Been a decade or so since I read it. I think I won't reread it, I'll watch the film with a fresh brain. (Which reminds me, I gotta send my brain out for cleaning).
Interesting art design. That said, I really don't know that I'll see this. Trying to do a film of "The Watchmen" would be like trying to do a film of "The Bible". There's just waaaaay too much going on to do any of it justice. I guess they could go with just the A plot and fit it into two hours and it would be OK. But it would be a bit like having a one-handed man play Beethoven's 9th Symphony on a piano. It would be OK, but it would be nothing, compared to an orchestral performance. [edit: One of my regrets in life is that I lived a half hour from San Diego for two years and never went to ComicCon. ]
I'll reserve judgement until I see it. The 300 was a fairly straightforward story, minimal plot beyond "Spartans good! Persians bad!" and adapted very nicely to film. Watchmen is a completely different animal. Far more complex and subtle. This - "a timely subplot about alternative fuels" - makes me cringe just to read. For the love of God, leave that bullshit on the cutting room floor. But still . . . the photos look pretty good. We'll see.
I cannot imagine this working. It should have been an HBO mini-series or something. I'll probably still go to see it, though.
Saw the trailer for it before Dark Knight. After it, one guy, very loudly, said "Well, I'm going to be skipping that one." Lots of laughter. This movie is fucked out of the gate when an audience that is watching a comic book movie finds the trailer for a comic book movie to be patently ridiculous. Personally, I wasn't impressed either. Looked like a bunch of style-over-substance nonsense.
Eh, man, it's the previews. Not like they were interrupting any meat-and-potatoes stuff - just the MPAA ratings screen for the next film (which was The Day The Earth Stood Still, I believe, which had a woman behind me mutter "But where's Gort?").
Are you sure you're not thinking of the trailer for The Spirit (which was god awful)? I'm not really interested in seeing it but I thought the Watchmen trailer was very well done.
Yeah, I'm really getting a "wow, they've fucked that up completely" vibe from the Spirit trailer. Looks like Frank Miller took his Sin City movie and shoehorned Eisner's creation into it. Don't think that one's gonna pan out too well.
The Watchmen trailer was the one with the naked blue dudes in it, correct? I'm positive. Hell, there wasn't even a trailer for The Spirit before my screening.
OK. Finally got to see the trailer: The good: It looks like the art director and the costume designer really captured the look of the comic. And the director appears to have shot scenes out of the comic with frame-for-frame devotion. The bad: What might work for a Frank Miller comic really doesn't work for an Alan Moore comic. There's no way you can pull off that level of slavish detail and then need to hack huge meaty chunks out of the story to make it fit the time. And yes, unless the trailer is completely misrepresenting the actual movie, the director has managed to be completely faithful to the look while totally missing the point of the story. The final crime? If someone in a Guy Fawkes mask starts blowing up Time-Warner properties, they'll come and arrest Moore faster than they caught the real Guy Fawkes.
For those of you with an Ipod they released the first chapter for free on ITunes. It is the comic book but in animated form. Well it was free when I got it. Pretty neat actually and it is word for word from the comic book.
I can believe it. To a fan, the trailer looks great. It combines iconic images and moments from the comic-book in a coherent manner. It tells the fans that they intend to be true to the source material. To the non-fan, I imagine it looks completely nonsensical.
I knew nothing about the source material, but the trailer had me picking up the graphic novel last weekend.
For me, the Watchmen has not aged well. Moore's sadistic desire to depict the heroes as drunks, whores, sociopaths, and murderers, all in the name of "deconstructing" the superhero mythos, has never appealed all that much to me. And the 80's cold war motif is certainly dated. There's a disturbing amorality to the whole thing. Moore's refusal to condemn Ozymandias's actions in murdering thousands of innocent civilians, except through the black & white reasoning of Roarshach, indicates his own juvenile misanthropic attitudes toward society. I have serious doubts that a Hollywood production can communicate the level of subversiveness that Moore infused the graphic novel with.
Yeah, who thought Frank Miller of all people would be appropriate for what is supposed to be a somewhat lighthearted, humorous character? "My city screams"? Fuck that shit. They make it look like some kind of weird Sin City sequel. Watchmen, on the other hand...I don't really care how it performs in the theater, I'm just glad we aren't getting that abortion of a film described earlier in the EW article, the GReengrass monstrosity. It may not be perfect, but no Watchmen film (Either a movie or miniseries) could ever be perfect. This is at least as close as we will ever get.
That they went in that direction for the trailer kinda makes me worry that they went in that direction for the movie itself. I hope I'm wrong.
