Sure, it's cheesy and over the top, but it's a modern adaption of one of the foundational "sword and planet" novels. You couldn't do this story without John Carter swording everyone to death despite the fact that they have lasers. You couldn't do this story without basically every female we meet happening to be a princess of some kind. And of course you couldn't do this story without a functioning Martian language which arguably lends a slight degree of authenticity to five minutes in the slowest part of the movie.
The Detail They Nailed:
John Carter employed linguists and dialect coaches from Avatar and Lord Of The Rings to create a fully functional Barsoomian language that matched up with the 420 words in the original 11 books. They diligently taught the language to the actors until they could communicate with one another in Barsoomian and began to influence one another to create a cohesive dialect for their tribe. They constructed a new language so that the Martian speech wouldn't feel like filler gibberish.
What They Missed:
I'm all for movies that go the extra mile to get the details right. (Did you know that the costume designer for Rome went to India to find materials to make 4,000 truly authentic-looking costumes? Neat!) I merely suggest that the "Let's construct and learn an artificial language" phase of production should come after the "Let's figure out why everyone's obsessed with jumping, even though they have airships that fly on light" phase of production. People literally watch John Carter's jumps agape from their flying airships. "Wow!" they seem to say, "it's almost like he can do what we can, only with less control!" This contradiction really leaps out at the viewer in one of the first scenes where the male and female leads talk to one another: