Obligatory Watchmen Post
Went to see Watchmen Friday night, and I have to say that I enjoyed it on the whole. I honestly never thought it would be possible to do such a faithful adaptation of that comic. And it was so pretty.
And the parts they cut were the parts I would have chosen - the side stories are great in the context of the book, but weren't really missed in the narrative flow of the movie. And I'm not sorry to see the giant psychic squid go. I like the ending they came up with - it made things neater, and sidestepped the fact that, to me, no matter how horrific and creepy that squid is in the comic (and it is both) there is a certain humor to the image of that squid. Rorschach was dead-on, Ozymandias was kind of lame, and I liked pretty much everyone else.
However, it was about halfway through that I realized that, despite everything that I liked, I still had a fundamental problem with the film that I think is largely attributable to Zack Snyder. My issue is that one of the themes of the comic is that the sexualization of violence is both problematic and pervasive, particularly in comics. But Snyder, as evidenced in 300 and here, sees nothing problematic about it; it's a part of his aesthetic. So there are these images that are taken straight from the comic but are decontextualized and tilted so that we're left with the message "Violence is HOT."
And then there are the race issues, which are present in the source material but seem worse on-screen. A factor is the removal of the psychiatrist's storyline, which I agree with from a narrative point of view, as the movie is already almost three hours long. But once he's marginalized even more, we're really confronted with a film where almost all of the characters of color are victims of violence, often at the hands of the white protagonists, and that made me feel pretty urky.
And the parts they cut were the parts I would have chosen - the side stories are great in the context of the book, but weren't really missed in the narrative flow of the movie. And I'm not sorry to see the giant psychic squid go. I like the ending they came up with - it made things neater, and sidestepped the fact that, to me, no matter how horrific and creepy that squid is in the comic (and it is both) there is a certain humor to the image of that squid. Rorschach was dead-on, Ozymandias was kind of lame, and I liked pretty much everyone else.
However, it was about halfway through that I realized that, despite everything that I liked, I still had a fundamental problem with the film that I think is largely attributable to Zack Snyder. My issue is that one of the themes of the comic is that the sexualization of violence is both problematic and pervasive, particularly in comics. But Snyder, as evidenced in 300 and here, sees nothing problematic about it; it's a part of his aesthetic. So there are these images that are taken straight from the comic but are decontextualized and tilted so that we're left with the message "Violence is HOT."
And then there are the race issues, which are present in the source material but seem worse on-screen. A factor is the removal of the psychiatrist's storyline, which I agree with from a narrative point of view, as the movie is already almost three hours long. But once he's marginalized even more, we're really confronted with a film where almost all of the characters of color are victims of violence, often at the hands of the white protagonists, and that made me feel pretty urky.