Superhero Filmmakers: Where's Our Watchmen?

It's true that moral badness often seems to be intrinsic, neverthless there must something at the core of these concepts, otherwise why do we seem to know what judgements are moral ones, and why do moral systems always seem to convern themselves judgements about the same kinds of things? When examined properly, I'd argue that the domain of morality is (human) life and living - generally, how to live for the good (ie flourishing) of the tribe.

xp i did revive another thread for this but everyone wanted to play here!

or at least abstracted and moved to the morality/ethics thread

Morality - Ethics for those looking for it

but which of these desires violates Ape Law and which uphold it?

didn't wanna move to other thread, cuz then i'd feel compelled to read and deal. both of which i'm averse to. but i'll quit after this:

lemme just say that while i agree in general w what yr saying, ledge, i think the semblance of intrinsic-ness (intrisicity?) is a big part of what makes moral systems what they are. if a moral system were truly and transparently pragmatic in ALL respects, it wouldn't really be a moral system anymore. it would simply be a flexible, situation dependent, bean-counting approach to relative costs and benefits (costs & benefits being considered in as many senses as possible, objective & subjective, long & short term, individual & group, etc). i'd argue that moral systems are distinguished in part by their insistence on the existence and value of idealized & codified absolutes that do not require this kind of objective, outcome-based validation.

watchman dat ho

http://www.cracked.com/article_17072_7-stages-nerdgasm-fanboy-awaits-watchmen-movie.html

^^^left out the part where the movie sucks

I just assumed that everyone who reads this thread has read the book. If you read the reviews in the links - those are chock full of spoilers. Who in this thread hasn't read the book?

Morbius

Okay, I've got to talk about this notion of "An extremely faithful adapatation" nonsense. Obviously I haven't seen the movie, only some stills and promotional clips, but I think it's enough to say that this is an extremely wrongheaded belief. The usual evidence given in support of this notion is that Snyder used the comic as a storyboard and has been meticulous in his imitative attention to detail, putting exactly what's on the panel on the screen. This is much too reductive an approach to merit the 'faithfully reproduced look' claim.

The formal innovations of Watchmen go way beyond storytelling techniques and undermining genre conventions in the writing. The art is also, in its overall approach to the material, defying expectations for a superhero comic. A lot has been made, over the years, of the nine panel grid approach that is used for almost every page. This rigid structure (which is only broken at times of extremely heightened emotion) has the effect of making the spectacular and exotic of a piece with the drab and mundane, resulting not in a comic where the mundane is presented as a thrillride, but where rooftop rescues and prison breaks appear familiar and squalid (there are exceptions, of course, mostly when Dr. Manhattan is pictured.) Besides dramatic panel layouts, other typical comics techniques that Moore and Gibbons forgo are exaggerated, hyperdynamic poses in deep foreshortening, sound effects, 'bursts' to signify blows connecting, figures with bodybuilder muscles, and on and on. The clear intention of this is to draw the reader in, to immerse him or her in the world of Watchmen. It's not about being 'grim and gritty' it's about being believable and intimate. Moore and Gibbons undercut the idea of superheroism with visual strategies, not just literary ones. No matter how many Gunga Diners and Pyramid Sugarcubes and moving Rorschach masks Snyder piles on the screen, the fact that he can't resist digital effects and slow mo shows that he's completely missed the point of why the book looks the way it does. If he were serious about emulating the comic's approach with movie technique, Rorschach's outfit should look absurd, not cool. Dr. Manhattan should look like a dude with blue skin, not a glowing angelic presence. Actions sequences should resemble Michael Mann's or David Simon's, not The Warchowski Brothers' or Leung Kar Lau's. The guy doesn't get that Watchmen is all about deglamorizing the genre, not valorizing it. And that, essentially, is why the movie will utterly miss the point the book made.

tl, dr, I know...

It's probably UK-only but http://www.watchmenpromo.com has this deal where they'll send you a 'free' smiley face USB key (if you pay £2.49 for p&p).

Oilyrags, I see what you're saying -- and I do hope some of that will come through in the movie -- but I kinda think that, unless you got a serious A-list director with real chops, I think what you'd end up with is something whose aesthetic more resembles this.

Anyway, no matter what happens, it can ALWAYS be worse. To wit:

The script that the studio gave Snyder, when he first agreed to do the movie, ended with Nite Owl killing Ozymandias by crashing the Owl-ship into him via remote control. Nite Owl even says a cool catch phrase immediately afterwards.

Unfortunately, in this day and age I think Snyder is considered an A-list director with real chops. I have my problems with the latest crop of Bat-movies, but Nolan knows enough to shoot them like modern policiers, which is what I think is required here.

And you're right that it can always be worse, but even that ending is better than the idiotic one Sam Hamm came up with.

That's not entirely fair about Batman, on second thought. The character has been through enough different versions that any one of them is a legit interpretation for a movie. Nolan happens to like best the same one that I do.

Watchmen is a different animal. It's a novel where none of the characters have ever been reused in other stories. If your intention is to remain true to the text, there's really only one way to go about it.

Zack Snyder and all:

"Every day I think, 'I can't believe I get to make this come alive,' " said Snyder, who was a prisoner of the page long before that chilly afternoon outside Vancouver in an old paper mill that had been turned into a penitentiary for the director's $100-million film. "Watchmen" finally reaches theaters Friday and will arrive as the most controversial superhero film ever made. Snyder, an affable, 43-year-old father of six, has been the picture of patience in the face of private setbacks and public challenges to the film, but while filming that bloody riot last year he let a wicked grin cross his face.

"We're killing the comic-book movie, we're ending it," Snyder said. "This movie is the last comic-book movie, for good or bad."

...

Supporters of Snyder, though, write that off as talk by people who don't understand that "Watchmen" is a religious scroll of sorts. Deborah Snyder, the director's wife and a producer of "Watchmen," said this film has been "a million decisions made, and every one of them was to get the story on the screen with integrity." Strolling down the outdoor New York street set that was created for the movie, she said her team was not going to go down in history as the people who found the Holy Grail and then dropped it.

"We feel," she said, "a great responsibility."

...

Snyder said it's advantageous that "Watchmen" didn't get made sooner. Only now, with the superhero cinema truly alive, is the genre ripe for snuffing.

"Twenty years ago my parents wouldn't know who the X-Men were, and now everybody knows that stuff," Snyder said. "It means that deconstruction of the superhero is something you can do. All those movies have led to a point where we can finally have 'Watchmen' with a Superman character who doesn't want to save the world and a Batman who has trouble in bed. Essentially, I want to kill the superhero movie because now we can."

Superman Returns is going to be legendary,
― Squirrel_Police (Squirrel_Police), Monday, 26 June 2006 02:27 (2 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Jesus, it's like Moore's ego stuffed into some dipshit Ron Paul supporter's tiny literalist brain.

> the fiery cellblock he saw before him looked nearly identical to the one in the hand-drawn pages of " Watchmen,"

THIS COULD NOT BE MORE IRRELEVANT TO THE QUALITY OF THE FLICK.

http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/2009-02-24_cc_040.gif

I lol'd @ "this game makes me feel bad"

The clear intention of this is to draw the reader in, to immerse him or her in the world of Watchmen.

um... setting aside the lolcollege aspect of this statement, aren't you kind of arguing exactly the opposite. the clear intention is to push the reader out, to forgeround and call into question conventions of the genre by frustrating them, etc etc n'est-ce pas?

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2009/03/09/090309crci_cinema_lane

dang

I've been wondering how they were gonna calibrate the critical reaction this and I'm a little shellshocked that they went for "lol nerds"

“Watchmen,” like “V for Vendetta,” harbors ambitions of political satire, and, to be fair, it should meet the needs of any leering nineteen-year-old who believes that America is ruled by the military-industrial complex, and whose deepest fear—deeper even than that of meeting a woman who requests intelligent conversation—is that the Warren Commission may have been right all along.

lol ouch

I have nothing to say yet about the quality of the movie but as Lane seems to indicate that he's at least glanced at the book I have to take issue with this:

Amid these pompous grabs at horror, neither author nor director has much grasp of what genuine, unhyped suffering might be like, or what pity should attend it; they are too busy fussing over the fate of the human race—a sure sign of metaphysical vulgarity—to be bothered with lesser plights.

So I gather he skimmed over all the scenes in the book on the street corner with the news vendor and the kid, the home life of the psychiatrist, the quarreling lesbian couple etc. None of which is critical to the plot but specifically put in by Moore to hammer in the importance of the small-scale day-to-day existence of these characters in the face of all that looming apocalyptic stuff.

god i forgot about the psychiatrist scenes, not looking forward to them at all. "oh rorschach you have opened my eyes to the worthless nihilism of existence, how can i ever repay you, you have ruined my life".

now this is how you properly bait geeks:

http://www.moviehole.net/200917960-ashley-didnt-love-watchmen

> um... setting aside the lolcollege aspect of this statement, aren't you kind of arguing exactly the opposite. the clear intention is to push the reader out, to forgeround and call into question conventions of the genre by frustrating them, etc etc n'est-ce pas?

Sorry, I wrote that really fast. It's a wierd sort of pushme pullyou game that they Moore and Gibbons play with style. Yes, they want us to see the strings on the puppets, but they also want us to consider the puppets (and the whole show) on the terms we'd use to evaluate people in our real life. Batman and Rorschach are both cases of arrested development revenge fantasies taking over someone's life, but because the spectacle of Batman comics invite emotional distance from that traumatized personality and Watchman shows it close up (to choose the easiest example from the book, but hardly the only one) Batman comes over as a hero and Rorschach, well, doesn't. lolcollege all you want, though, latebloomer's quote four up is pretty fair.

I wrote that really fast, too, and about six minutes after waking up.

Hi! My name's Austin and I read "Society of the Spectacle" once in an undergraduate art history class.

> 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.

Proof that Denby hasn't read the book. And also that he doesn't understand Gibbons is as responsible for the book as Moore, but that's a less relevant beef at this time.

Proof that Denby hasn't read the book.

Lane, not Denby!

hey are too busy fussing over the fate of the human race—a sure sign of metaphysical vulgarity—to be bothered with lesser plights

Classic.

> Lane, not Denby!

WHAT-EVER!

zing:

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. The result is perfectly calibrated for its target group: nobody over twenty-five could take any joy from the savagery that is fleshed out onscreen, just as nobody under eighteen should be allowed to witness it. You want to see Rorschach swing a meat cleaver repeatedly into the skull of a pedophile, and two dogs wrestle over the leg bone of his young victim? Go ahead. You want to see the attempted rape of a superwoman, her bright latex costume cast aside and her head banged against the baize of a pool table? The assault is there in Moore’s book, one panel of which homes in on the blood that leaps from her punched mouth, but the pool table is Snyder’s own embroidery. You want to hear Moore’s attempt at urban jeremiad? “This awful city, it screams like an abattoir full of retarded children.”

OK, he read it. But he can't make up his mind about it from one sentence to the next.

> Moore, is so insanely aroused by the look of vengeance, and by the stylized application of physical power

> nobody over twenty-five could take any joy from the savagery that is fleshed out onscreen, just as nobody under eighteen should be allowed to witness it.

which is it?

I don't understand your confusion. His point is that only teenaged boys would get a kick out of the violence.

Whether his fellow-Watchmen have true superpowers, as opposed to a pathological bent for fisticuffs,I never quite worked out = "I sent an intern to watch this for me."

The first sentence indicates he thinks Moore is hot for the carnage, Alfred.

Lane is clearly not a comic book fan; the first paragraph telegraphs that like an SOS. This is what a cursory read of the book and sitting through the film feels like for a non-comic book fan. It ain't the target audience.

Do you think a fan of comic books would have given this a better review?

Well, I'm a fan of comic books and this one in particular. Although I haven't seen the movie, I expect it to suck and I think I've made it clear why.

ncoherent, overblown, and grimy with misogyny, “Watchmen” marks the final demolition of the comic strip, and it leaves you wondering: where did the comedy go?

uh

I am all for "it tried to do [x] but that didn't work" criticism but srsly this is pretty grim source material so criticizing it for not being funny seems to be basic point-missing.

I think a fan of comic books would've given this a _different_ review. Most of what Lane centers on in his criticism are issues that wouldn't stop any fan of the comic from buying a ticket. We already know about the child rapist and the dog, we know about the Miller-esque Rorschach dialogue and the dystopian powertrip grumblings. They're a given but a fan of the book (or of good comics in general) forgives the trappings for the meat underneath. Lane doesn't.

I know it's a controversial position, but I have no opinion on the quality of this film until after I've seen it.

I find it hard to believe you don't have some first impressions, based on your current handle.

There's a difference to having an opinion on the movie and having an opinion on the reviews of it. I may end up hating this but that doesn't change the fact that I think most of the reviews linked here have been garbage.

My first impressions are that it looks like a slavish recreation of a comic book in film form; i.e. Sin City redux. I thought Sin City was okay for what it was, but not a great film. I think this is gonna make a lot of money and that, chances are, I likely won't be enthralled.
But I'm attempting to withhold judgment until after I see the thing.

"ncoherent, overblown, and grimy with misogyny, “Watchmen” marks the final demolition of the comic strip, and it leaves you wondering: where did the comedy go?"

hahaha

"and where's snoopy? i like snoopy."