Why John Carter Is Probably Still Stuck on Earth

Ok, so I am still struggling through trying to figure out most of the Barsoomian in the movie John Carter.  And I will be the first to admit that phonetics is not my strong suit.  But I’m absolutely confident about the pronunciation of the teleportation phrase that triggers the Thern device.  It’s repeated several times, and it’s spoken slowly and distinctly both by the dying Thern in the Arizonan cave and by Dejah Thoris teaching John Carter to repeat it phonetically.   John Carter also pronounces the phrase slowly and deliberately when he finds himself back in the cave on earth, desperate to return to Mars, as well as at the very end when he lays his body to rest in his tomb with his newly acquired device.  We’re meant to believe that he is waking up on Mars while we watch the credits roll, but I’m telling you, that poor dude is still in his tomb, probably crying.  Because his pronunciation was wrong.

I mean, we’re not told exactly how  the devices work.  Judging by the way he gets to Mars, when the injured Thern weazes out the phrase, and Carter picks up the device and only repeats the last word, a person has to be holding the device for it to work, but they don’t have to say the entire phrase as long as someone in the vicinity of the device says it.  (So then, I’m not entirely certain why it doesn’t work when Dejah is teaching the phrase to Carter, unless the person holding it has to say the final destination word in order for it to work, and she hands it to him before she says Jasoom?)  It doesn’t seem to care about inflection, since Carter’s “Barsoom?” at the beginning deviates from the morm, and Matai Shang rushes the first two segments together when he spits out the phrase very quickly to send poor Carter back to Jasoom towards the end.  So, whatever, it’s entirely possible the device doesn’t care about vowel distinctions either.

But that’s stupid.  Isn’t this phrase supposed to be a soundwave command?  Why would it not be sensitive to distinct sound deviations?  Plus, the likely explanation for Carter’s distinctive (wrong) pronunciation is lazy and/or inattentive film-making.  Which is so annoying!  You ask me to suspend my disbelief, but then force me to think about the fact that Taylor Kitsch is reading a script.  As I’ve said before, I know it’s not real, but it should still make sense!

So the Thern that Carter shoots very clearly wheezes:

(Here’s a pronunciation guide for unfamiliar or ambiguous symbols, in case you’re not familiar with IPA):

Dejah Thoris pronounces the phrase in exactly the same way as the Thern, except that she substitutes Jasoom for Barsoom as the destination:

Carter mimicks Dejah properly in the scene where she is teaching him what to say.  But when he finds himself suddenly back in the cave on Earth, the first thing he does is try to return to Mars/Barsoom by repeating the phrase even though he doesn’t have a device, and he says:

He totally changes the first vowel from a low back unrounded “ah” to a mid back rounded “oh”.  And he says it that way again at the end!  Very deliberately!  But the problem is that we’ve already herd a Thern and Dejah pronounce the first vowel as “ah,” equally deliberately, and I’m inclined to think they know what they’re talking about over Carter.

Maybe that first word is spelled ok or och or something.  And that could be confusing, because the letter “o” in standard orthography can sometimes stand for an “oh” sound, (like in open, no, and rope), but it can also represent an “ah” sound, (like in octopus, ox, odd, and dog).

I have no idea how the phrase is spelled in this script, (it doesn’t appear in the book,) but John Carter shouldn’t know how it’s spelled either!  He learned this phrase phonetically from the princess.  He can’t read the writing she deciphered.  Every single time he heard the phrase pronounced by others, it was with an “ah” for the first syllable.  There is no reasonable explanation for why he should have changed it to an “oh” unless it is that the actor Taylor Kitsch read the lines that were perhaps spelled with an o in the script, and perhaps did not go to Thark camp like everybody else, and perhaps filmed those scenes before he filmed the ones with the princess where she explicitly taught him to repeat it as “ah,” or else filmed them so far apart that he forgot, and nobody on set corrected him, and nobody in the editing and screening processes noticed or decided it was worth it to do a simple voice-over rerecording to fix it?

I seriously don’t understand how that happens.  And I will maintain that either Carter is stuck on Jasoom at the conclusion of the movie, or else the phrase is basically meaningless gibberish and the device just feeds off the will of your heart or something.  I mean it can’t just be a magical phrase, right?  Because Harry Potter taught us that pronunciation does matter: (“It’s leviOsa, not levioSA!”)  Cater’s butchering of the teleportation phrase is not the worst line of dialogue, (not by a long shot), but when a film sets up an element as being important and then can’t even stay consistent with said element, it’s very disappointing for viewers like me.  What about you?


Filed under language, movies, nerd

5 responses to “Why John Carter Is Probably Still Stuck on Earth

  1. Robin

    I saw the movie in a Swedish theatre, and the “spell” was actually spelled out in the subtitles — I didn’t have the time to write it down, but I realised that what was actually said bore very little resemblance to that which was written.

    I’ll come back to you when I know more!

  2. Pingback: 100,000 Views | pagelady

  3. Hahaha this made my day.. My brother and I were arguing about this, I’m clearly correct

  4. Rob

    technicalities and over analyzing just enjoy the field of possibilities and imagine and create that which you will

  5. You forget the atmospheric implications on the pronunciation… different pressure, composition etc 😛

Leave a Reply to Robin Cancel reply


WordPress.com Logo


Google photo


Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Connecting to %s