John Carter‘s Mars Isn’t As Red As You’d Expect

The first trailer for Disney’s John Carter is out, and it certainly looks promising.

After only 80 years, John Carter of Mars is finally coming to movie theaters. Actually, this isn’t breaking news, as it’s been widely-known for a while that the series of books was getting a film adaptation from Disney, but the studio has just released a trailer that definitely proves the movie is a massive, epic, undertaking.

Based on the trailer, it looks like the story will be told as a giant flashback, courtesy of the journals that Edgar Rice Burroughs inherits when his uncle John Carter dies. From there, the story is transported to the deserts of “Barsoom” (Mars) where Carter shows some skin, fights with a sword, and strikes epic poses as he and princess Dejah Thoris fall in love with each other.

Here’s the official synopsis, which explains way more of the plot than the trailer does:

John Carter is based on a classic novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose highly imaginative adventures served as inspiration for many filmmakers, both past and present. The film tells the story of war-weary, former military captain John Carter (Taylor Kitsch), who is inexplicably transported to Mars where he becomes reluctantly embroiled in a conflict of epic proportions amongst the inhabitants of the planet, including Tars Tarkas (Willem Dafoe) and the captivating Princess Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins). In a world on the brink of collapse, Carter rediscovers his humanity when he realizes that the survival of Barsoom and its people rests in his hands.

Production-wise, this looks impressive (even if Mars does look like the landscape I drive through on my way home to California from Arizona). However, the four-armed Martians from Burroughs’ books are in woefully short supply, but maybe we’ll get another trailer that showcases them a bit more in the future.