If that had been the title of the movie mistitled John Carter, I am confident that it would be doing much better at the box office. It was the title of the book on which it was based and, unlike Disney, Edgar Rice Burroughs knew how to sell books. It would help as well, of course, if the trailers had offered ample views of Lynn Collins rather than Mars monsters. It would have brought in the adolescent males by the hordes, just as DiCaprio brought the female tweens into Titanic.

We took the afternoon off (from normal weekend chores) to go see it at the matinee in 3-D IMAX, and we had a great time. Yes, it’s harder to suspend disbelief about the features of the planet than it was in E. R. Burroughs’ day, but it’s still a great story. Sadly, the theater was almost empty, both because of Disney’s awful marketing, and because it was competing with the opening weekend of a movie about teens hunting each other down.

I was amused to hear at the end someone talking about how it was a rip off of Star Wars. Obviously, whoever said it had no concept of what George Lucas was reading as a boy. I imagine that it was pitched as “Star Wars meets Gladiator,” but it’s a lot more than that. I highly recommend, and I particularly recommend it for families, who want a great role model for their daughters.