I watched the Watchmen
So, whoa, I thought The Watchmen lived up to its trailer. That's not something I expect to happen very often. A lackluster movie can often put together enough really gripping material for a 30-second trailer. And I was totally the target audience for those trailers -- I'd read the graphic novel recently enough that I could almost quote page numbers for each scene. They were pulling the exact images from the comics, transforming them in 3D and technicolor, and putting them up on the screen. It was like Myst 3D for a comic book.
I was amazed and impressed that the entire film really does have that feel. Aside from the fairly necessary (IMHO) change of the plot device in the ending, which was well-integrated, it was religiously faithful to the source material. And it managed to do so without getting bogged down, which I think has been the problem with some other extremely faithful adaptations. I rather like this trend of faithful book adaptations. Movies and books are completely different media, and they support different kinds of stories. But if you're going to adapt a book, your goal ought to be to tell the spirit of the book on the screen, not take a few interesting elements and write a new story. If you're going to do that, just say it was "inspired by." :-p
And, man, the characters really are as if the comic book drawings came to life. It seemed like everyone was cast and sculpted to be exact look-alikes. I found Ozymandias to be a bit jarring not because there was anything wrong, but because he was the only major character who didn't look like an exact match.
My only gripes are:
- It seemed to completely step on the gallows humor that I enjoyed from the original. It actually used the material I thought was funny, but in the movie version, it just isn't funny at all.
- The violence is very graphic. And in most cases, that is entirely in the right mood. But I think you have to be careful with your graphic violence, or it loses impact. There's a scene where Lori and Dan fight off a gang of street thugs in an alleyway where I think the tone of the violence totally changed the sense of the scene I took out of the book. And there's a jail cell faceoff with Rorschach that was morbid-goofy enough to make me roll my eyes.
- Being a little less timid about streamlining the story would probably have contributed to better tension throughout. I had to resist the impulse to look at my watch in the middle.
- There were a couple of really WTF FX failures. The Antarctica base looked like a Warhammer miniatures set. Richard Nixon looked like a guy in a rubber caricature mask. Considering how high the budget must have been, this stuff really caught my eye. SB thinks they spent all the extra money on music licenses :).
Still, wow. Seriously. Loved the visuals. Loved the use of music to set the historical period. Loved that they didn't make Dr. Manhattan wear boxers. Love love love that they left it in its original Cold War setting and didn't try to come up with a way to update it. Awesome.
I was amazed and impressed that the entire film really does have that feel. Aside from the fairly necessary (IMHO) change of the plot device in the ending, which was well-integrated, it was religiously faithful to the source material. And it managed to do so without getting bogged down, which I think has been the problem with some other extremely faithful adaptations. I rather like this trend of faithful book adaptations. Movies and books are completely different media, and they support different kinds of stories. But if you're going to adapt a book, your goal ought to be to tell the spirit of the book on the screen, not take a few interesting elements and write a new story. If you're going to do that, just say it was "inspired by." :-p
And, man, the characters really are as if the comic book drawings came to life. It seemed like everyone was cast and sculpted to be exact look-alikes. I found Ozymandias to be a bit jarring not because there was anything wrong, but because he was the only major character who didn't look like an exact match.
My only gripes are:
- It seemed to completely step on the gallows humor that I enjoyed from the original. It actually used the material I thought was funny, but in the movie version, it just isn't funny at all.
- The violence is very graphic. And in most cases, that is entirely in the right mood. But I think you have to be careful with your graphic violence, or it loses impact. There's a scene where Lori and Dan fight off a gang of street thugs in an alleyway where I think the tone of the violence totally changed the sense of the scene I took out of the book. And there's a jail cell faceoff with Rorschach that was morbid-goofy enough to make me roll my eyes.
- Being a little less timid about streamlining the story would probably have contributed to better tension throughout. I had to resist the impulse to look at my watch in the middle.
- There were a couple of really WTF FX failures. The Antarctica base looked like a Warhammer miniatures set. Richard Nixon looked like a guy in a rubber caricature mask. Considering how high the budget must have been, this stuff really caught my eye. SB thinks they spent all the extra money on music licenses :).
Still, wow. Seriously. Loved the visuals. Loved the use of music to set the historical period. Loved that they didn't make Dr. Manhattan wear boxers. Love love love that they left it in its original Cold War setting and didn't try to come up with a way to update it. Awesome.