was that compelling or that unique looking. I agree with Pascalahad that the Barsoom in the Asylum version looked more alien than Stanton’s-and all they did was shoot Vasquez Rocks and add in funky sky colors.

  • But, would’t the atmosphere, that Mars has in the film, yet not in reality, give it the “blue” hue sky? I’ve read that Mars would actually have a purple, or lavender sky with its atmosphere, so if they’d gone that direction that would have been cool.

  • Kevin – that’s a really interesting point but I think it supports MY point. LOL 😉

    If NASA has to adjust the color timing in documentary photos so that it “feels” adequately like Mars, then even moreso when someone is make a magical theatrical motion picture (a poem)…..

    As for cost — nah, this could be done on an indie budget. It’s just a matter of color timing and any color timing suite could handle it. Event copy/pasting in the sky is no big deal with the software that exists now.

    Even going farther and painting in distant hills and mountains that have character would still be super cheap — not a cost issue on a film of this scale.

  • To me this is not necessarily a small quibble, since the “earthen look” was part of the criticism some journalists familiar with the property made as the first pics were shown. They should have been at that point the stanchest supporters of Stanton’s vision but were let down in that respect. I don’t think it was a budget issue, since they did modify the landscapes anyway, it was an artistic choice, and one I still don’t understand. Some landscapes from Asylum’s Princess of Mars feels more alien than the ones in John Carter!

  • The very first Mars pic from the first Viking lander that I saw had a blue sky – that was on the front page of the San Diego Evening Tribune. Later it was adjusted, and we were told that it had been a mistake in the processing of it or something like that. I have no reason to doubt that information. If the sky really is blue and not reddish, then perhaps the fist humans there will be all, “Dude, they totally lied to us!”
    I honestly feel Stanton had a plan for a trilogy that would reconcile Barsoom with what we know of Mars today – I think that was his goal with his “realistic” take on the look of Barsoom. I have no info to back up my theory of course, just what I’ve kind of read between the lines in what he has said.
    I loved the ancient and decayed cityscapes he showed us, but I think a lot of them were lost on viewers – they were thought to be natural formations. The decay of buildings were almost too much at times. I also think part of the film’s problems was its monotonous color scheme of the land – at least what was always shown in the trailers, and why it drew comparisons to “Prince of Persia”.

  • Maybe it would have really added too much more to the cost? Everything costs in post production these days.

    But I don’t have as much quibble with his choice as there are many stories around that NASA deliberately adjusts the color in their Mars shots to look the way they do because they don’t want the people who think they’ve never gone to say, “Hey, they shot those in Utah!” There’s an old story that says when the first photos from a Mars mission came in they looked like Earth and then a tech went around adjusting all the monitors to a more red glow. An intern went and changed some back and was told to leave. There’s also a shot on a few sites that was color corrected to match the color chart on one of the older landers with the light and angle of the sun (the correct color temperature) and what was there was a blue sky, just like Earth. Mars atmosphere in some shots also has the blue Rayleigh light scattering effect around the horizon as you see in Earth shots but to a lesser degree since Mars has less atmosphere. Don’t trust everything you see as there has been much photo manipulation over the years to punch up photos mainly. Just one site:

    http://mars-news.de/color/blue.html

  • No it’s not. It’s Utah. 😉

    That’s the point — subtle changes were not made — changes to make it “feel” like you’re on another planet. That’s something that you wouldn’t be thinking about overtly while watching the movie, but you would be feeling it. So many of the critics who complained said they found it ‘unengaging’, which is of course an outcome of things like this.

    I remember reading an article in the LA Times way back in 2002 or thereabouts, where they took one of the scenes from one of the LOTR pics — the scene where they go through a swamp — and they showed how it looked when they shot it on 35 in the real swamp, then what they did when they created the digital intermedia and then went in and did subtle changes to the coloration that in the end made a huge difference — but subtle. It didn’t make it unrealistic, but it did make it evocative and other worldly. I think some of that was lacking in John Carter. This is a fairly small quibble, mind you ….. but I think more could have been done. And should have been.

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