The Watchmen Movie Thread

[dejavroom]

Show this one some love, the movie is getting nigher and nigher. To get things started, here's the latest trailer.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

[littlefallsmets]

I am definitely of two minds on this one.

I cannot imagine this movie being anything than amazing or one of the worse movies of all time.

One of the other. Definitely nothing in-between there.

[lprkn]

I always imagined Rorschach's voice to be more devoid of expression, kind of like flat grating.

I agree with LFM on this one, either it will be great, or it will be utter shite.

[Doc]

I'm pretty confident about this. They've certainly got the look right and the director sounds slavish enough that what cuts they've made were made in the interests of maintaining the core story instead of trying to put a different spin on it. How well received it will be is another matter. There's already forums full of people raging about how terrible it is just from the trailers but people were always going to hate it just for existing and make up any stupid reason to support that position. I have a friend who's pissed to this day that Tom Bombadil got cut from the LOTR movies.

Rorschach sounds about right to me, I read him as a bit more emotionless in general but his lines in the trailer are pretty dramatic ones, I'm hoping his conversation is a bit flatter. The growl is right though. I've heard a lot of comparisons to Christian Bale's Batman voice and that sits in about the right place, big R being basically the fascist vigilante type turned up to 11.

What about Manhattan's voice? I always read him as being more Voice Of God boomy with a touch of electronic echo but hearing Billy Crudup just speak normally really works somehow. Just flat and totally detached but not in itself unusual. Fits the character well I think.

[pmcd9]

Tom fuck*ng Bombadil mother fuckers.

[littlefallsmets]

That is, of course, one of the few areas where my geek-cred does an epic fail...

My experience with the swords-and-elves stuff is shallow and sporadic at best.

The Lord of the Rings books bored me to goddamned tears... so so SO much universe-building and ridiculous tiny goddamn details about the world that had little of nothing to do with the characterizations or the plot and I just had to give up. Never finished anything by Tolkien. It is what damns Dickens for me and what partially redeems Hemingway for me... Dickens writes good plots but as he was writing by the word for serials, there is so much absolutely unnecessary fluff that I want to rip my hair out whereas Ernest wrote dick-swinging jingoist gun-worshipping bullshit most of the time but at least he was quick about it.

I witnessed a game or two of DnD and was absolutely mystified as to how that kind of thing would be anything other than an ironic punishment worked up by an English teacher who's like "oh, you wanna doodle axes and wizards-with-big-tits in class, huh? well you gotta do THIS for a day." Overly structured, everything has to be intricately memorized... fuck*ng kabuki for people who want to pretend they're a knight.

Not that I have anything intrinsically against people wanting to pretend they're a knight but... can't you just do it in your imagination then, instead of needing the structure of arguing in a basement with other people about the interpretation of certain rules and if that dice roll counted and the strange psychosexual politics of four or whatever teenage boys dickering over whose fantasy this collaborative clusterfuck belongs to, who gets to fuck the half-orc barmaid and who has to BE the half-orc barmaid or whatever?

Boggled my mind that such a thing could be considered pleasant.

Those were always my two epic fails as a dork:

I was not a gamer/fantasy guy at all and I understood very little about how the computer actually worked other than Microsoft Word, e-mail, message boards and so forth. I could not fieldstrip my computer nor could I code or build a webpage.

Oh, I could describe the mechanism wherein Ego the Living Planet and the Phoenix both had infinite power but how one could be more infinite... I had my cred in other fields, I was the king indie-film dork of my high school and a leading rock nerd and the only baseball nerd who didn't play on the team but...

Elfs and tech. Never understood.

[Asherdan]

So...

Is this the kind of thing I should see and enjoy even if I know fuck-all about it?

Or should I seek out some source stuff first?

[wombat]

I think I'm going to take Paul's advice.

[littlefallsmets]

Cold War NYC, 1985-ish.

A world of mostly-non-powered superheroism with a few exceptions and some old skeletons in the closet but a while back, costumed vigilantism was cracked down on hardcore... most of them retired, a few stayed on in government service and one, just one, went rogue and kept up the good fight. The way the retirements went down left a lot of the former heroes with awkward kind of unfulfilled lives but whatever. They deal.

Absolute height of the fears of atomic war and a world of despair where quite literally all the heroes are gone... quietly, secretly, former heroes (most of them surprisingly subtle pastiches of superheroes both major and obscure) start getting killed off one by one.

Pressure builds for them all to kind of "get the band back together" to figure out who's gunning for them and... as it does... it starts to seem like maybe it's part of a much larger scheme than just killing off vigilantes who've been on the shelf for fifteen years.

It is hard to say if you should pick up the graphic novel beforehand.

If the movie turns out to be good, then... no, so it isn't spoiled.

If the movie turns out to be bad, then... yes, so that the movie still kind of makes sense.

The big problem with "Watchmen" is that it is such a large dense work... and so many aspects are married in symbolism and structure to the exploration of the medium of comic books... that it conceptually difficult to picture it as a two-two-and-a-half hour movie, no matter how talented the filmmakers or true the adaptation.

Even if it were a six hour animated mini-series on HBO, you'd still feel like something was lost in the medium change because... it is so much an exploration of the medium.

I mean, why did the adaptation of "Breakfast of Champions" suck so bad? Because the book itself is a deconstruction of the 1970s middlebrow novel... and when you put that into a film, a whole layer of meaning drops out no matter what you do.

I mean, that famous painting of a pipe, right? "Ce n'est pas une pipe". Because... it ain't a pipe, it's just a drawing of a pipe?

See how expressing that in a messageboard posting just fuck*ng obliterated the value of it even though I expressed all of its literal information?

Yeah.

This is the ultimate fear with "Watchmen".

[Asherdan]

It is hard to say if you should pick up the graphic novel beforehand.

Naw, it ain't hard at all now that you've laid it out and I've done some back checking.

This is a read first for me, easy as pie. Then, like the LotR movies, the film can be a possibly amusing addendum, rather than the entirety of the thing.

And I won't have to miss the chance at a Bombadil moment.

[Limmo]

The graphic novel is ten pounds of kill in a Ziploc sandwich baggie.  Must to get. 

[Doc]

Yeah you should totally own the book either way. It made Time's 100 books of the 20th century list for what that's worth so it's bona-fide lit-oo-rat-toore.

I was going to say hold off on reading it first since the movie's here in a couple of months anyway but some of the plots developments are so great it would be sad to read the book later and know what was coming because you'd already seen a watered down version. So yeah, get the pure stuff first time round.

[Choop]

I'm just pissed they cut the pirate ship.

edit:
I wasn't going to watch any further trailers, I usually avoid them at all costs - the dark knight, for example, i successfully saw zero trailers for - but I went ahead and watched this one, my curiosity got the best of me. They fuck*ng nailed the look of it, which should come as no surprise considering the director's resumé. Rorshach's voice is pitch-fuck*ng-perfect. Downey looks great for the Comedian, which is cool because this story is so completely unrelated to Iron Man. Crudup's voice for Dr. Manhattan? Complete failure. It should be completely flat, a slight tenor- that part's almost right- but it's missing the psyche-shattering overcurrent of muddled mid-range feedback I always heard when reading (and re-reading) the book. The look is great. I hope the characters resemble the book in more than look. And I hope the story isn't just the flashbang from the book but deals with the heart of the plot. I hold out hope.

[dejavroom]

I cannot imagine this movie being anything than amazing or one of the worse movies of all time.

One of the other. Definitely nothing in-between there.

Exactly. Either it will be an embarrassment to all involved, audience included, or it will be the movie experience of 2009, doing to "The Dark Knight" what TDK did to other mainstream movies when it was released. Melodramatic as it might be at times, Watchmen's "Gordian knot"-style resolution is untouchable, if done right, and its plot is tight as a duck's nether-regions (unlike TDK, so rife with plot-holes that you had to squint hard in order to ignore them).

...what cuts they've made were made in the interests of maintaining the core story instead of trying to put a different spin on it.

Yes, and this makes all the difference. With every single movie adaptation of a work by Alan Moore, some muttonhead in a suit thought that movie people of all people could improve on Moore's writing! Just the fact that the movie got the "R" rating relieves me to no end.

Ash, I'd recommend you read the book first as well.

Choopernickel, the pirate ship story will be included in the DVD, so yay you. It will be animated and inserted into the appropriate ins and outs of the movie, with the kid reading the comic book near the newsstand. Also, they found a way to include a large chunk of the book's background story in the form of a mock interview-type show celebrating the anniversary of Hollis Mason's "Under The Hood". But that's also only for the DVD.

[CortJstr]

I hated the pirate comic so much. I haven't been this happy about a movie-cut since LotR dropped all the ridiculous songs and stories from every freaking time they make camp.