A man in the old west stumbles upon a secret cave in which he meets an Alien, shoots it and uses it's medallion to travel to Mars. There he is adopted by a civilization of aliens and meets a humanoid princess whom he must save.
Not too shabby, but I got the feeling that it was trying to be a Star Wars spinoff. This was based on A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, a sword and planet "science fantasy" book published in 1912. I had stumbled upon a web page mourning the loss of good science fiction and fantasy pulp paperback novels which accompanied the end of the 1980s and this was one of the series listed there. Being a Disney production, the cinematography and special effects were amazing. With a 306.6 million dollar budget, I would expect no less. Just for perspective, the entire school district that I work at has less than an 81 million dollar annual budget and that runs 6 schools fully staffed with teachers, administration and cleaners, an administration building and a bus garage with a full fleet of buses. There was some extremely low volume dialogue in the beginning which is unacceptable considering the money involved. The rest of the audio was fine. The aliens speaking an unknown language without subtitles in the beginning was intentional, as the main character learns to understand them and they speak in English after that. I don't know how much of the sets and costumes were CG (lots), but I saw CG eyes on the female lead. In the arena scene (which took forever to get to) monsters called "wild Bants" are mentioned, but all we get are "white apes" that looked like Yetis from Drakan: The Ancients' Gates for PS2, but with 4 arms. The whole consensus anatomy of Mars except humanoids was to add arms or legs. Their riding beasts had the most, rivaling Odin's Slepnir with 8 legs. Overall, an entertaining science fiction/fantasy adventure with good special effects. I'm keeping it, but discerning movie buffs may be disappointed by the lack of tact and finesse. I would put this in the same category as Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018): cheap thrills that were expensive to make. I rate this good because that's what I've been liking watching these days.
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