Photo credit The Sdyney Morning Herald
WHEN the 11-year-old Michael Chabon, deliriously steeped in the Martian fictions of Edgar Rice Burroughs, doodled a title page in his notebook that advertised the ''Literary Masterpieces'' of ''Mike 'Burroughs' Chabon'', he can't possibly have imagined that 37 years later the first big-budget film adaptation of the novels would have his name on the credits.
But the involvement of Chabon - who is now, at 48, a novelist with the unique distinction of having won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Hugo Award, literary fiction and science fiction's top accolades - is just one of several surprising things about John Carter you might not guess. It also represents the live-action debut of Andrew Stanton, co-writer of Toy Story and writer-director of the animated masterpieces Finding Nemo and WALL-E, and the first faithful adaptation of a series of books whose tendrils of influence stretch through a century of science fiction.
Perhaps most arresting, though, is that beneath John Carter's sci-fi trappings and lavish special effects beats the heart of a thrillingly old-fashioned character drama, rather as though a Michael Curtiz swashbuckler had been dragged into the modern age and loaded up with four-armed green monsters, mechanical walking cities and insect-winged flying battleships.
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Author and Edgar Rice Burroughs enthusiast Michael Chabon. Photo: Los Angeles Times
It didn't do well in BOx office
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