Superhero Filmmakers: Where's Our Watchmen?

> but if the graphicness was for reality's sake, why the special effects (which include the way people flew)?

Because Snyder is a dipshit who has never heard the expression 'less is more.'

fwiw I also know people who have read it that really like it. The only one i know who has had a negative reaction is my friend who is obsessed with the graphic novel

I thought it was cool-looking in general.

Zach Snyder = Merchant Ivory of graphic novel adapters.

i'm pretty sure that nite owl and silver spectre kick ass in an alley early on in the book

They do, and it's in exactly the same place in the book as it is in the movie, right down to the inter-cutting with Jon's interview scene.

The main difference is that a fairly-brutal-but-brief scene consisting of a few panels in the comic gets drawn out and embellished by Snyder into a bone-crunch orgy.

That said, while I find the excessive slow-mo annoying at least Snyder's action scenes and camera movements are relatively coherent. (More than can be said for large parts of the Dark Knight!)

Might not have hated this if it were less than seven hours long.

this movie shits all over the dark knight on initial viewing. it's got more wonder about it, and doesn't take itself half as seriously. i'll echo what i read above about gutlaughing several times.

the flashbacks were mostly better than the 1985 stuff, but snyder is very weak on narrative. i never quite grasped how the watchmen met, or why they were disbanded, and in some cases what they brought to the table.

last hour or so was just really dire, and lots of the movie -- the mars stuff in partic -- just looked awful.

this movie shits all over the dark knight on initial viewing.

gotta be kidding. im not a massive TDK guy but this is absurd.

watchmen had its forehead slapping 'good grief penfold' moments, but they were neither as numerous nor as maddening as TDK

This film needed Pale Horse.

best part was the alternative-history opening credits. I saw the volley of fire coming after the girl with the flower and it was still fun.

> This film needed Pale Horse.

useless unless Krystallnacht is also included.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3186/3308390327_52e52d2819.jpg

for shits n' gigs:

http://i78.photobucket.com/albums/j91/terminallunch/moorejpg-1.jpg

fwiw I'm pretty sure Roger Ebert never read the book and he loved it so much he basically reviewed it again after the second viewing.

i think the shocker here is that mr. "dark city 4eva" somehow avoided reading watchmen anytime over the last twenty years.

dude gave Spawn 3 1/2 stars not really a shocker he loved this

gotta be kidding. im not a massive TDK guy but this is absurd.

It's not. I liked this much more than TDK (which I found to be clumsy, hamfisted, and WAY too long)

I'll give you way too long and maaaaaaybe hamfisted, but clumsy how?

They do, and it's in exactly the same place in the book as it is in the movie, right down to the inter-cutting with Jon's interview scene.

The book has a nice "...whatever it is you super-people do" caption over Laurie punching a knot-top in the crotch.

I'll give you way too long and maaaaaaybe hamfisted, but clumsy how?

In general most everything after the hospital scene but specifically the the subplot with the reporter (Reece?) who wants to reveal Batman's identity.

god i just remember that snyder added janey yanking her hair off, guess the scene wasn't dramatic enough for zack

I don't really think that was all "clumsy", just part of that last third that would have been better left for another film. I think maybe we're getting towards the same thing, I'm just a much bigger fan of the first 2/3rds of the film.

"this movie shits all over the dark knight on initial viewing. it's got more wonder about it, and doesn't take itself half as seriously. i'll echo what i read above about gutlaughing several times."

See, I don't get this about Watchmen "not taking itself too seriously" or whatever. The movie is funny, but that's often during "heavy" scenes that just fail miserably.

opinions4u on this thread are really hard to read

im shocked

yeah this movie takes itself pretty seriously

i thought it was an alright movie that missed a lot of what was cool about the book but i dont get why folks were fronting like they're doing so much important shit that they couldnt see a water cooler chat film like this one bcuz anthony lane wrote a crappy review of it

"omg 2 hours & 50 minutes!! -- but i could just be flippantly dismissing it on principle for that long on ilx isntead!"

> dont get why folks were fronting like they're doing so much important shit that they couldnt see a water cooler chat film

Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday. Yep, that's five.

god i just remember that snyder added janey yanking her hair off, guess the scene wasn't dramatic enough for zack

That didn't bother me too much... It was a shorthand way of introducing her before getting to Osterman's history and his history with her. Additionally, it had to be dramatic enough to get Dr. Manhattan upset enough to go directly to Mars (in the book he goes back to his apt just as a "Radioactive: Quarantine Area" is being put on his door, then he walks around the remains of Gila Flats, then he goes to Mars)

useless unless Krystallnacht is also included.

No one going to rep for Enola Gay & The Little Boys?

a lot of problems stem from snyder's lack of narrative gifts. wasn't clear why the watchmen had been disbanded. had nixon gone soft or what? were not able to give a give a fuck about the night owl/latex girl 'getting back in the game' subplot, with the beating up the hoodlums and the saving people from the fire. there must have been more important stuff to keep than that.

but the main howlers, the total indescribable idiocy of ozymandias's plot, and whatever the fuck dr manhattan was building on mars -- and his whole 'does humanity even deserve to live?' thing was the lamest shit of all -- im guessing were in the original.

Trust me, dude; Ozymandias' plot is SO MUCH MORE INDESCRIBABLY IDIOTIC in the book.

Also the thing Jon builds on Mars is never really explained in the book either. it's just.... a.... thing. That looks a bit like massive clockwork.

amirite in thinking the comedian -- the best perf in the film -- was in both the minutemen and the watchmen? all of that could have been simplified. in the context of a movie, we don't need that much backstory about latex girl's parents. the big reveal there was totally meh. not helped by me not getting what dr manhattan got from it. something like: well, that's pretty fucked up but it's given me a reason to save humanity(?)

not snyder's fault, but nixon still being in charge and all that malarkey was very 'period'. why include that cringe-y 'zomg ronald reagan is president?' line at the end? i don't know how they could have updated it but that line did not need to be there.

Haha, in the book it's Robert Redford, not Reagan!

The thing about the book is that there's a huge amount of supplementary material, diary and journal extracts, excerpts from books and magazine articles, photo albums etc etc etc, tacked on at the end of each chapter after the traditional panels & pictures. You can't add that to a cinematic release. You can add it to a DVD, though...

Yeah, I don't understand the change from Robert Redford. Considering that Reagan was already governor of California in 1967, and a potential presidential candidate in 68, the joke in the film is just stupid.

xpost. I don't think Dr Manhattan was asking "Does humanity deserve to live?" which is the kind of corny moral judgement you used to get in 60s Star Trek. It was more a case of "Does it matter if humanity lives or not?" The central question of Watchmen is "how do you save the world?" For Nite Owl and Laurie it's naively old-fashioned heroics. For Rorshach it's hardline manichean morality - save the good, punish the bad. For Ozymandias, who sees himself as one of history's Great Men, it takes something huge and sudden and drastic (in the book he compares the plot to Alexander cutting the Gordian knot). The Comedian basically says "Don't bother. It's all a cesspit." Dr Manhattan basically says "Don't bother. In the great scheme of the universe it's irrelevant."

Agreed.

Dr manhattans' conversion is pretty lame, but unavoidable if you were making the film. veidt's plot is pretty lame, but probably a big improvement on the book as far as filming it goes.

i enjoyed this a lot, am looking forward to a dvd release with all the possible extras.

Dr Manhattan basically says "Don't bother. In the great scheme of the universe it's irrelevant."

appreciating dorian's clarity on the superheroes' different motivations. slightly begged the question for me of how they ended up working together, what use they were. to the US government, dr manhattan excepted. what use was nite owl?

i dimly recalled one of the worst bloggers of all time citing his line about there being no difference between a dead and a live human body. making a point about humanism and how it is bad. this is the sort of thing that struck me as sophomoric.

K Punk?

Nite Owl was good at making coffee.

In the book there is no such thing as the Watchmen right? It's just the title of the comic.

I don't think they did work together - Veidt's plan for an updated Minutemen never comes off and they all go their separate ways, though crossing paths on various occasions, eg Vietnam, the riots. The point is that the old idealism that produced the Minutemen is dead and there's no chance of bringing together such disparate personalities in a common cause again.

Sophomoric blogger doesn't make the dialogue sophomoric. From Dr Manhattan, it's an entirely logical scientific observation. From a human being, I agree, it's just stupid nihilistic posturing.

with revolutionary road, which like watchmen i've been meaning to read for a logn time, i avoided the film coz i knew it'd spoil the book. if i saw the film after reading it (unlikely), it wouldn't damage the experience.

with this i reckon i might still like the book. the movie was pretty good for the first hour or so, and the first few minutes were awesome. the denouement and all the bs on mars turned me against the whole.

I just saw this tonight and my only complaints, or really the only flaws that actually managed to distract me, were that some of the music seemed really out of place/a bad fit and that the Mars bits were were pretty meh. I went into this thing kinda forgetting that comic book movies don't automatically suck so much these days, which worked to my advantage I think.

some of the music seemed really out of place/a bad fit

Nena right? they should've used that when Dr M and SS were drifting over Mars in the glass

All the '60s stuff or whatever, Hendrix and Dylan and I forget what else, I felt like someone was piping in a Wes Anderson soundtrack into the theater.

i quite liked the song choices -- better than the godawful score, at least -- and in keeping (from what i can make out) with the source material, which is informed by 60s counter-culture. (i read 'v for vendetta' and got that feeling about moore anyway.)

should've had some kids on the street poppin to Newcleus at one point

In the book there is no such thing as the Watchmen right? It's just the title of the comic.

in the comic, the phrase "who's watching the Watchmen?" shows up as graffiti in several frames...