The best way I can describe this movie to you is by asking you to imagine your friend's dumpy, middle-aged mom, dressed up for Halloween in a skimpy 'warrior princess' costume. That's Traci Lords as Dejah Thoris and she's every bit as embarrassing to watch as your friend's mom would be. Moreover, she doesn't seem to be enjoying the party much. She goes through the film with an ill-tempered pout welded to her face, looking as if she's perpetually on the edge of saying 'Screw this' and storming off. Unfortunately for us, she decided to stick around, growling out her lines like someone being forced to read the telephone book at gunpoint.
So much for "the most beautiful woman in two worlds". The "fighting Virginian", Captain John Carter, isn't much better. He's a sword-and-sandal beefcake who looks to be about half her age, with spiky hair and the kind of 'tramp stamp' back tattoo more commonly seen on oversexed teenage girls. He spends most of the movie smirking to himself.
Rounding out the cast are a few sinister swarthy figures, and a small - very small - army of undersized tharks (humanoid Martian monsters). The tharks also mostly sound as if they're having their lines read to them over the telephone, but their faces are mercifully hidden behind tusked plastic masks, so there's no way to tell whether they're pouting or smirking. In some scenes, the tharks appear to tower over John Carter, as if the film-makers had remembered that they're supposed to be fifteen feet tall. In the next shot they've suddenly shrunk to human size again. My guess would be that the makers originally planned to fake the size differences using clever camera angles, but found that it was too much work. For financial reasons, they were apparently unwilling to re-shoot the scenes they'd already filmed, so they just stuck them in and hoped for the best.
There are also some sinister swarthy figures, a collection of computer-animated monsters plodding morosely across a desert landscape and some giant ant/spider things, some of which fly and all of which explode in a splash of vivid green ichor when shot with the flimsy art deco rifles carried by the tharks. It looks rather as if the spiders - which do not appear in the original novel - somehow used up the limb budget for the whole film, forcing drastic cutbacks elsewhere: the tharks have only two arms, while the eight-legged thoats have become bipeds. The scenery is similarly reduced. It looks like what it is -- not the fabled deserts of Barsoom, but a few rocks in a sandy patch of waste ground somewhere outside L.A.
I couldn't bring myself to watch the movie all the way through. There didn't seem to be any point. It's fairly clear that the film-makers probably felt the same way, but they at least stuck it out and dragged it to some kind of plodding conclusion. Or so I assume.
It would be nice to imagine that the movie was intended as a kind of post-modern satire on Burroughs' overblown heroic fantasy. In this cynical vision, everything is deceptive and disappointing, a cruel metaphor for the human condition -- the deserts of Barsoom are nothing but a sandy backlot, the peerless princess is a middle-aged former * star, the ultimate champion just an over-muscled gym rat. Scholars would applaud the daring irony, the bold inversion of the escapist epic. But I'm afraid that the cynicism was of a different kind and that the makers were simply trying to make a quick buck as cheaply and crudely as possible.
Even 'completists' who want to see everything inspired by Burroughs' work should give this one a miss. It's just depressingly bad on every level.
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