Watchmen. It’s no Daredevil. That said, it’s also not the Dark Knight.
Zack Snyder, the same director who gave us Frank Miller’s 300 was given the task of tackling the ‘un-filmable’ Watchmen. There are many reasons this graphic novel was pegged as un-filmable: cost, length, and we should include interest. At least interest outside Android’s Dungeon.
But you know, it is interesting picture. It’s exciting. It has action and capes and explosions. Some of the themes and grit of the original survive the translation. The clocks, the countdowns, the smiling faces are all there, and so is Dr. Manhattan’s dong. The visuals painstakingly mimic the artwork of Dave Gibbons, which pop right off the graphic novel page and onto the screen.
What doesn’t make sense is after so much attention to detail and trying to keep it as close as possible to the graphic novels - they changed things. What’s upsetting is that the changes weren’t specifically for the better. It’s that they were changed for no good reason.
It had been long known that the ending was not the same as the graphic novel. And I was prepared for it. What I didn’t understand was why they changed it. It didn’t improve the story. Frankly, it was those changes that ruined it.
Examples of the changes are that Silk Spectre II doesn’t smoke. Yeah, it’s very nit picky. It’s probably okay that Nite Owl bears witness to his partner at the end. Archie lost his Screechers for gattling guns – so he transplanted a non-lethal weapon for a gun. Dr. Manhattan hasn’t solved the energy crisis – yet - which causes Lee Iaccoca to get shot. But it’s not in Adrian’s lobby, it’s in a meeting in his penthouse suite. It’s a bit silly, but also not nearly as understandable. Why would a Fed Ex type guy get that far up, during a very important meeting? It’s slightly more plausible if it’s on the first floor. Also more showy, which was the point, right? But it was the reworking of the ending that was completely different from the source material. It wasn’t better, and frankly didn’t make sense if you paused to think about it for more than eight seconds.
The original book ending made sense. It came from Ronald Reagan’s Cold War.
There were some criticisms of the film on a cinematic level.
The music was jarringly and excruciatingly terrible. It was as if a high school student using iTunes was put in charge of soundtrack and scoring. For example, "Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen has officially nuked the fridge.
There’s also valid grumbling about the length. Watchmen is 11 minutes longer than the Dark Knight. Now, I didn’t think Dark Knight was long, but Watchmen didn’t need to be that long. I thought that Dark Knight was also shockingly violent. Watchmen employs the 300-style camera of over cranking to under cranking with a nice camera spin on insane latex boots to baddies heads. Normally I’d say that the stylistic violence used here works for comic book movies – but after the Dark Knight, it rang hallow and excessive. But it’s okay for the meat clever to slam into the child molester’s head a fifth time – you know he’s a child killer after all. It’s a form of exploitation pornography. What's funny is that the Watchmen movie came out of twenty years of development hell, was green lit and fast tracked to get out into the theatres because of the success of the Dark Knight. The great irony is that because of Dark Knight the Watchmen live, but also fail.
Bottom line. It’s already reporting a great opening weekend, but will have drop out the next couple weeks. It will accomplish its task - to sell thousands of copies of the original graphic novel.
Zack Snyder, the same director who gave us Frank Miller’s 300 was given the task of tackling the ‘un-filmable’ Watchmen. There are many reasons this graphic novel was pegged as un-filmable: cost, length, and we should include interest. At least interest outside Android’s Dungeon.
But you know, it is interesting picture. It’s exciting. It has action and capes and explosions. Some of the themes and grit of the original survive the translation. The clocks, the countdowns, the smiling faces are all there, and so is Dr. Manhattan’s dong. The visuals painstakingly mimic the artwork of Dave Gibbons, which pop right off the graphic novel page and onto the screen.
What doesn’t make sense is after so much attention to detail and trying to keep it as close as possible to the graphic novels - they changed things. What’s upsetting is that the changes weren’t specifically for the better. It’s that they were changed for no good reason.
It had been long known that the ending was not the same as the graphic novel. And I was prepared for it. What I didn’t understand was why they changed it. It didn’t improve the story. Frankly, it was those changes that ruined it.
Examples of the changes are that Silk Spectre II doesn’t smoke. Yeah, it’s very nit picky. It’s probably okay that Nite Owl bears witness to his partner at the end. Archie lost his Screechers for gattling guns – so he transplanted a non-lethal weapon for a gun. Dr. Manhattan hasn’t solved the energy crisis – yet - which causes Lee Iaccoca to get shot. But it’s not in Adrian’s lobby, it’s in a meeting in his penthouse suite. It’s a bit silly, but also not nearly as understandable. Why would a Fed Ex type guy get that far up, during a very important meeting? It’s slightly more plausible if it’s on the first floor. Also more showy, which was the point, right? But it was the reworking of the ending that was completely different from the source material. It wasn’t better, and frankly didn’t make sense if you paused to think about it for more than eight seconds.
The original book ending made sense. It came from Ronald Reagan’s Cold War.“We often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. I occasionally think how quickly our differences, worldwide, would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.”Of course, all that doesn’t make a difference if you haven’t read the original.
There were some criticisms of the film on a cinematic level.
The music was jarringly and excruciatingly terrible. It was as if a high school student using iTunes was put in charge of soundtrack and scoring. For example, "Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen has officially nuked the fridge.
There’s also valid grumbling about the length. Watchmen is 11 minutes longer than the Dark Knight. Now, I didn’t think Dark Knight was long, but Watchmen didn’t need to be that long. I thought that Dark Knight was also shockingly violent. Watchmen employs the 300-style camera of over cranking to under cranking with a nice camera spin on insane latex boots to baddies heads. Normally I’d say that the stylistic violence used here works for comic book movies – but after the Dark Knight, it rang hallow and excessive. But it’s okay for the meat clever to slam into the child molester’s head a fifth time – you know he’s a child killer after all. It’s a form of exploitation pornography. What's funny is that the Watchmen movie came out of twenty years of development hell, was green lit and fast tracked to get out into the theatres because of the success of the Dark Knight. The great irony is that because of Dark Knight the Watchmen live, but also fail.
Bottom line. It’s already reporting a great opening weekend, but will have drop out the next couple weeks. It will accomplish its task - to sell thousands of copies of the original graphic novel.
2 comments:
Enraged at Being Cut Out of the Movie, Giant Squid Devours Would-Be Watchmen Ticket Buyers
By Richard
Mondays are best spent piecing together the ruin that followed in the weekend's wake. Recovering the satellites, analyzing the soil samples. And looking at the box office receipts! This week: Disappointment haunted all their dreams.
1) Watchmen — $55.7 million
It was supposed to be the biggest movie ever—or at least beat director Zack Snyder's $70 million 300 bow—because it's dark and cool and edgy and is about nihilistic politics and tits and stuff. Instead it's just one of the biggest R-rated, March weekend openings ever.
Surely Watchmen's lower-than-hoped first dance is a big disappointment for Warner Brothers, which spent a hell of a lot of money and squawking time on the grim, turgid superhero alternate history. Word of mouth seemed to deal it a hearty blow, as it slipped from $25 million on Friday, to $19 on Saturday, to a sad little $11 on Sunday. Doesn't bode well for the coming weekends.
All I see is a bunch of people taking a great story, filling it with gore, obvious musical choices, and flat performances from some otherwise amazingly talented actors... and all to make a 'powerful statement' about a moment in history that has long since past.
Seriously, if this movie or the people associated with it had any balls they wouldn't be on their knees in front of the original text and would be using its cynical, humanist take on superheroes and what makes them tick in order to be relevant, to make some kind of a statement, as opposed to repeating a tried and tested formula. And they would be doing it smartly and with sophistication, as opposed to presenting a watered-down, gore-spiked version of the original story that's basically only good for people who are too lazy to read the graphic novel in the first place... but who should, so they can walk away with a better impression of the characters, who were basically the only reason you could walk away from the GN glad that the world hadn't been destroyed. In the film, all you're really left with is the sense of having seen 'superheroes' having sex and being nasty. Is this what he means by uncompromising film??? It's like he's trying to steal credit from the original source as if he thought it all up in the first place, instead of just being one of many who have spent millions upon millions to make a fantastic piece of art into a grisly, grimy, ugly mess of a movie.
Presenting their back stories isn't enough-- you need to get the actors to present them with all their little ticks, their ups and downs... everything about this film was superficial, with zero depth to any of the performances... even Rorschach wasn't so amazing, and I attribute the recent lauding of his performance to the fact that he was good in Little Children and also that he's not physically attractive. He was definitely no Heath Ledger.
This film is a missed opportunity if there ever was one... I can only imagine what a real auteur would have done with that story, with those characters... how someone who could actually appreciate the subtleties of the story, all of those things that made it work so well... how they would have made this film. Maybe instead of surrendering their intelligence and their judgment to a process of reconstructing the text, they would have found some deeper meaning inside of it and come up with a great work of art.
Post a Comment