Personally, I can hardly get enough of the WTF/OMG/we-all-live-in-Plato’s-cave-my-mind-is-blown school of moviemaking. Not only was I a big fan of “The Matrix,” but to this day I will also defend the even nerdier “Matrix Reloaded,” Cornel West cameo and everything. (“Matrix Revolutions” — let’s all agree not to talk about that, OK?) One of my proudest achievements as a critic — and I’m not kidding about this, even a little bit — is that I wrote one of the very few positive reviews of “Donnie Darko” on its initial release, long before it became a dorm-room, bong-hit fave rave. Next week you’ll probably get to read me expounding on Jacques Rivette’s “Céline and Julie Go Boating,” which is a drug-addled continental meta-narrative exploration from 1974, and I know you just can’t wait.

I dig moderately cheesy sci-fi or horror that offers a peek behind the narrative curtain, like “Cabin in the Woods” or the underappreciated “Source Code,” and I’m a huge admirer of Austrian director Michael Haneke (“Caché,” “The White Ribbon,” “Funny Games”), who offers the chilliest, most art-housey version of porous-reality cinema. There’s Lynch, of course, and Christopher Nolan, of course, and we’ll discuss my reservations about both of them some other time. I’m not going to defend M. Night Shyamalan’s films on any grounds except sincerity and enthusiasm, but if I’m laid up with a bad cold or whatever, I’ll happily watch any of them. (I’m not counting “The Last Airbender.” OK, I’m not counting “The Village” either, it’s just too stupid. But anything else, even “Signs.”)

So I’m delighted to report that “Sound of My Voice,” a low-budget cult-thriller puzzle that made a splash at Sundance in 2011, proves how effectively you can set the mind-bending mood without any special effects, action sequences or spectral rabbits. On its most fundamental level, “Sound of My Voice” is an L.A. character drama built around the unresolved erotic tension between a tall, otherworldly-looking blonde named Maggie (Brit Marling), a nervous would-be documentary filmmaker named Peter (Christopher Denham), and Peter’s girlfriend Lorna (Nicole Vicius), a onetime Hollywood wild child gone straight. But when you throw in the fact that Maggie claims to be a time traveler from the year 2054, bringing word from a world half-destroyed by civil war and technological meltdown — and that Peter and Lorna have set out to expose and debunk her — things really get interesting.

Marling is a fascinating new arrival in movies, an actress with commanding screen presence who decided she could write roles better than the crappy ones agents were offering her. She co-wrote “Sound of My Voice” with first-time director Zal Batmanglij, at exactly the same time as she was writing another sci-fi indie, “Another Earth,” with Mike Cahill. That one also had a cool premise, and Marling is magnetic in both roles, but I think “Sound of My Voice” is far more compelling as storytelling, blending its enigmatic sci-fi elements with a creepazoid cult drama somewhat akin to “Martha Marcy May Marlene.”

Divided into numbered chapters that gradually heighten the tension, “Sound” presents a mystery that seems at first like hardly any mystery at all. Maggie’s coterie of followers are standard-issue California New Age seekers, dressed in white robes. They arrive blindfolded in her secret basement hideout somewhere in the San Fernando Valley, where she keeps them in line with tried-and-true psychological manipulation, mixed with nostrums from the future that are so vague as to be meaningless. (When she is finally coaxed into singing a hit song from the 2050s, a time when CDs and MP3s have almost ceased to exist, it turns out to be — well, no, I shouldn’t spoil it.)

But Maggie’s apparent lameness and fakeness is itself part of the mystery. Fraudulent or not, there’s no question that she’s a sexy and compelling woman, and there’s nothing false about the odd chemistry she strikes with the withdrawn and overly controlled Peter, or about Lorna’s mounting jealousy. And what about the chapters we don’t understand? What is the significance of the 8-year-old girl, a student of Peter’s at the private school where he’s a substitute teacher, who’s apparently suffering some kind of disturbing abuse? And what’s driving the mysterious female cop or secret agent (Davenia McFadden), who arrives in L.A. with a lot of puzzling gear hidden beneath a shopping bag, including a photograph that seems to be of Maggie?

All this is heading toward a dynamite denouement, which, for all the movie’s tense atmosphere and expert pacing, Batmanglij and Marling can’t quite pull off. I’m totally OK with irresolution and mystery, don’t get me wrong; the spinning top at the end of “Inception” is all good, and I don’t need to know for sure whether Maggie is an oracle of doom from the middle of the century or a tall drink of water running a delicious con. Maybe, in the quantum state of low-budget mind-melter cinema, she can be both! But “Sound of My Voice” has such creepy-crawly, brain-tickling energy that I wanted a much bigger payoff out of the final collision of all these people and episodes. (Go see the movie and come back; we’ll talk.) Maybe they’re saving that for the sequel. In which case, I’m mastering the secret handshake — there really is one — memorizing the lyrics of the surprising hit song, and getting in line.

“Sound of My Voice” is now playing in major cities.

As its devotees will explain to you — sometimes in long-winded detail — Whedon’s signature series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” was about many things, and the killing of vampires was often an incidental plot motor but rarely the centerpiece. Along with its companion series, “Angel,” “Buffy” was best appreciated for its long, slow maturation and metamorphosis; there’s just too damn much of it to soak up on DVD over a holiday weekend. (Taken together, those two series offer 255 episodes!) Although Whedon will be identified with “Buffy,” and with the small screen, until the day he dies (he got his showbiz start as a writer on “Roseanne” in the late ’80s), he’s not a total newbie to the movies. He co-wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay for “Toy Story” in 1996, as well as the not-nominated-for-anything screenplay for “Alien: Resurrection” a year later.

Between then and now, Whedon’s only cinematic venture was the 2005 “Serenity,” a spinoff from his failed but beloved western-in-space series “Firefly,” whose fan base (I think) continues to grow a full decade after its cancellation. But in a shift that looks more sudden than it is, the 47-year-old New York native has plunged into moviemaking full bore. This week sees the national release of “The Cabin in the Woods,” a long-brewing, mid-budget horror puzzler hatched by Whedon and his longtime collaborator and protégé Drew Goddard (who directs). Just a couple of weeks later, we’ll see Whedon’s debut as an A-list Hollywood writer-director, at the helm of “The Avengers,” the culminating chapter of the recent series of Marvel Comics superhero adventures. (I know I’m not alone in wishing that Whedon would take on the other “Avengers” franchise, the 1960s British spy series so poorly served by its 1998 film adaptation. But that isn’t what this is.) After that, he has an adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing” that’s already in the can, and a sci-fi script called “In Your Eyes” that’s in production.

Whether or not Whedon’s storytelling skills are best served by this switch from the long arc of TV drama to the punchier, more concise and primarily visual mode of the movies is, let’s just say, an open question that’s likely to attract all kinds of viewpoints. As for the funny, surprising and action-packed “Cabin in the Woods,” you can read my review if you dare, but many Whedon fans may understandably wish to see it while knowing as little as possible. (Some of my conversation with Whedon has been expunged, for spoiler-protection reasons.) Horror buffs will admire its ingenious twist on an archetypal setup, which may not be entirely new but is certainly put together with humor and generosity. I’ve had several anxious Whedon acolytes ask me whether they’ll enjoy “Cabin” even though they can’t stand horror movies, and I’m going to answer that forcefully: Maybe! It depends!

Whedon called me one evening last week from his Los Angeles office while I was having dinner with friends. I adjourned to the bedroom.

Joss, I apologize for the background noise. I’m at a dinner party in Brooklyn, and when I told people you’d be calling, they all started talking about how much they loved “Firefly.” You know how dinner parties go in that direction.

Yes, it’s a law.

Is that the show that people talk to you about the most? I mean, it got canceled and everything, so obviously it wasn’t as popular as it might have been. But do you run into closet “Firefly” fans all over the world?

I do, I do. It surprised me because I definitely hear about it as much as I hear about “Buffy,” which ran for seven seasons. It’s definitely got its own following, which is awesome.

I’ve had some letter-writers make the comparison between “Firefly” and the recent mega-flop “John Carter,” which I wouldn’t have thought of by myself. But I couldn’t help wondering whether you felt some particular sympathy or compassion for Andrew Stanton and the people who made “John Carter,” which is now being held up as a symbol of everything that’s wrong with Hollywood.

Of course I feel some sympathy. Andrew is a sweetheart and a really great director. I haven’t seen the movie, I have to say. But there’s been, it seems to me, some mishandling in how it was rolled out and that’s always tough to deal with. The fact that he’s directed the most beloved animated classic of all time might provide comfort, but it’s rough. When they put so much behind a movie, and then aren’t even confident enough to keep the title, you know that doesn’t put the best foot forward. That’s got to be a rough situation for him.

It gets weirder the more you think about it. I mean, they made a movie that grossed about $200 million worldwide. So a lot of people liked it, and it’s still going to go down as an enormous disaster.

Well, there’s always this spin on things. I mean, “Sherlock Holmes,” the second one ["Game of Shadows"], did numbers that were comparable to “Mission: Impossible 4″ [aka "Ghost Protocol"], and nobody talked about that. It’s all based on expectation, and at some point even Schadenfreude.

I think that definitely plays a role. If I said I wasn’t guilty of that at times I’d be lying. Listen, break down the history of “Cabin in the Woods” for me. Was that actually being made at around the same time as you were working on “The Avengers”?

No. “Cabin in the Woods” was actually finished three years ago. Drew was finishing the sound mix right when I got the gig on “Avengers.” So it’s been two years since we put it to bed.

So it’s just a weird coincidence that they’re both hitting at the same time?

When Lionsgate told me the week they were targeting [for "Cabin"], I laughed and laughed, and then it was fear.

And then you have the premiere of “Avengers” almost right away. It’ll be the closing night film at Tribeca, and premiere in L.A. around the same time.

They’re premiering it a few times, and early on, and that’s exciting to me because it shows confidence, and it means I get to go to a lot of premieres.

It’s not going to be easy for us to talk about “Cabin,” so let me avoid leading questions. How do you want to describe the guiding concept, which I think is simultaneously ingenious and hilarious?

“Cabin in the Woods” is, for me, a way of making the kind of movie that I love and at the same time making another kind of movie that I love. It’s a way of taking the cabin and — not blowing it up, but kind of exploding it. Not just enjoying it, but turning it over in your hand over and over and looking at it. I know that’s not a great sell, but that’s really what it is to me.

If you take the premise, and then you take the idea that the premise is a premise — without losing the audience, without winking at them — how much can you do? How far can you take it? However far I think I can take it, Drew will take it much farther. And that’s the glory of the thing, what’s in that cabin in the woods is even worse than a bunch of kids being killed. It’s something even darker than that. And I have to be a little proud there.

Right. I love that you found a way to do something that is a little meta, a little self-reflective about the horror genre and its requirements, without having the characters be snarky or self-aware the whole time.

I’m a big fan of “Scream,” and I’m a big fan of “Scream” because I was terrified for the characters. I understood the trick they were doing, but it was so well orchestrated that their snark and their knowledge of genre could not save them. In this, we went a very different way. I wanted to save them from postmodern self-awareness! The movie obviously has a very self-aware element to it, but if you’re not invested in the characters, if you don’t believe that the characters, and not just the kids, but Bradley Whitford and Richard Jenkins [who play two mysterious onlookers who seem to be manipulating events], if you don’t believe that they truly are the people they are, then nothing means anything, we are all cardboard cutouts. It’s a movie that deals a lot with manipulation, but you can’t really talk about that unless you care about the people who are being manipulated. Stanley Kubrick might disagree, and he could probably pull it off.

In a funny way, we do grow to care about Bradley and Richard’s characters. They puzzled me, they confused me, they pissed me off. But their fate becomes important too.

Besides being lovely guys and great actors, Bradley and Richard represent a completely different kind of identification. We are them — and not just me and Drew, although specifically me and Drew — but they are the people who have chosen for what happens to happen. And you, as the viewer, are the person who chooses that, if you have gone to see this movie. The act of walking into the movie makes you the one to see these people suffer. It does not happen if you do not watch.

It’s like one of those issues in physics, involving the uncertainty principle or the observational paradox.

If you don’t go to the movie, maybe those kids have a really nice weekend. What I’m trying to say is, America, don’t go to the movie. Wait, what have I done?

In terms of coming up with a list of five horror-movie characters — and you explain it in the film: the Athlete, the Whore, the Fool, the Virgin, etc. — how did you get to that point? Did you have to debate how many archetypes there were, did you go and do research?

We did research. I did about 10 more years of research than Drew did, but we’ve both been doing it all our lives. And at one point we said, do we really want an extra person? But we knew we couldn’t live without five. We didn’t want someone there who was just an extra body, we really needed to have the five. We’re going to throw a party, it’s going to be crazy, there’s going to be five of us. It’s an odd number, but you need the essential people and no one else.

I don’t imagine either of you needed to read Carol Clover’s academic work on the “Final Girl.” Although I bet you know about it.

Yes, the “Final Girl” is well known in the horror community. As well as the “murderous gaze” and all kinds of other terms that come to play in this movie.

I was trying to come up with some potential similarities between “Cabin in the Woods” and “The Avengers,” which of course I haven’t seen yet. I was having a hard time before I started thinking about rules. Maybe this is true of all genre storytelling, but you’re very interested in rules and you like universes with rules. Both of these movies are like that.

Well, yeah. The more you can create a structure by which people live in a fantastical situation and by which they will act, and the more you lay that out for the audience, the more they will feel at home in it. And for me, there’s always going to be two things going on at once. There’s going to be the people trying to manipulate a situation and controlling it from above, and the people who are actually in the trenches. In that sense, “Cabin in the Woods” and “The Avengers” are oddly similar.

Don’t you have the particular problem with “The Avengers” that there are a zillion comic-book fans who are going to jump on you if you make one tiny mistake?

You know, I suppose you do, but people are always asking me if I’m worried about that. I’m totally not. I feel like, speaking as a lifelong Marvel fan, this movie will deliver unto them. And I know that someone will be like [comic-book guy voice], “I can’t believe they took the purple out of Hawkeye’s outfit! This is the worst movie ever.” Because there’s always gotta be somebody who’s gonna hate. But the fact of the matter is that this movie celebrates what has always been great about those characters, and I feel confident in it, and it’s a respectful, exciting story about the insane-o characters.

There’s been so much talk among fans about “What is the alien race?” and the alien race is not one of the big Marvel alien races because the point of the movie is elsewhere. But the debate rages on every time there’s a shot of one. That debate is ultimately raging on between a very small percentage of the people who will need to see this movie for it to be a hit. Ultimately, I don’t think of the fan reaction as something that I’m worried about, because I don’t separate them from me. I separate me as a fan from me as a storyteller because you can’t turn the film into the Chris Farley show: “Remember that story line when you were red? That was awesome.” You can’t do that. But you can bring the flavor to it.

You’re always trying to work with two demographics. There are certainly plenty of people who are serious fans of the genres, and serious fans of your work, but for something as big as a mainstream movie to connect, you have to go way beyond that.

I think one of the problems with “Serenity” was that they were like, “We’re gonna target your fan base!” And I was like, “Well, that’s bizarre.” Because they would be the only people who would definitely show up. And my fan base is not nearly as big as I think it is. But with “Avengers,” particularly Iron Man right now, because of the movies, Captain America, too, and the Hulk because of the TV show, everyone’s got their own juice. But at the end of the day, it’s a huge investment. For the movie to work financially, it needs to reach out to people who would never crack a comic and haven’t seen all the other Marvel movies, and that’s really the dance that you do, between the expectation as a fan and your desire to make it palatable to people in the know.

It’s not so much a tonal problem as opposed to how much information you put in. How much will people glean if they haven’t seen the other films? What’s been exciting to me is that people in tests, who haven’t seen the other movies and don’t read the comics, have almost universally said that they had no trouble and that you don’t need to see the other films to see it. And my hope is that Marvel will reach out to the people who don’t see action movies, who don’t see superhero movies, because there’s this kind of old-fashioned aesthetic to it. It’s kind of an old-fashioned movie. It’s not a cavalcade of sensation. There’s a ton of stuff in it and we really put them through the wringer, but at the end of the day, it’s a human story that I feel people can relate to on a lot of levels.

Whereas with “Cabin in the Woods” the budget is lower and I would assume the expectations are more modest. You’re primarily looking for the horror-movie audience, right?

I’d like to think that “Cabin in the Woods” is a tent-pole movie [meaning a major attraction that brings in all four "quadrants" of the audience], but I know one of those quadrants would be traumatized for life. Don’t bring the kids! It is a horror movie. I’ve also had people who don’t watch horror tell me how much they’ve enjoyed it. But at the end of the day, those are the people we will go to first and say, “We will deliver you the goods,” and hopefully broaden from there.

I know that Drew Goddard wrote for you on both “Angel” and “Buffy,” and went on to write “Cloverfield.” But this is his directing debut. What convinced you he could pull it off?

His tallness. He looks very commanding up there. Drew and I have told stories together for years, and to each other for years, and a storyteller who is working in a visual medium, you can tell when they have a command of the visual aspect of it. Drew is an extraordinary guy and very charismatic, so there are two sides to directing. There’s knowing what you’re doing, and convincing people you know what you’re doing. And I could tell, just through our interactions, that Drew had both of those things. Because some people are super-smart, great at whatever it is they do, but you get them onstage and you’re like, “Oh, they have to relate to people. Oops.” And Drew doesn’t have that. You want to follow him, and aesthetically we were always on the same page, and we wrote this thing as though it was coming from one voice. So I couldn’t have been more confident.

The big twist in the film, which we won’t discuss right now, that came from both of you guys?

It came from me. The plot is something I presented to Drew as “I think I found the movie that we could actually sit down and write in a weekend,” because it has a third act. It starts one way then takes you another way and just when you think you know where it’s going, it goes a third way. And this is how it wraps up. And not only did I present it to him all in a bundle, but it came to me that way. The structure came first. Not, “We should make a movie about a guy named Marty.” Or, “We should make a movie about two guys in an office. What could they do?” The structure is what appeared before me, shining like a unicorn. And I went, “Oh.” And we just filled it in from there. And structure is the hardest part of storytelling. With “The Avengers,” the structure nearly killed me. It was very difficult to make it flow and cohere in terms of all the changing perspectives and characters, all these movie stars, all these beats to hit. It’s a ridiculously complex puzzle. But once you’ve got the puzzle, and you’re just filling in the voices and coming up with the moments, that’s what’s fun.

You haven’t made a film in seven years — or at least haven’t gotten one released — and have only had the 27 episodes of “Dollhouse” on TV since “Angel” and “Buffy” went off the air in 2004. And all of a sudden, it’s cowabunga! Two movies in three weeks.

I don’t hate it. I won’t lie. I’m incredibly excited and proud of both of these movies and they have many similarities, but they really couldn’t be more different in so many ways It’s nice to be able to do that.

“The Cabin in the Woods” opens nationwide this week, and “The Avengers” will open around the world on May 4.

See, “Cabin in the Woods” is a self-knowing horror movie that is partly about a group of college students behaving like dumb-asses and unleashing unknown terrors at an isolated mountain retreat full of secrets, and partly about what it means to make that kind of movie and tell that kind of story. And if you’re rolling your eyes right about now and saying, “Oh no, another damn movie that’s too clever for its britches,” well, that’s OK too. Because Whedon (creator of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Firefly”), who produced and co-wrote the screenplay, and his longtime collaborator Goddard, who co-wrote and makes his directing debut here (after writing “Cloverfield”), have that angle covered.

Furthermore, if you’re thinking that Whedon and Goddard’s title sounds more like a category of movie than a specific movie, you’re absolutely on the right track. You can probably guess who the characters are before I describe them: There’s the studly athletic Curt (Chris Hemsworth of “Thor” fame), along with his borderline slutty girlfriend, Jules (Anna Hutchison), and you can be pretty sure what’s going to happen to them, right? There’s the reserved, bookish, decent Holden (Jesse Williams of TV’s “Grey’s Anatomy”), and the baked stoner Marty (Fran Kranz), who sees patterns and conspiracies everywhere he looks. Last but not least there’s Dana (Kristen Connolly), the shy and awkward brunette who’s being set up with Holden even though she’s not sure she wants to be — and if you’ve ever seen a horror movie in your life, you don’t need me to explain her role.

But even before this quintet heads out into the wilderness for a little relaxation and invocation of demons — even before they blithely ignore the crazy old guy at the rural gas station who warns them that if they drive up that durn road they won’t be driving out again — we can tell there’s another level to this whole business. (I’m not crossing the spoiler line here, I promise.) In the very first scene of the movie, we see Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford (Josh Lyman from “The West Wing”) playing a couple of wisecracking salarymen in shirts and ties, classic supporting characters from some workplace comedy. Except that their workplace appears to be some kind of panopticon command center, from which they can observe and even manipulate our five idiotic protagonists as they launch themselves into horror-movie hell.

Without getting into specifics, it’s clear that Sitterson (Jenkins) and Hadley (Whitford) have seen this show before. They watch with the knowing, slightly bored gaze of aficionados, who feel pretty sure how things are going to end up but can’t help getting a little bit invested in the story as it goes along. At one point, Hadley sighs (prophetically, as things turn out), “Yeah — but I just think it would have been cooler with mermen.” As more details about their workplace are revealed, they even conduct a vigorous betting pool on what exact fate will befall the five sacrificial lambs in that eponymous cabin. What is the nature of Sitterson and Hadley’s investment and involvement? And what’s the connection to various other horror-movie scenarios they can watch playing out around the world on their monitors? (I especially like the schoolgirl nightmare streaming live from Japan, which appears to combine “The Ring,” “The Grudge” and a few other Asian delights.)

Well, that’s the game, of course — but it’s a mistake to think of “Cabin in the Woods” as nothing more than a secret that’s waiting to be revealed. Much of the fun, not to mention a whole lot of splatter, comes after the central premise has become clear, when the archetypal teen victims declare their independence, and begin to fight back against their narrative enslavement. Whedon’s great strength (and occasionally his great weakness) is that he identifies so strongly with his fans, and “Cabin” is loaded with all sorts of references and in-jokes for horror buffs, beginning of course with the “Evil Dead” series but proceeding through a full range of the gruesome, the gothic and the grotesque. I honestly believe that I could tell you right now exactly what influences he and Goddard have combined in this script, and it wouldn’t “ruin” your experience or any such thing. But that’s a discussion for another time, and no, I’m not going to do it.

For a mid-budget production, the effects in “Cabin in the Woods” get pretty delirious, as the universes of the trapped teens and bored functionaries collide with disastrous consequences. Goddard’s direction strikes me as capable, direct and not especially showy, which is a pretty strong endorsement for a movie as high-concept as this one is. (He has the aid of veteran cinematographer Peter Deming, who shot “Drag Me to Hell,” “Evil Dead II,” “Mulholland Drive” and three of the four “Scream” films.) The cast are all game for their archetypal parts, especially Jenkins, Whitford and Fran Kranz as the indomitable pothead who figures out that things are not always what they seem, man. Other credited parts include the Werewolf Wrangler, the Dismemberment Goblins, and Fornicus, the Lord of Bondage and Pain. And in the end, Hadley is right: It is cooler with mermen.

“The Cabin in the Woods” is now playing nationwide.

– George R.R. Martin, “A Game of Thrones”

Epic fantasy — sprawling stories full of swords, castles, magic, kings and lots and lots of white people – is slowly finding its way into America’s cultural mainstream. In the age of the anemic box office, Peter Jackson’s films of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy remain a gold standard of blockbusterdom – and his forthcoming version of “The Hobbit” will almost certainly follow suit. Newer writers like Brandon Sanderson and Patrick Rothfuss have sold hundreds of thousands of their “door-stopper” tomes of wizardry and courtly intrigue. And tonight, countless viewers will be glued to their sets for the return of what is arguably the hottest show on television, “Game of Thrones,” HBO’s adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy novels.

This is all a bit odd for those of us who grew up with – maybe even got beaten up for – an obsession with these sorts of books. Accustomed to being mocked for our profoundly uncool fixations, many fantasy nerds, myself among them, have an almost nurtured notion that our love of the fantastic and the pseudo-medieval is something that the rest of the world Just. Doesn’t. Get.

But now, as our beloved genre finds its way into “normal” people’s hearts and minds, fantasy fans are increasingly confronted with an inversion of this notion – a question that I, as an Arab-American fantasy fanatic, have been wrangling with for years: If the mainstream doesn’t get fantasy, just how well does epic fantasy, with its lily-white heroes, get the multicultural real world of 21st-century America? As some of the most popular works in the genre’s history – works that shed any pretension of being children’s fare – A Song of Ice and Fire and its wonderful TV spawn are particularly useful springboards for this question.

When it comes to inherited conventions regarding race in epic fantasy, “Game of Thrones” is, in a sense, standing on the shoulders of dwarfs. The Lord of the Rings is the most obvious predecessor to Martin’s work, and it’s not hard to find subtle rhetorical responses to Tolkien in his books. When Time magazine dubbed Martin “the American Tolkien,” it highlighted not only Martin’s rather astonishing genius in world-building and narrative scope, but also the ideological baggage that all of us writing in the genre have inherited from our shared progenitor.

And it’s heavy baggage indeed, however much we love Tolkien’s creation. His half-sublimated wranglings with race are more complex and fraught than either his shrillest detractors or his most fawning defenders would have us believe. But there is some irreducible ugliness in his masterpiece that really can’t be convincingly redeemed. The men of the global East and global South (“black men like half-trolls with white eyes and red tongues”) are monstrous and evil, naturally and culturally inclined to bow to Sauron, and to make war on the good men of the North and West. The bestial visages of orcs bear a striking resemblance to racist caricatures of African and Asian facial features. Above all, to be dark-skinned in Middle Earth is to be part of a savage horde – whether orcish or human – rather than to be a true individual.

The savage hordes described by Tolkien have been imported by his dozens of imitators over the years, becoming a mainstay of fantasy in books, movies and video games. It’s a convention that Martin both takes up and departs from in depicting the Mongol-inspired Dothraki. As a people en masse, the Dothraki value only their horses, treating life cheaply, and reveling in violence:

Across the road, a girl no older than Dany was sobbing in a high thin voice as a rider shoved her over a pile of corpses, facedown, and thrust himself inside her. Other riders dismounted to take their turns. That was the sort of deliverance the Dothraki brought the Lamb Men.

The HBO production – which has been so remarkable on so many fronts — has exacerbated this hard-R-rated cartoonishness, bringing out some of the novel’s more unfortunate tendencies. The show’s depiction of the Dothraki has been positively cringe-inducing. In the novels, Martin’s quasi-Mongol warrior culture is depicted in a problematically essentialist, but still complex fashion. But HBO has nudged Martin’s creation fully into racial caricature by casting a seemingly random variety of colored people, and apparently raiding productions of both “Hair” and “Braveheart” to clothe them.

Even so, by skillfully replicating the juxtapositions posed by Martin’s back-and-forth POV, the show has managed also to replicate his ultimate, rather un-Tolkienish subtext: There is nothing unique about the savage horde’s savagery. If Dothraki society is depicted as violently perverse, so is Westerosi (i.e., quasi-European) society, which bows to the whims of the Aryan-featured boy-monster King Joffrey, and which has knighted mass murderers and rapists like Ser Gregor Clegane, one of the most horrifying minor characters in all of fantasy. Every culture is savage in “Game of Thrones,” and that’s a very different view of the world than what Tolkien gave us.

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Sunday’s Season 2 premiere begins HBO’s adaptation of “A Clash of Kings,” the second book of A Song of Ice and Fire. Book II is even more wide-ranging in terms of setting and scope than Book I was, so viewers can expect brief glimpses of characters from other parts of the world, including the Summer Isles, Martin’s analogue for Africa.

Unfortunately, some of these depictions partake in some pretty familiar stereotypes about African sexuality. It will be interesting, for example, to see what the show does with Chataya, an associate of Tyrion’s from the Summer Isles, and an upscale brothel madam. Chataya blithely sends her own 16-year-old daughter into prostitution at her “pillow house.”

Chataya continued, “My people hold that there is no shame to be found in the pillow house. In the Summer Isles, those who are skilled at giving pleasure are greatly esteemed. Many highborn youths and maidens serve for a few years after their flowerings, to honor the gods.”

“What do the gods have to do with it?”

“The gods made our bodies as well as our souls, is it not so? They give us voices, so we might worship them with song. They give us hands, so we might build them temples. And they give us desire, so we might mate and worship them in that way.”

“Remind me to tell the High Septon,” said Tyrion. “If I could pray with my cock, I’d be much more religious.”

Again, an entire nonwhite culture is presented as holding skewed values. But this wince-inducing depiction is tempered by some interesting implied questions about sex and commerce and spirituality and culture and power. Here’s hoping there’s a hint of this in the show’s version of things as well.

Part of the challenge of adapting Martin’s novels for television has to do with honoring his skill in constructing jaw-droppingly epic sweeps of plot and setting from beautifully rendered small details. If there’s a saving grace for the racial imagery in A Song of Ice and Fire, it’s in some of these little glimpses and hints that appear throughout – skillful deployment of which on”Game of Thrones” could help make an already good show great.

As an example, the only black character in the first novel is the barely mentioned, but deeply intriguing Jalabhar Xho, “an exile prince from the Summer Isles who wore a cape of green and scarlet feathers over skin as dark as night.” In the first novel, Xho’s most notable act is to frighten one of Sansa Stark’s fellow court ladies with his exotic appearance. So the first black guy to show up in A Song of Ice and Fire basically scares a white girl and then disappears. (He also ties for second place in an archery competition.) Not exactly marquee stuff, but – if online reader reactions are any measure – tantalizing. Yet the character didn’t appear at all in Season 1 of “Game of Thrones” – an understandable enough choice, given that Xho is essentially court furniture, but still a disappointing one for those of us who notice such things.

Another minor character who might have been used a bit more effectively to add a smidge of color to the screen in Season 1 is Syrio Forel, Arya Stark’s vaguely Mediterranean “dancing master” (a gender-acceptable euphemism for “sword-fighting teacher”). Forel is a fan favorite among readers, much more than one might guess from his brief appearances. The show could certainly have added a scene or two more of the wonderful actor Miltos Yeromelou, giving us just a bit more of his character training Arya in the deft swordsmanship of the East. All the more so because Arya’s POV on the show has thus far felt a bit diminished from the books. One supposes training flashbacks are always possible …

Of necessity, turning 1,000 pages of prose into a relatively few hours of screen time involves dropping, combining and retooling elements of a novel. “Game of Thrones” has already taken a few liberties with Martin’s books – cutting minor scenes, combining some characters and eliminating others, and (most notoriously) signposting plot points and character motivations through clumsy new “sexposition” scenes. It would be nice if, moving forward, the writers and producers chose as well to keep an eye on these sorts of promising moments of cultural variety and — dare I say it? — color in Westeros. But, given the contempt our culture currently holds for anything smacking of the much maligned (if chimerical) “political correctness,” I’m not holding my breath.

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As an Arab-American writing fantasy fiction, I’ve been asked more than once whether fantasy’s race problem is in a better place now in the Age of Martin than it was in the Age of Tolkien. My short answer is yes, but honestly, I think such questions are almost beside the point.

Ultimately, A Song of Ice and Fire, like the Lord of the Rings, is the work of a brilliant and conscientious writer who is nonetheless writing in his own time and place. The United States in 2012 is, far too often, and even with a black president, still a culture rich in racist stereotypes and xenophobic fear-mongering. Expecting a writer to remain entirely unstained by this is expecting a person to live underwater without getting wet. If we still find troubling racial assumptions and caricatures in fantasy – whether on the page, or on the big or small screen — this probably tells us more about our culture-wide problems than it does about a single writer’s, or a single show’s issues. A Song of Ice and Fire is indeed our American Lord of the Rings, and if Westeros has its race problems, they are simply a powerful reflection of America’s.

My verdict is that while “John Carter” may well go down in history as a great folly, it’s no “Mars Needs Women.” (Nor is it the misbegotten 2000 adventure flick “Red Planet,” with Val Kilmer and Carrie-Anne Moss, which reportedly cost $100 million to make and earned back about a third of that.) It’s a profoundly flawed film, and arguably a terrible one on various levels. But if you’re willing to suspend not just disbelief but also all considerations of logic and intelligence and narrative coherence, it’s also a rip-roaring, fun adventure, fatefully balanced between high camp and boyish seriousness at almost every second. Stanton even makes a case, of sorts, for the relevance of the Carter yarns, which were pretty nearly the first American science fiction and prefigured so much that would come later, from Robert Heinlein to Ray Bradbury to “Planet of the Apes” to “Star Wars” to “Avatar.” Whether there’s anywhere near enough mass interest in this antediluvian franchise to turn it into a 21st-century hit, well, I’m afraid that’s quite another story.

One might almost compare “John Carter” to Brian De Palma’s “Mission to Mars,” even though the films are quite different in stylistic and generic terms. Both are sumptuous, grandiose and profoundly silly spectacles, liable to inspire over-the-top flames from some viewers and impassioned defenses from others. At this point Disney would probably accept a similar outcome with gratitude; while “Mission to Mars” was one of the worst-reviewed movies of the 2000s (at least in the United States), it came close to breaking even overall.

Filmmakers have eyed Burroughs’ series of novels about John Carter — a former Confederate cavalryman turned Western adventurer who is thrown into the three-way civil war waging on Mars (sorry, “Barsoom”) — as potential material since at least the 1930s. You have to admire Stanton for wading so confidently into that long history of failure, talking big about spinning this unknown hero and his unproven star (Taylor Kitsch, of TV’s “Friday Night Lights”) into a three-film franchise. He signed up novelist and pulp aficionado Michael Chabon to rewrite the screenplay, perhaps to lend the project some geek authenticity. I think that’s cool and all — but A) there’s no way to make Edgar Rice Burroughs not seem silly, and B) seriously, who’s going to care? Are there legions of Burroughs buffs out there demanding fealty to the text of “A Princess of Mars”?

Indeed, that’s my mystified reaction to “John Carter” in general: So, the “WALL-E” guy has made an immensely expensive special-effects movie that combines a western and a sword-and-sandal epic and a proto-steampunk action-adventure, and is set on Mars. That’s kind of interesting! But what the hell were they thinking? It doesn’t help that “John Carter” gets off to a slow and murky start, lurching back and forth between the digitally created “predator city of Zodanga,” which is bent on conquering all of Mars, and our eponymous hero pursued through the rainy streets of Manhattan, circa 1881. That narrative encloses another one, when Carter dies suddenly and leaves his nephew, Edgar “Ned” Burroughs (Daryl Sabara), his private journal, and then two more, when the journal reveals how Carter discovered a mysterious cave years earlier in the Arizona Territory and was thence teleported into a new life on another world.

Things pick up considerably once Carter — played by the muscular, long-haired Kitsch with a persistent wise-ass smirk that somehow isn’t obnoxious — reaches the surface of Barsoom and is captured by the Tharks, a violent but noble race of 9-foot-tall, six-limbed aliens with walrus tusks and a vaguely Christian mythology. It’s a little bit “Avatar” and a little bit “Planet of the Apes” and a little bit “Man Called Horse” and even a little bit “Tarzan,” and yes, I know that the Carter franchise predates all of those (even Tarzan, whom Burroughs invented after Carter). Possessed of godlike superpowers in the lower Martian gravity, Carter bounds around in obviously fake fashion, rescuing the sultry and nubile Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins), princess of the besieged city of Helium, who is supposed to be a scientific genius but spends most of her screen time looking bodacious in increasingly skimpy Barsoomian fashions. Yeah, the warring humanoid city-states of Mars are called Helium and Zodanga. I giggled too. Burroughs established an all-time low in dopey science-fiction names, pretty much at the moment of the genre’s creation.

There’s one-on-one gladiatorial combat and big, chaotic battle sequences and an incomprehensible plot involving the vicious and stupid prince of Zodanga (Dominic West), who’s being manipulated by three immortal guys in robes (led by the always excellent English actor Mark Strong) who claim not to give a damn about anything but also seem to feed off planetary destruction. Or something. Zodanga! Playing the ruler of Helium and father of Dejah Thoris, Irish actor Ciarán Hinds gets to wear the most awesome military uniform I’ve ever seen, which appears to have been jointly designed by Julius Caesar, George Washington, Idi Amin and Karl Lagerfeld. (Sacha Baron Cohen’s fictional Arab dictator can eat his heart out.) At its best, “John Carter” is a mightily impressive spectacle, cleanly photographed in dusty reds and brilliant blues by Daniel Mindel, which dares to straddle that elusive boundary between awfulness and wonderfulness. It’s awfully wonderful, or wonderfully awful.

As so often with big, expensive Hollywood disasters, the real problem with “John Carter” is tone. Can you think about “Battlefield Earth” or “Ishtar” or “Waterworld” or “The Adventures of Pluto Nash” — with a net loss amounting to 94 percent of its production cost, pretty much the all-time dog — without laughing? Big movies fail when those who make them lose all perspective on how to make them and whom they’re making them for — when they strike a tone that’s completely misguided, and often unintentionally hilarious. You can feel Stanton struggling to bring the confidence, wit and style of “Wall-E” and “Finding Nemo” to bear upon this leviathan, but he can’t quite pull it off. Whatever tone he’s trying to impart gets eaten by the pure bigness of the project, and you’re never sure whether he’s embracing this ludicrous, antiquated fable of a pioneer American on Mars, or making fun of it. You could argue that that ambivalence is interesting on some intellectual level, sure. But from a commercial point of view it’s contagious, and likely to be fatal. Don’t buy your ticket for the sequel quite yet.