Who watches the Watchmen? Six does!
I finally finished Alan Moore's "Watchmen," which I thought was excellent. Usually I can eat up a trade paperback comic in a day, but I took weeks with this. Not entirely on purpose, since I had a hard time getting the time to myself to sit down and focus, but I moved very slowly through anyhow. Each frame is so layered and rich. Two scenes unfold simultaneously, alternating cells on the page, while the diagetic dialog of each transposes itself onto the other. Sense of time and chronicling coexist at different speeds. Over what length of time does the story unfold? The doomsday clock is a great touch, too.
From a writer's perspective alone this is an opus. So much interweaving, mirroring, transition. I like the sense of history in the story as well- fictional, but similar enough to our reality that it makes me stop and think back about the way things really happened. Or the fantastically allusive story of the shipwreched seaman which is interwoven with all the events... Great stuff.
This is by far one of the best examples I've ever seen of using the comic medium to it's full capacity. No wonder it's the winner of a Hugo award. In some ways it is cinematic, but in others it's completely beyond cinema - could all this layering be accomplished with voice overs (and do those ever really deliver?) Can the Dr. Manhattan "Watchmaker" book be brought to film in some sort of twisted vomit containing leftover Memento? Will all the repeated images (and even cell "framing") stitch together so rewardingly onscreen? How does the "foil" structure so prevalent in the comic appear on screen? Can the film be as self-aware as the comic (a la Fight Club?) I would really love to see it, because it could have a great deal of potential.
So apparently someone is trying to make this happen but I'll leave out my own 2 cents on that until much later.
Some of the cast.
A still from a 300 trailer. Or just a fake put together by some dudes with a white T shirt and a sharpie.
Jeremy and I were talking about the film adaptation, and we think that maybe De Palma (not today, but maybe De Palma in his prime) could handle it. Or I think David Fincher could. The problem I have with the director attached to the project, or at least my greatest fear, is that it's not the big action that makes Watchmen so fascinating. I mean, even Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons knew that - the simple rectangular cells lay in the same static form from page to page, nothing breaking the frame or creating excess motion (like Frank Miller's style). The action seems purposely understated, and instead, the normal-ness of the characters takes an odd center stage. I remember being shocked when Rorschach's face was shown because he's so plain and un-anything it's completely banal. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of scenes in the book to spawn huge action scenes, but if that came to be would the heart of the story be gone?
Six was interested in The Watchmen too.