The blockbuster/SF loving reviewer (usually, he's certainly not prejudiced against entertainment) on my favourite local radio show just gave it a disastrous review, starting by saying with movies like this or the Phantom Menace a reviewer must go see it and analyze it with his "child's heart" or the exercize is pointless... to add that even then in the case of John Carter it proves completelyuseless to attempt to review what is more a corpse than a movie and what it deserves is an autopsy.

Some of his points:

"It's an adaptation that comes way too late - a losing and stupid idea to bring to the screen a nearly 100 y.o. novel that's been pillaged by cinema and pop culture so much that's it's lost all that made it original or relevant and make it look like a rip-off of all the space opera/SF movies of the twentieth century instead of one of their source of inspiration. We've seen everything in it tons and tons of times before, and since 1977 we've seen that done much, much better, in better and more entertaining movies."

"It's a painting by numbers and it commits the biggest crime any blockbuster can commit: failing to entertain."

"Puerile and retarded - if you thought Jar-Jar was the unbeatable all-time low in the history of space opera, prepared to be surprised. No focus, total failure to bring anything of interest or new to the themes it attempts to deal with. No redeeming qualities adults viewers can fall back on since "watching it like SW with a kid's heart" fails - the VFX are average at best, the action is boring, the screenplay is horrible and the performances are either abysmal or cartoonish, making Hayden\Anakin and Natalie Portan/Padmé look Oscar worthy - a complete waste of money on big names.

He concluded by saying that rather than anyone starved for such a movie should consider even taking another dose of Jar-Jar over losing their time and money to go see this, or much better, watch or rewatch THX-1138 - with a completely different tone and even genre, but to see how exploring similar themes can be done with brilliance and relevance.

He also pointed out that to release it in March, Disney clearly seemed to want to get it out of the way and forgotten when the real blockbuster season begins.

He predicted the movie might have a good opening week-end as people are curious, before word-of-mouth makes it take its big plunge.