Watchmen!

[megotelek]

First of all, I found the opening credits here and here. They're wonderful, and here's some Easter-egg type stuff that I'm glad I read about before I saw it so I could watch out for them. My favorite:

The opening shot, with Nite Owl giving a fist full of justice has a big Batman reference. First, check out the posters to the right. Look familiar? And isn't that Mr. and Mrs. Wayne at the back entrance of the opera, being saved from a bloody death? And according to commenter Rainbucket, the opera bills say: "Die Fledermaus" (The Bat). So can we safely come to the conclusion that the original Nite Owl stopped Batman from popping up in their universe?

Ah, now to the movie...


I haven't read the book in a while, so my memory for the exact details was a little fuzzy. Plus, I knew about the changed ending, and was curious how they'd work it in.

I loved it. It's just such a rich story, and I think Zach Snyder was able to keep it as complex and rich as he possibly could. That said, I understand why Alan Moore thinks Watchmen is unfilmable. Things had to go, like the Under the Hood segments and the Black Freighter comic-within-the-comic. The good news is, those will be coming out on DVD soon (already on my Amazon wishlist).

And the soundtrack. Oh, my god, it's like I died and went to music heaven. Everything from Simon & Garfunkel to the classic Bob Dylan in the beginning to the Hendrix "All Along the Watchtower" (which prompted a "Wait, Rorschach and Nite Owl are Cylons?" from me...though if one of them is, Ozymandias is the best bet, I think) to even a slice of Mozart's Requiem. I need both soundtrack albums now. I even think the Leonard Cohen "Hallelujah" worked in context. Yes, I giggled, but I still think it worked. Oh, and "Ride of the Valkyries"? Cliche, maybe, but still inspired.

The ending...while I think the squid would have lost some people and I did like the simplicity of it being Dr. Manhattan's power, it definitely lost some impact for me by not being as horrifying and bloody as the book. I mean, I know why they felt they couldn't show the staggering heaps of bodies and Laurie's horror at it all, but it really shifted the weight of impact backward, to Rorschach's death. That, for me, became the emotional heavy-hitter of the movie. Because he became the tragic hero for me in the movie, the way he never really did in the book. Granted, that's partly because I was trying to figure out how to read in pictures at the time (not a big comic book reader, me).


Okay, I have to go to work now...the beginning of the end (see last entry)!

Comments

[slew6.livejournal.com]

hated.

[megotelek.livejournal.com]

Okay...

The book? The movie? Both? The idea? Alan Moore?

[slew6.livejournal.com]

The film. Loved the book, love Alan Moore (who should probably be put on suicide watch), but hated the movie.

I tried really hard to like it. By mid movie I thought, "I have to like this. Why am I not liking this?"

I thought the soundtrack was God awful. I know they were trying to keep it in the time period there... but it was just terrible. I really hated Hallelujah, it was awkward and did not work at all. I mean, on it's own - great music. As the soundtrack for Watchmen? Not so much.

I thought the characters AND the story were underdeveloped. Zach Snyder could have done way more, at least with character development. I mean, it's impossible to get the whole thing on screen since the comic is so long, but the characters sucked. Dr. Manhattan was this distant character that I couldn't sympathize with at all. Obviously in the comic he is distant and as it goes on he becomes more and more detached from society, but I feel like the reader at least has some sympathy for him.

All the scenes with Laurie and Dan... awful and awkward. Whoever played Laurie sucked as an actress and all her scenes were filled with this soap-opera level acting. It was also some of the worst dialog in the film. The viewer also had no idea as to WHY Laurie hated her mother in the movie (unless you read the book). No tension was really shown at all and then at the end I can imagine some people were going, "wait, what is she reconciling with her mother for?"

I think Rorschach was the only character I was mildly pleased with. I think he was true to his character, but still pretty underdeveloped.

One of the things that REALLY pissed me off though (and this is a minute detail) was that Dr. Manhattan didn't say the line "Nothing ends, Adrien. Nothing ever ends." That was seriously one of my favorite damn lines in the whole book and Laurie (who by the end of the movie I wanted to kick in the chin) said the line.

I know that it's a MOVIE and not the book. I went in with the expectation that I would at least like it as a movie. But I think even if I had never actually read Watchmen, I still would have thought it was mediocre.

I feel like there are 1000 more things that made me hate it but I feel like I'm just rambling and every time I think about it my thoughts of the movie start to run around in my head and fight each other.

[megotelek.livejournal.com]

I think part of what made me inclined to like it was reading about how much the studio wanted to change it (http://io9.com/5165227/the-version-of-watchmen-the-studio-wanted). After reading that, I realized that this is probably the best Watchmen movie we could have gotten. For as underdeveloped as the characters seemed in the movie as it was made, they would have been unrecognizable in the studio's version.

That said, I agree it still had problems. My personal "minute detail" issue was that for everything else they left verbatim (seriously, some of Rorshach's journal just didn't sound right as a voiceover), they changed "I did it thirty-five minutes ago"?! That was my favorite line of the book...and "triggered" just didn't have that gut-punch to it.

I thought the soundtrack was God awful. I know they were trying to keep it in the time period there... but it was just terrible. I really hated Hallelujah, it was awkward and did not work at all. I mean, on it's own - great music. As the soundtrack for Watchmen? Not so much.

We'll have to agree to disagree on the music, I guess. It was jarring, at first, to have such familiar music, and it almost intruded on the story for me a little. But it also made the story more real for me, brought it into the real world, so to speak.

All the scenes with Laurie and Dan... awful and awkward. Whoever played Laurie sucked as an actress and all her scenes were filled with this soap-opera level acting.

Dan and Laurie...see, I thought they were awkward in the book, too, and that was part of the charm. That very human awkwardness that Jon is pulling away from.

The soap-opera acting -- I think Zach Snyder was trying to parody movie cliches the way the book satires comic book cliches, but wasn't able to quite get there.

It definitely had its issues, but I don't know that it should have never been made. Partly that's because I want to have the option to watch the story, rather than try to read it. I struggled through the book, because I didn't know how to read comic books. And I don't think a straight novelization would work either, because some of the visual impact is crucial to the story. So I think the movie works on that level, also.

ETA: For your Aunt Beth, the movie got her interested in reading the book. So that's another plus for it.