Watchmen
EDIT: As you can see, my cutting of the text due to extreme length didn't work. I don't know why, I tried to retype the "cut text" command 5 times already, and it just won't work. So I apologize for the length of this, but I'm not going to delete the entire thing because of that. - GB
I'm going to write my thoughts on the Watchmen movie for you lucky people
(all five of you, if that)!
It starts with one of the most impressive credit sequences ever, covering the history of the USA since the inception of the Minutemen in the 1940s. We then see the ultraviolent murder of the Comedian, and from that point on the movie sticks obsessively to the book in order of images taken directly from the graphic novel. It looks like they used the book for the movie's storyboards. There is very little difference from the book's dialogue, but there is some. The "tricky dick" line wasn't in the book, for instance.
I went to this movie with Kim, and she had never read the book. I was interested to see what she would make of it without knowing the story beforehand. She was confused. She liked it, but did not love it. I can see why. I think it was a case of trying to cram in too much story into too small of a space. Maybe this should have been a two-parter, to make things more clear. Or even a trilogy.
One thing that struck me was the ultraviolence. This movie is even more violent than the book, which was pretty violent itself. We see bones broken through skin, limbs sawn off, heads and bodies blown apart in gooey sprays of blood and guts, etc. They even had a extremely unpleasant recreation of the murder of JFK, just to show that the Comedian was the assassin.
And you can't have violence without sex, right? So we get to see Silk Spectre II and Nightowl II in near-pornographic scenes of gettin' it on, and then there's the combination of the two in the attempted rape of Silk Spectre I by the Comedian. Followed by more beatings. Whew!
This violence isn't the jokey, over-the-top, too much to take seriously kind like in Dead-Alive or Shoot 'Em Up, it's realistic and it looks like it hurts.
Another thing: I think the book SCREAMED to be made in film-noir style, and it wasn't. A mistake, in my opinion.
Anyway, the movie had to drop some of the many plotlines from the book, such as the newsvendor and the kid reading the pirate comic book. They appear, but just to make a cameo for the fans. One change I did like, thought, was the changing of the disaster at the end from 'alien invasion 'to 'nukes'. The fake alien invasion seemed contrived and unsatisfying to me in the book, and a nuke attack framing Dr. Manhattan seemed easier to swallow. It also made the "Tales of the Black Freighter" subplot unnessesary.
But! The one thing that was left out of the movie that I think was a huge mistake was the exchange between Dr. Manhattan and Ozymandias, towards the end, after Ozzy's plot has apparently succeeded, and I quote directly from the book:
Dr. M: Goodbye, Adrian.
Ozzy: Jon, wait, beore you leave... I did the right thing, didn't I? It all worked out in the end.
Dr. M:"In the end"? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing EVER ends.
Ozzy: Jon? Wait! What do you mean by... (Dr. Manhattan vanishes)
I think that exchange was important to show the philosophy of the book, but was missing from the movie. That everything we do, no matter how grand, eventually will change. I read that part of the book to Kim, and she said just those few lines would have made the whole movie make more sense to her.
I'm tempted to say that the movie was made just for fans of the book, so we can see the comic book acted out by real people. And that's too bad, there was a great story in that book, but I think the movie makers missed their chance to tell it in a way that the average Joe/Jane would enjoy.
After seeing the movie, I thought to myself that I can wait until the DVD comes out to see it again, but now I kind of feel like I might like to see the film again, to catch what I didn't the first time. It makes you think about it for days after seeing it, and that's not so bad, is it? The day after we saw it, Kim called me and talked for an hour and a half about it. That should tell you something right there, that it would affect a non-fan of the book so much.
Oh, and one last thing: Dr. Manhattan's dick is smaller in the book.
I'm going to write my thoughts on the Watchmen movie for you lucky people
(all five of you, if that)!
It starts with one of the most impressive credit sequences ever, covering the history of the USA since the inception of the Minutemen in the 1940s. We then see the ultraviolent murder of the Comedian, and from that point on the movie sticks obsessively to the book in order of images taken directly from the graphic novel. It looks like they used the book for the movie's storyboards. There is very little difference from the book's dialogue, but there is some. The "tricky dick" line wasn't in the book, for instance.
I went to this movie with Kim, and she had never read the book. I was interested to see what she would make of it without knowing the story beforehand. She was confused. She liked it, but did not love it. I can see why. I think it was a case of trying to cram in too much story into too small of a space. Maybe this should have been a two-parter, to make things more clear. Or even a trilogy.
One thing that struck me was the ultraviolence. This movie is even more violent than the book, which was pretty violent itself. We see bones broken through skin, limbs sawn off, heads and bodies blown apart in gooey sprays of blood and guts, etc. They even had a extremely unpleasant recreation of the murder of JFK, just to show that the Comedian was the assassin.
And you can't have violence without sex, right? So we get to see Silk Spectre II and Nightowl II in near-pornographic scenes of gettin' it on, and then there's the combination of the two in the attempted rape of Silk Spectre I by the Comedian. Followed by more beatings. Whew!
This violence isn't the jokey, over-the-top, too much to take seriously kind like in Dead-Alive or Shoot 'Em Up, it's realistic and it looks like it hurts.
Another thing: I think the book SCREAMED to be made in film-noir style, and it wasn't. A mistake, in my opinion.
Anyway, the movie had to drop some of the many plotlines from the book, such as the newsvendor and the kid reading the pirate comic book. They appear, but just to make a cameo for the fans. One change I did like, thought, was the changing of the disaster at the end from 'alien invasion 'to 'nukes'. The fake alien invasion seemed contrived and unsatisfying to me in the book, and a nuke attack framing Dr. Manhattan seemed easier to swallow. It also made the "Tales of the Black Freighter" subplot unnessesary.
But! The one thing that was left out of the movie that I think was a huge mistake was the exchange between Dr. Manhattan and Ozymandias, towards the end, after Ozzy's plot has apparently succeeded, and I quote directly from the book:
Dr. M: Goodbye, Adrian.
Ozzy: Jon, wait, beore you leave... I did the right thing, didn't I? It all worked out in the end.
Dr. M:"In the end"? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing EVER ends.
Ozzy: Jon? Wait! What do you mean by... (Dr. Manhattan vanishes)
I think that exchange was important to show the philosophy of the book, but was missing from the movie. That everything we do, no matter how grand, eventually will change. I read that part of the book to Kim, and she said just those few lines would have made the whole movie make more sense to her.
I'm tempted to say that the movie was made just for fans of the book, so we can see the comic book acted out by real people. And that's too bad, there was a great story in that book, but I think the movie makers missed their chance to tell it in a way that the average Joe/Jane would enjoy.
After seeing the movie, I thought to myself that I can wait until the DVD comes out to see it again, but now I kind of feel like I might like to see the film again, to catch what I didn't the first time. It makes you think about it for days after seeing it, and that's not so bad, is it? The day after we saw it, Kim called me and talked for an hour and a half about it. That should tell you something right there, that it would affect a non-fan of the book so much.
Oh, and one last thing: Dr. Manhattan's dick is smaller in the book.