Watchmen

[innerSpaceman]

I haven't read the GN, and I'm glad I'll be seeing it thru the (IMAX on Sunday) lens of whether it's a good movie, and not whether they did justice to the GN.

[mousepod]

Found this link through boingboing. Click on it and then hit "watch this movie". Brilliant! Watchmen as a Saturday morning cartoon.

[Cadaverous Pallor]

Originally Posted by mousepod

Found this link through boingboing. Click on it and then hit "watch this movie". Brilliant! Watchmen as a Saturday morning cartoon.

That was great! (Don't click if you haven't read it/seen the movie.)


JW - I would rather not know about the choices they made until I actually see it for myself. Guess that's just me. I've been avoiding as many commercials as possible, too.

[JWBear]

We're going to the 2:40 show today in the Director's Hall at The Bridge.

[Tom]

We saw this last night. I hadn't read it previously and in fact knew very little about it beyond very broad brush strokes.

That said, I found this to be one of the worst written and worst directed films I've seen in years. It was awful.

[Alex]

Are spoilers ok in here? There may be some in what follows, but I'll try to avoid anything really specific.

I will say that it is a very faithful adaptation of the novel. It does capture the look very well and pretty much if it is in the book it is in the movie. Obviously not every panel or word but pretty much all the foibles, quirks, and issues are touched upon.

And this makes it only a mediocre movie at best. I suspect I would have hated it if I weren't familiar with the book. Books can cover territory with a scope that just isn't feasible in a single standalone movie. Watchmen is essentially a half-dozen creation stories rolled into one thing with a minimal of plot driving things along until the very end when that minimal plot expands into something so big as to overwhelm what came before.

In moving Watchmen to film they apparently said "how do we fulfill the letter of the novel even if the spirit doesn't survive" when the question should always (in my never particularly humble opinion) be "how do we translate the spirit of the novel knowing that the body can't survive."

The literal approach of the movie would have worked much better as a 10-episode HBO series (I know, that is hardly an original thought). As it is, I quite honestly looked down at my watch at one point and thought "oh my god, we're about 100 minutes in and Rorschach isn't even in jail yet." Fortunately, the prison stuff is something that got cut back on. If nothing else the sex scene needed to be cut, I don't think giggling was the intended response to that.

Anyway, it just barely kept my interest throughout, and there were some crazy awesome visuals. But even when taken from graphic novels, movies are a different medium than books and tough decisions need to be made.

[JWBear]

I loved it! It was mostly faithful to he book, but there was a lot that was left out - mostly minor stuff that wasn't needed for the plot. The only major change was the one I mentioned upthread.

I think it did an excellent job in translating the theme and feel of the book to the screen.

The casting was perfect; with one disappointing exception. The actor who played Veidt was too young, to thin, and too boyish looking.

A lot more glowing blue penes than we saw in the book, BTW.

[Moonliner]

Originally Posted by JWBear

A lot more glowing blue penes than we saw in the book, BTW.

Well I can't say that's getting me fired up to see this movie. How about blue (or other color) female bits?

[JWBear]

There is some female flesh - but it's not blue.

[second class citizen]

Who's Watching the Watchmen? We did.

Having read the novel and realizing well beforehand that there was no way a director could possibly capture the entire essense of the book (because there is far too much material to convey within 4 hours let alone the mere 2 hours 43 minutes of the film), I have to say that I was impressed. The story was going to be comprimised from the start, yet even knowing that beforehand, I felt that the movie did more than to merely retell a comic book story I had already read.

First off, there was the casting. With the exception of the casting of the character Adrian Veidt, I felt all other cast members were right on! Most of the actors lent to their comic book characters an even deeper, more human (flawed or not), soulful life.

Then there were the action sequences. How they play out on film is MUCH more powerful and impressive than reading them in a flat 2-dimensional medium.

The voices were pretty much right on, too, for how I heard the characters in my head when I read the novel. Rorshach's in particular was way better than I could have imagined.

There was the music. The director's choice of Philip Glass' piece during Dr. Manhattan's "origins" monologue was absolute perfection! And there was the way in which that particular sequence was shot as well...in flashback snippets... which supported the character's perspective on life.

On the whole, I thoroughly enjoyed it. It seemed that the film took me to a place where I could experience the story in a deeper, more tactile way, through cinematography, sound, spoken dialogue and music. It made the graphic novel much more human and real to me.

I would only wish two things: 1) That there had been a way to have told ALL the material in this format, and 2) That the director's "exit music" had not been so Godawful.

For $13, it's the most entertaining thing I've seen thus far this year!