Superhero Filmmakers: Where's Our Watchmen?

I watched the opening credits via the link above. Since that seems to be universally regarded as the best part of the film, that's me done.

No wonder Snyder seems to be doing so much press, trying to save the ship from going down.

I think he's doing so much press because the movie just came out

I've probably read the book 10 times. The book and Dark Knight Returns were responsible for getting me into comics for several years. I went into this movie with a chip on my shoulder, and ended up being pleasantly surprised by it.

* Pacing of the movie was odd, jerking from action to slow-paced flashbacks. Neanderthals a few seats down talked and took phone calls during slow-paced flashbacks and any scene involving geopolitics

* I don't understand why everyone is saying Laurie actress did such a horrible job. I did not notice her bad acting. I did feel they could have gotten a more charismatic and convincing actor to portray Veidt. It to judge since I knew the story really well, but it seemed hard to believe that he could have fooled anyone into thinking he was good in any way.

* I think I liked the movie ending better than the book ending. I am a huge fan of Alan Moore, but the squid was always kind of silly. I think squid worked better in the book than it would have in the movie, because the book felt a bit more surreal and dreamlike than the movie ended up being.

* Really did not like the music in the movie very much. I could have lived without the awkward use of 99 Luftballons and the Cohen song in the love scene was hella cringe-worthy (no doubt intended, but still...) The classic rock stuff was okay, but just blared too much and was too obvious for me.

Highlights: Prison break, love scene in Owl's ship

Looking forward to the extended cut, but I hope there's an option on the Blu-ray to watch the theatrical version.

yeah i hated the music so bad, except when they used the pruitt-igoe music during the manhattan flashbacks - whole movie should've been on some philip glass ish

Not read the reactions on here, but just wrote this for another forum and thought I'd stick it here too;

1. The Watchmen thing is difficult. Should you have to have read the graphic novel to "get it"?

2. I have (a couple of times, initially many years ago, but again over the last few months), and I thought the film was brilliant, a solid 8/10, can't wait to rewatch it on DVD.

3. Oddly, possibly, I found it INSANELY funny at various points; the love scene in particular had me literally howling with laughter in the cinema, it was played, edited, and soundtracked so fantastically. (No one else seemed to laugh like I did, though, which makes me wonder how many people there knew the source material well.)

4. The source material for both Sin City and The Dark Knight is directly influenced by the Watchmen graphic novel; Watchmen as a film may have come later, but it is the earlier films that take so much from it, and not vice versa. People have been trying to make this film for 22 years.

5. But because Watchmen is almost shot-for-frame modeled on the comic (to the extent that the rewritten ending was, prior to being storyboarded, illustrated by the guy who drew the original comic, so they could get the feel right), anyone who's not read the comic wont get that, so feeling as if it's derivative is understandable.

6. I don't think you'd get masses from this without having read the graphic novel, or knowing many comics (and many comicbook films) very well. Partly because the plot and setting is so complex, and also because Watchmen is, as well as being a comic, a comment on and satire of comics; the characters are all archetypes, the history drawn in such detail - to convey the full richness of it you'd have to a; double the length of this film, and b; make sub-films to establish the universe - like in the graphic novel there is a sub-story about a kid reading pirate comics, which is a comment that, in a world wear "costumed avengers" are real, people need comics about other sets of characters, and so pirate comics become popular.

7. The rewritten ending (I wont say what the graphic novel did or what this does) is a serious improvement. It wouldn't have worked in a film; I don't think it works that well in the comic, to be honest, the new ending actually works better on both levels.

8. Casting was GREAT. Fuck me if that dude wasn't exactly Dan Dreiberg. Awesome.

9. Billy Crudup's blue wang.

10. I'm glad they went full-on and made it an 18, kept the rape story, the brutality, the gore, stayed faithful to the spirit of the comic, didn't open up the possibility of a sequel. I think they'll have pleased all but the most fascistic Alan Moore fans.

Yeah, really enjoyed it.

have a feeling this will not do well at the box office, and insanely well in DVDs

think i'll see it tomorrow?

agreed on most points in xpost above...still, something kinda gnaws at me...the scene where Lori tries on the owl goggles drew howls of laughter and thunderous applause in the theater...am I not "getting" something here?

I'll still buy the pirate story/under the hood dvd when it's out in a few weeks.

I think it will do well in box office. Every high schooler guy is going to see this (except maybe in the bible belt). My friend who hadn't read the book saw it and said it was badass. I would have enjoyed the new ending more if I hadn't had to pee so much. I think my friend understood the movie well enough, he didn't think it dragged or anything. He did open his phone during a geopolitical Nixon scene but my friend is an asshole.

The blue wang never wobbled, it should have. also in Vietnam, he should have taken off that fig leaf so that he could have dick slapped some bitches.

But yeah I was one of the folk who liked the film. I'm not planning on watching it again though. I barely ever buy dvds or rent a movie I have already saw.

The blue wang wobbled, definitely. In Veidt's palace place at the end there was a walking bit, and a slight wobble. I was bracing myself shortly afterwards for major wobbleness when Crudup went down the stairs, but they cut at his thighs just in time.

I saw wobblage too

haha, you guys would have noticed that

Also, there seems to be a lot of talk about a GIANT blue wang, but I never noticed his wang when he was a giant. I think there's a lot of shit being talked about this film, especially by paid critics. The Metacritic score is ridiculous.

yes, metacritic was the only site I checked for reviews.
something like 100 100 100 100 100 100 83 80 75 75 70 50 50 50 50 50 50 50 10 10 10 0 0 0 (high variance basically)

yeah i hated the music so bad, except when they used the pruitt-igoe music during the manhattan flashbacks

The music during the Mars bits was chopped and edited to hell, though. Really noticeable, I thought. The Mars CGI was a bit rubbish, too, as was the giant Manhattan during the ending.

I found all the "whoooooosh" and "diiiiinnkk!" and "thhhhuuudd" sounds effects during the fight scenes really offputting, too.

Watchmen is, as well as being a comic, a comment on and satire of comics

exactly - it's a comic about a.) comics b.) the 80s. which is why it's a dumb idea to make a movie about it in the year 2009... it's a relic... when u read it, it feels like a historical artifact. it's kinda how an american psycho movie (or v for vendetta lmbo) felt inappropriate too, if only bcz its time had passed. aside from that, most of the scenes and performances just struck the wrong notes for me. i acknowledge part of that is just one of things that goes hand in hand with movie adaptations, where fans of the source material (not that i'm even a big watchmen fan) will always be frustrated by anything that doesn't mesh exactly with their own ideas about how it should've been rendered, but it struck me towards the end that the movie reflected more the Image Comics grim n gritty legacy of Watchmen than the actual spirit of the book.

i also just wanted it to be funnier and more deadpan - funnier in a Taxi Driver kind of way, a movie it should've taken its cues from. eg. all the 'lol 80s' stuff is sorta undercut by the fact that it all looks like a videogame cut scene. there's some solid laughs (a lot of what feels like unintentional lols), but there's so much lol potential there and the movie commits the greatest sin by STEPPING ON ALL THE PUNCHLINES.

rorschach guy was great when he had the mask off, 'you're trapped in here with me' scene gave me legit chills, but as rorschach he didn't feel monotone enough. when I was leafing thru my copy after the movie, I noticed that Rorschach was the only character whose lettering was completely free of emphasized copy, no bolded or enlarged words.

all the fight scenes look like something from a Blade movie, like nite owl literally snaps a guy's arm off... i will say that figuring out how to portray the non-Manhattan superheroes was going to be extremely difficult no matter what. last time i read it, it really sunk in with me how utterly impossible the entire enterprise was, of normal, unarmed people fighting crime and having success at it, and i guess one way of getting around that is to make it so that laurie and dan shatter concrete with their fists and shit like that. it was still gay as hell tho.

also it was way too fuckin long, there's no reason u couldnt have made a 2 hour movie out of this shit. just trim a few fuckin minutes here and there, do we really need to see nite owl dodging glaciers and shit in antarctica? just land the fuckin bird and get on with it

ya it was pretty chopped up, but i was just glad to not be listening to all along the watchtower or the insanely bad original score

http://img11.imageshack.us/img11/8318/aughsquid.jpg

An initial ramble, to be continued.

See, I thought the use of music made it a period piece; 99 Red Balloons and the dinner scene was like something out of Pretty In Pink or another 80s cheese romance movie, the Watchtower use reminded me of Withnail (a 60s period piece made in the 80s).

I think the film transposes the fact that the comic is a comment and satire of comicbooks into the film being a comment and satire on comicbook films; Ozymandias' nipples, the compound fracture, the Archie owl sex, the arms cut-off; these things all seem, to me, to reference other comicbook films in the same way that the original comic references it's own genre.

I hear this movie is REALLY, REALLY LONG and having to sit in a theatre for it kind of ruins it. Definitely gonna wait on this one.

I didn't go to check the time once during Watchmen. My girlfriend's brother fell asleep. But he'd only just got out of bed and had a stinking hangover.

Heh. I thought Ned's intro was leading up to "And I proceeded to watch Transformers."

There's a vision!

I really enjoyed it. My hadn't read the book, and normally has a low tolerance for long movies, but he said it was really cool, which I found kind of gratifying. Like, SEE!! Other people do TO like it.

I thought the new ending kept all the necessary elements of the book...that's what I had been worried about. that the new ending would somehow change the whole story. but building on elements from the original was a really smart way to go, and I didn't feel cheated...it it's true, there's no way that showing me a giant squid on a movie screen wouldn't have made me do anything other than laugh...even though it made me audibly gasp in horror the first time I read the book.

Dreiberg was great - as if the character himself just came to life right on the screen. Manhattan was hella cool though I did get "dong fatigue" after a while. I think Veidt was the weakest link for me...he didn't seem at all commanding physically, if a little on the weedy side, and his speaking voice was so sibilant at times, it was almost difficult to understand him. A bit too weasely for me, I think. But Bubastis was cool. Poor girl.

doh. My HUSBAND hadn't read the book...

I think the film transposes the fact that the comic is a comment and satire of comicbooks into the film being a comment and satire on comicbook films

Snyder has repeatedly said that this movie would only work now, "with the Superhero cinema doing really well" in a post-Iron Man/Dark Knight/etc era. "We couldn't kill the superhero movie until people understood how superhero movies worked."

I did like the fact that, in the comic, Veidt says "I'm not a Republicac serial villain," and in the movie, he says "I'm not a comic book villain."

Republicac? Jesus.

The movie ending makes a ton more sense than the comic book ending, both in terms of feasibility and in terms of giving even more of a reason for Dr. Manhattan to leave Earth.

There is one teensy problem with Veidt's set up though - given that Jon can transmute elements - surely he can (like he does in the book) simply make more oil/lithium/whatever rather than the 'free energy' handwave that he uses to work out how to replicate Jon's energy signature?

Ha ha, I just read Ned's review and the first thing I thought was "It's like Dune? Awesome! That's one of my favorite movies!"

I like the way that now people have actually, y'know, seen the film this thread has switched from churning negativity and obsessing over the minutiae to (what seems to be) a *general* consensus that this is nowhere near as bad as was predicted.

(also, yeah - nice Dune parallel Ned. There's a film that could never be said to be "faithful" or a success by any normal measures, but I'll watch it any day of the week)

The problem is that Snyder, following Moore, is so insanely aroused by the look of vengeance, and by the stylized application of physical power, that the film ends up twice as fascistic as the forces it wishes to lampoon.

Anthony Lane in the The New Yorker

1) How illiterate and/or dense does one have to be to think that Moore was attempting to "lampoon" fascism rather than, you know, depict it?

2) "...twice as fascistic..."

Ned's Dune comparison is actually pretty apt.

Thanks to all re: Dune comparisons -- it's something that just kinda hit me, as I mentioned, and it makes it pretty easy for me to frame the film and its reception in this light. But more on that in my next post, as I imply.

the Watchtower use reminded me of Withnail (a 60s period piece made in the 80s).

It's a pretty direct connection to the book, as the song lyric is quoted at the end of the chapter showing Night Owl and Rorschach approaching Karnak, but the reference there is specifically to Dylan rather than mentioning Hendrix. I admit I thought of Withnail as well.

The movie ending makes a ton more sense than the comic book ending, both in terms of feasibility and in terms of giving even more of a reason for Dr. Manhattan to leave Earth.

I'd agree on this, of all the changes I think it's notable that the 'big' chance is actually the most successful one -- it allows the filmmakers to be able to afford the radical simplification of the conspiracy necessary to keep the film shorter and more focused in comparison, and while I don't recall if the Comedian's discovery of it in the film is explained as it is in the book, it actually doesn't matter. And as Dan cogently notes, it pushes the necessity of 'removing' Dr. Manhattan to the full, as well as eradicating any wishes that he might return.

The exercise I've been suggesting to folks runs something like this -- say the endings had been reversed, that the original book version had the Dr. Manhattan-as-fall-guy plot and the movie version had the squid. Imagine how well THAT would fly.

More in my next blog tomorrow.

Big CHANGE, not big chance, but anyway.

fwiw, I had never heard of The Watchmen (book or movie) before yesterday afternoon and enjoyed the movie, even though I hated it for about the first 10 minutes

Perrin on the fascist argument etc:

http://dennisperrin.blogspot.com/2009/03/cape-town.html

probably as good as it could've been.
some great (and funny) bits some awful bits - but they all kinda blurred into each other. but a lot of the criticism i see upthread (mainly from linked reviews) is just the usual BS imo.

actually liked it when they dropped all along the watchtower while zooming out from mars smiley. we haven't seen Mars in a film for what 10 years? like seeing an old friend again, who was always a glib but crazy muthafucka

http://img205.imageshack.us/img205/2385/6brookboleyr.jpg

The exercise I've been suggesting to folks runs something like this -- say the endings had been reversed, that the original book version had the Dr. Manhattan-as-fall-guy plot and the movie version had the squid. Imagine how well THAT would fly.

This ought to be the last word on the subject for anyone who isn't a fanboy with OCD. (There's a fair number of those, though, and they'll not be led astray by your infernal logic.)

My second initial ramble is up.

$55.7 million. Will do well on DVD anyway.

Never read or seen Dune, so Ned's totally lost me so far...

My thoughts, a little ordered.

http://rocktimists.blogspot.com/2009/03/billy-crudups-digital-blue-wang.html

among the many little things other people have noticed: Bruce Wayne's parents get rescued in the opening crawl (preventing the birth of Bruce Wayne).

that wasn't supposed to come out that redundant.

chuckled at the Warhol bit

Bruce Wayne's parents get rescued in the opening crawl (preventing the birth of Bruce Wayne)

Uh? (Preventing the birth of Batman, I think you mean.)

Oh wait, your follow-up post explains that. Moving on!