Step by step process by illustrator Sean Phillips.
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John Carter Movie Review
Grade C+: When I saw the first trailers for the John Carter movie I was a less than impressed. Something that I’d assumed would have the action of Indiana Jones and the visuals of Star Wars was instead being sold as an introspective journey to an alien world. Which was okay, I can dig it when a movie like John Carter plays with viewer expectations and instead delivers something different and unique than what has come before.
Unfortunately, though there are some bright moments in John Carter, for the most part there’s nothing different or unique in this movie than what’s come before.
In John Carter, the character of the same name (played by Taylor Kitsch) is magically whisked away to the planet Mars after he seeks shelter in a weird cave. On Mars, known as Barsoom by its inhabitants, John Carter meets the green, four armed Tharks, falls in love with princess Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins) and does battle with the evil Matai Shang (Mark Strong) and minions who somehow feed off of chaos and have driven the planet Mars to ruin. It’s up to Carter to stop Shang before he completely destroys Mars and moves onto the Earth.
The bright moments of John Carter are the visuals, Mars and the CGI Tharks are particularly wonderful, and other various special effects too. Since Mars has less gravity than the Earth makes John Carter much stronger than anything else on Mars and when we see Carter jump and fight it’s awesome. That being said, the overall story of the movie is the real weakness of the film. What works are the bits of the original A Princess of Mars story that makes it into the movie, what doesn’t is just about everything else.
John Carter is currently available on DVD, Blu-ray and digital download.
Comcast Chief Admits ‘Battleship’s’ a Bomb
Comcast Chairman Brian Roberts publicly acknowledged Friday what has been largely ignored by the Hollywood media: “Battleship” is a big, bad, “John Carter”-sized flop. [Comcast owns a controlling interest in NBCUniversal, the parent company of Universal Studios, which distributed “Battleship.”]
Speaking at the Sanford Bernstein Strategic decisions conference in New York City, Roberts said that the poor performance of the alien invasion film, which he labelled “an unfortunate, large miss,” coupled with the failure of the comedy “The Five Year Engagement,” will drag down earnings at NBCUniversal.
via Comcast Chief Admits ‘Battleship’s’ a Bomb – Yahoo! Movies.
Falling Skies: The Best Show of the Summer
Movies about the end of civilization have been in vogue since at least the late 1990s. There have been movies about doom coming from the skies like with Deep Impact and Armageddon, viruses ravaging mankind like I Am Legend and Contagion but it seems like the most popular of the apocalyptic movies have been about alien invasions like The War of the Worlds and Independence Day. And while films like these can do a great job of depicting events leading up to the end of things, the limited scope of movies means that they tend to focus on the spectacle of things going “bang” during the apocalypse rather than having the time to deal with any in-depth story of what comes after.
While movies might not be good at in-depth stories TV series are, and one of my favorite of these is the post-apocalyptic series is Falling Skies on TNT.
