I feel vilified in my beliefs that film critics are knobs.

I've been a fan of Edgar Rice-Burroughs' John Carter Of Mars series for a good few years now (even since finding them on the Gutenberg Library) and was quite excited by the imminent release of the film. I was thinking about going to see it and thought I'd have a look at the reviews on Wikipedia to see what the film-critic elite had to say about it.

In summary, most of them said something along the lines of the fact that the concept had been done before. My "favourite" was Owen Glieberman of Entertainment Weekly: "Nothing in John Carter really works, since everything in the movie has been done so many times before, and so much better."

Interesting. So the John Carter plot and story are old hat. Derivative, some might say. Despite actually being a reasonably faithful interpretation of the ACTUAL story (I know...rare..) written b y ERB in, wait for it, 1917!!!

So if anything, most of the stuff that today's reviewers/critics compare this film to is probably itself based on the original books.

If, on the other hand, the action scenes or even the setting had been changed, the critics would have lambasted the film for straying from the original material. Kobayashi Maru.

Mars looks like Nevada/Oregon. Deal with it.

Action scenes that look cliched now were innovative in 1917 and JCOM is, from all the reviews on Amazon.com, a darned good adaptation.

So film critics are knobs. We all knew that anyway but it's good to have confirmation.