Bank Holiday Afternoon Movie Musings

It seems like an age since I last posted here, what with the long Easter weekend, and all.  In truth, it has only been a couple of days.  Unfortunately, I haven't been able to enjoy the glorious weather we've been having, courtesy of an upset stomach (the result of the medication I take for my diabetes - around once a week I suffer these upsets, with their severity varying wildly).  I barely slept last night, as this round of upsets reached their crescendo, instead ending up spending most of this bank holiday Monday in bed, catching up with my sleep.  So, I've spent a lot of the weekend on the sofa watching films.  Some of these were re-watchings of stuff I have on DVD, (I particularly enjoyed revisting Bob Le Flambleur, his habit of never getting to bed before six in the morning struck a chord in the midst of my stomach troubles), others involved chasing down schlock I'd been meaning to watch for years now.  For instance, I started a long-delayed mission to watch more Al Adamson films by viewing Dracula vs Frankenstein, which, hopefully, I'll write about at length in the near future.  I also started watching Death Dimension, but decided that I didn't have the stamina for two Adamson movies back-to-back.  I'll come back to it later in the week.

This afternoon, during my sojourn on the sofa, recovering from last night's stomach upsets, I started catching up with stuff I'd recorded from TV over the past few weeks, (it sometimes takes months for me to watch things I've recorded).  I ended up watching John Carter, the 2012 adaptation of the first of Edgar Rice Burroughs' 'Barsoom' series.  I missed this on its first release, when it performed disappointingly at the box office, killing any chances of sequels, and met with a lukewarm critical reception.  Watching it now, it is difficult to see exactly why it was such a flop, (in the UK and US, at least - it was a big hit in other territories, notably Russia, for instance).  But that's part of the fascination of the film business: there is no such thing as a sure fire hit.  No matter how calculatingly a film is assembled by a studio, no matter how many elements and plot formulae tried and tested in previous hits are replicated, there is no guarantee that the public will go to see it.  John Carter certainly ticks all the boxes when it comes to big budget fantasy epics, yet failed at the box office.  It's actually pretty well made, with the CGI effects well-integrated with the live action, a decent cast, a good pace and a script which provides a pretty reasonable adaptation of the original material without getting too bogged down in exposition. 

Perhaps its slight unevenness of tone told against it, (it never seems to be entirely sure who its primary audience is, whether it should be aiming itself at an adult demographic or being more family-friendly).  Maybe it simply got unlucky in terms of its release dates: it came on the back of several other major fantasy franchises releasing climactic episodes around the same time.  It is entirely possible that audiences were just experiencing 'fantasy fatigue' at this point.  Moreover, the box office was beginning to move from fantasy epics to superhero franchises around this time, leaving John Carter seeming 'anachronistic'. Then again, maybe modern audiences' lack of familiarity with the source material was a factor.  Of course, the fact that it widely touted as being the most expensive live action film ever made probably didn't help.  Like Waterworld before it, it doesn't always seem obvious where the budget went, perhaps leaving audiences feeling cheated.  Who knows?  The fact remains that John Carter failed at the box office, killing any chance of further films based on the 'Barsoom' books.  Nonetheless, it still provides a couple of hours of perfectly reasonable entertainment for a bank holiday afternoon.