About the Movie
Civil War veteran John Carter (Taylor Kitsch), hunting gold in Arizona, stumbles into a cave, touches the wrong medallion, and wakes up naked on a red desert that is not on Earth. This is Barsoom — Mars — a dying world of warring city-states, four-armed Thark warriors and flying ships, where Carter’s Earth-born muscles make him able to leap impossible distances. Captured, freed, and drawn to the brilliant Princess Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins), he is pulled into a war he tried to leave behind on his own planet.
Disney’s film adapts Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars (1912), directed by Andrew Stanton of Pixar fame. Famously, it lost a fortune on release — and just as famously, audiences who actually saw it kept insisting it was good: a big, sincere, old-fashioned planetary romance with real heart and spectacular design.
Why This Movie Matters to Sci-Fi
Almost every space adventure you love descends from Burroughs’ Barsoom books — Lucas, Cameron and generations of writers borrowed from them for a century. John Carter is the source material finally filmed at full scale, and its failure taught Hollywood the wrong lesson for a decade: the problem was never the movie, it was selling a hundred-year-old hero to an audience that had never been told he invented the genre. Time has been kind to it; reputations keep rising.
Where to Watch
Watch on YouTube (rent or buy) — listed on YouTube Movies & TV.
