Finally got around to seeingJohn Carter, and hey, it's really terrific. In particular, the visuals are way more ambitious and unusual than anything that had been shown in the previews, which gave absolutely no sense of its epic scale or its sly wit.
Recent stories in both The New York Times and New York magazine have the Disney marketeers blaming director Andrew Stanton himself for the lackluster ad campaign, but that feels like finger pointing from studio lackeys who failed to do their job. How hard could it have been to sell an adventure picture based on an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel? American International Pictures knew how to do that sort of thing back in the seventies. True, John Carter doesn't actually feature an exploding lizard--and is poorer for it, I must admit--but it should have been easy to put together a trailer featuring some exciting highlights. Because, let's face it, this makes At The Earth's Core look like a ton of fun.
