Headaches and Rorschach
It's been awhile, but my usual haunts these days are no place for a long form post. So here goes.
I have a nagging headache, which is making sleeping difficult tonight. When I can't sleep, my mind works over things. Usually nothing important, as will be evidenced shortly. Anyway, when this happens, I generally have to get up and futz around until I expel whatever is on my mind.
So, I liked the Watchmen movie. I didn't love it. In fact that I haven't rewatched it, not even once, since I first saw it. Something kind of bugged me, but I didn't spend any time thinking about it. Tonight, unable to sleep, I think it hit me.
It can best be summed up thusly: the slavish devotion to the book's details are all about the outline of things. The details the film makers added had little to do with the book or the purposes of things in the book. The colors are all right, the basic shape of things is right, but the details, the minutiae, are wrong.
The best example I can think of is Rorshach's mask, and maybe Rorshach in general, in the movie versus the book. First off, you're not really supposed to admire Rorshach most of the time in the book. Most of the time he's presented as a broken person, someone who's snapped. And we're told that's the kind of person he is in the movie, but as good as Jackie Earle Haley was in the part, he's not sold that way in the movie. In the movie he's supposed to be awesome, in a "twisted" kind of way.
In the movie, his mask is cloth, and has the trademark blotch patterns moving around on it. In the book, the mask is made of an experimental material, new to the fashion world. The material is made of two sheets of plastic with fluid in between them. To handle the material, you must use heated scissors to cut it. This isn't what Rorshach looked like in the movie.
Of course, such a material would present some problems. First, It would be impermeable. That would make running and strenuous activity difficult or impossible. Second, it would likely be slick and shiny, which wouldn't look so great when the character was supposed to be grimy.
This is my cobbled together, fast and dirty Photoshop job to show what I'm basically thinking of. Notice the air holes over the mouth for breathing. You're supposed to have nightmares after meeting this guy.
For a movie, I kind of imagine that Rorschach's costume would be something cobbled together by someone trying to do the best that they could, but missing the mark a bit. Rorschach is supposed to be nightmarish, partly because of the sense that he just lacks some fundamental connection to other people. He should be creepy like a serial killer, dammit, because that's what he is. I imagine that the mask would show bits and pieces of his face, wherever the two layers of the material his mask is made from touch. That would be an eerie effect, I think. Something where you only ever see bits and pieces of a face, indicating that the person wearing the mask is literally not all there.
At any rate, the stuff in the movie that bothers me isn't about the ways in which they kept things the same from the book, it's the ways in which they decided to make things different. The broad strokes are the same, but the small things, the nuance, it's not there.
At the time I saw it, I thought that Snyder had decided to use the material as a jumping off point to satirize modern comics. I'm not sure. Things like the rubber nipples on Ozymandias's suit make me think that it's possible they were at least trying to satirize superhero movies as a body of work in the same way that the comic satirized comic book superheroes. But I'm not sure.
I make no claims that this is flawless. I am writing this up because I can't sleep due to a headache. Again, I didn't hate it, I've just got a few nagging things that bug me about it. I'm interested in seeing Sucker Punch, just to see what Snyder does with his own material.
I have a nagging headache, which is making sleeping difficult tonight. When I can't sleep, my mind works over things. Usually nothing important, as will be evidenced shortly. Anyway, when this happens, I generally have to get up and futz around until I expel whatever is on my mind.
So, I liked the Watchmen movie. I didn't love it. In fact that I haven't rewatched it, not even once, since I first saw it. Something kind of bugged me, but I didn't spend any time thinking about it. Tonight, unable to sleep, I think it hit me.
It can best be summed up thusly: the slavish devotion to the book's details are all about the outline of things. The details the film makers added had little to do with the book or the purposes of things in the book. The colors are all right, the basic shape of things is right, but the details, the minutiae, are wrong.
The best example I can think of is Rorshach's mask, and maybe Rorshach in general, in the movie versus the book. First off, you're not really supposed to admire Rorshach most of the time in the book. Most of the time he's presented as a broken person, someone who's snapped. And we're told that's the kind of person he is in the movie, but as good as Jackie Earle Haley was in the part, he's not sold that way in the movie. In the movie he's supposed to be awesome, in a "twisted" kind of way.
In the movie, his mask is cloth, and has the trademark blotch patterns moving around on it. In the book, the mask is made of an experimental material, new to the fashion world. The material is made of two sheets of plastic with fluid in between them. To handle the material, you must use heated scissors to cut it. This isn't what Rorshach looked like in the movie.
Of course, such a material would present some problems. First, It would be impermeable. That would make running and strenuous activity difficult or impossible. Second, it would likely be slick and shiny, which wouldn't look so great when the character was supposed to be grimy.
This is my cobbled together, fast and dirty Photoshop job to show what I'm basically thinking of. Notice the air holes over the mouth for breathing. You're supposed to have nightmares after meeting this guy.
For a movie, I kind of imagine that Rorschach's costume would be something cobbled together by someone trying to do the best that they could, but missing the mark a bit. Rorschach is supposed to be nightmarish, partly because of the sense that he just lacks some fundamental connection to other people. He should be creepy like a serial killer, dammit, because that's what he is. I imagine that the mask would show bits and pieces of his face, wherever the two layers of the material his mask is made from touch. That would be an eerie effect, I think. Something where you only ever see bits and pieces of a face, indicating that the person wearing the mask is literally not all there.
At any rate, the stuff in the movie that bothers me isn't about the ways in which they kept things the same from the book, it's the ways in which they decided to make things different. The broad strokes are the same, but the small things, the nuance, it's not there.
At the time I saw it, I thought that Snyder had decided to use the material as a jumping off point to satirize modern comics. I'm not sure. Things like the rubber nipples on Ozymandias's suit make me think that it's possible they were at least trying to satirize superhero movies as a body of work in the same way that the comic satirized comic book superheroes. But I'm not sure.
I make no claims that this is flawless. I am writing this up because I can't sleep due to a headache. Again, I didn't hate it, I've just got a few nagging things that bug me about it. I'm interested in seeing Sucker Punch, just to see what Snyder does with his own material.