From Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Andrew Stanton, “John Carter" is a sweeping action adventure set on the mysterious and exotic planet of Barsoom (Mars). Based on the classic sci-fi novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the film tells the story of John Carter (Taylor Kitsch), who is inexplicably transported to Mars where he becomes 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 discovers that the survival of Barsoom and its people rests in his hands.
Via EW
On the White Apes:
"They’re sort of an oversized gorilla in the books, and they’re kind of ubiquitous. They’re littered everywhere through at least the first several novels. They were always cool, just from a visceral standpoint, [but] they don’t really have a narrative function in the first book. So what we did is we made the White Apes a formidable creature that you kind of hear about throughout the movie, but you never really witness. There’s a subtle sense of anticipation for what these things might be like. Then Michael Kutsche — who did a lot of the designs on [the Johnny Depp movie] Alice in Wonderland – came up with this design on his own, for just their scale. He made them nocturnal, almost like moles — they stopped using their eyes, and just had a heightened sense of smell. We just love that. We needed a scene where Carter was going have to get out of his execution sentence in order to move the story forward, and we thought what better than having to go up against this formidable creature?"
On hoe John Carter came to be in this predicament:
I don’t want to give any spoilers away, but basically he needs an army to solve his big problem in the third act, and the only army he knows was his previous captors. When he goes back, the game has changed, and he gets incarcerated. This is what he has to get out of. He has to get out of jail and not get killed by these apes in order to get his bigger problem solved.
On the picture above and the skill set he has:
He’s not Superman. He has this one Superman-like ability where he can leap farther than we can here [on Earth]. But it’s like being a man on the moon. It can’t be forever. He can build up momentum. This green species called Tharks, they know his one special jumping ability, so they chain him to a rock. It’s entertainment. It’s entertainment to watch this execution. They give him a nice long length of chain, so he can bounce around, but he can’t go out of the arena. It’s an interesting problem to have for that guy.
John Carter stars Taylor Kitsch, Willem Dafoe, Lynn Collins, Mark Strong, and will be released on March 9, 2012.