John Carter (still not of Mars) trailer 2 takes off...

This film is finding itself near the top of a lot of “most risky” of 2012 lists. It isn’t hard to see why. Disney appear to be frightened of the film’s title (hence the dropping of the “...of Mars” portion. It has significant competition 2 weeks after opening from The Hunger Games, one week after that from the Clash of The Titans sequel (I know the 1^st was piss poor but still) and may yet find itself with competition a week after opening from Mirror, Mirror. Yes I know the trailer got a seriously stink filled buzz but hey...

Mirror, Mirror Trailer; Snow White movie number 1 has Julia Roberts play the Wicked Queen ‘Princess Bride’ style...

A $250m film that has neither an A-List star (such as is left of that breed) nor a “name” director like Cameron, Nolan or Spielberg (No disrespect intended for Andrew Stanton at all after he directed Wall*E and Finding Nemo) , and is very difficult to summarise in a way that makes it sound sensible, is a big risk in these times. That it is based on a popular, but aging, set of books is probably not as much of a boon as it could be either.

So after a fairly underwhelming teaser trailer, it falls to this to grab your attention and sell the film. And...

Well has that made the weekend of the 9^th of March a no g o area for anything other than seeing this film? They’ve certainly gone all out to show us the film will be full of effects and have some ‘original’ action in it. I’m still waiting for the part where we see that it isn’t really Mars at all. I'm maybe a little surprised at how much of the effects work they've shown off here, given that there's surely a fair amount of rendering still to go and there will inevitably be those complaining about the CGI not being of a high enough standard in places.