So, John Carter:
I haven’t read the books, and I’m not sure it would make a difference. But I find myself weirdly depressed by the idea of a movie where a character is magically transported from one vicious sectarian conflict (the Civil War) to another one, on another planet. Maybe there’s just no escape velocity from war and territorial violence. Or maybe the lessons of one world are meant to redeem another, a hope that seems vainly and permanently disproved — it’s too hard to see our errors coming at us from a distance to avoid them fully. Or maybe I’m overthinking this. But it does sort of put a damper on my enthusiasm about futurism and space travel to think that we’ll encounter the exact same problems all over again out there in the great beyond. I almost don’t care if there are bad things out there in our fiction if they’re new, and reveal something different about ourselves.