Boxofficemojo.com is comparing this movie’s performance to Disney’s The Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, which ended up making $90M, but that movie was released on May 28th 2010, during the crowded summer, so Carter should do better.
Let’s take a look at the performance of remakes of famous sci-fi ‘period’ movies: War of the Worlds and The Time Machine. Critics had problems with both, but Spielberg/Cruise sailed far and away in spite of them getting a 74% rating. Take a hard look at the difference between it and the 1953 version: it was updated technologically, the aliens weren’t necessarily from Mars, the means of conveyance, insertion into the attack vessels, the ‘tripods’, and how the tripods came to be here, all different and exhilarating! The attack moved from London in the book, to New York in the Mercury Theater radio presentation, to Los Angeles in the '53 movie, then back to New York City and upstate N.Y. and New England. Many people savaged the over-interest in Cruise’s little family, while everyone else was expendable. In the end, it was still bacteria that did the job, altho large swaths of the illiteracy needed Morgan Freeman’s spoon feeding to get it, and some still didn’t… Many, many of the people who didn’t like that movie could not understand how the aliens died, what a laugh, so I’m sure many of the critics weren’t far behind. This remake was definitely not an authentic ‘period’ film, as Stanton wanted the look and feel of J.C. to be.
The other H.G. Wells movie, Time Machine was released a few years earlier and didn’t do well at all, even with outstanding Jeremy Irons playing the cerebral leader of one of the evolved forms, the Morlocks. The director was Wells’ descendant. The setting was also moved from London to N.Y.C. area, and had a substantial script rewrite. There were some new wonderful sci-fi story concepts, including a still existing library robot ‘know-it-all’ and the Uber-Morlock telepathic leader. These were panned by the critics, but updating and change in the story is mandatory if you’re going to have a remake at all, not just adding CG erosion algorithms. But it just didn’t have the soul of the earlier film, of 1960, and got a 29% TM rating. There were lots of theories, some saying it depended on gadgets too much. I think that the 1960 film showed the romantic, utopian pining of a scientific inventor, a strength that the new lead couldn’t muster. Since Wells depended on leaps of technology to excite his reading audience, the same had to be done in 2002. If I were a screenwriter, the story would involve a modern day applied physics researcher proposing a time machine, and actually getting into some of the advanced physics concepts, of which there is a currently untested theoretical exposition, rather than just coming up with some gadget out of whole cloth. Many would find that boring, and they would have a point, since 94% of the population is scientifically illiterate, but not quite that many are sci-fi illiterate. A remake of this particular tale MUST have new future science in it early in the script. I like the driving force of the 2002 release: the scientist’s wife dies and he invents a machine to go back in time and prevent her death. That she dies again, right away, from another cause, is a theme that has already been explored in other films such as 2004’s Butterfly Effect and one of the 70’s Superman movies. It’s a kind of obvious consequence of tinkering with the past, a retread. Having the atom-bombed Moon destroy the Earth, it’s not good science and it takes away a lot of the mystery as to where everyone went. No previous treatment tried to understand the Morlocks, and perhaps that was a mistake: that the bad guy needs to appear remorselessly incorrigible. In recent years, that concept has been challenged with bad guys often having reasonable motivations, instead of being evil for evil’s sake. (I like Stanton’s treatment of Auto, he is only following his directives, and hasn’t really had the opportunity to be derailed from his programming, to be set offtrack like how Mo was in the spaceship dock.)
Some say that Wells lacked the emotive force of current filmmakers, he certainly had a somewhat harsh underclass upbringing. Notice that it was bacteria, not human bravado or intervention of some sort, that finishes off the aliens, and that in the year 800,000 that the hero faces insurmountable odds. Just as an example of his intellect, he and his son, sometime around 1920 gave a talk where they were asked what aliens might look like. They answered that they would be so radically different and evolved that we both could go right past each other without even noticing. That sure isn’t what today’s astrobiologists are saying, but it makes wonderful sci-fi. Remember: “Pure energy” Mr. Spock. I would imagine that such an alien would look like a wisp of fog passing along the way, a consequence of the marine layer and hot desert winds intertwining, and that we would appear as some sort of rolling stone, tall and symmetrical and eventually finding repose, a phenomenon not unseen along sandy collapsing beach cliffs. But ‘pure energy’ becomes quickly boring to look at, so don’t expect any filmmakers to hop on it.
I can forgive a director who can’t keep up with a spotless resume, but JC seems like a significant drop for a storyteller as talented as Stanton. I don’t think 