20 Comments | Posted: February 26th, 2009 | Filed under: Outbound Linkage, Thinking About Comics, Thinking About Movies | Tags: watchmen
Variety‘s review of Watchmen:
Yet the movie is ultimately undone by its own reverence; there’s simply no room for these characters and stories to breathe of their own accord, and even the most fastidiously replicated scenes can feel glib and truncated. As “Watchmen” lurches toward its apocalyptic (and slightly altered) finale, something happens that didn’t happen in the novel: Wavering in tone between seriousness and camp, and absent the cerebral tone that gave weight to some of the book’s headier ideas, the film seems to yield to the very superhero cliches it purports to subvert.
So, not to be too heretical here, but while the series was certainly very well done, I’ve always thought that level of literary cleverness was pretty much wasted on the subject matter… it felt sort of like seeing a Shakespeare play where all the actors are midgets or something. Wow! This is really clever! But – what am I watching, here?
And what, really, can you get into a movie version? I expect just the subject matter, leaving the literary cleverness entirely by the wayside. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be a fun couple of hours sitting in a dark room with a bunch of
nerdsother nerds.I guess I’m just cursed by this desire to not turn my brain off. I actually enjoy it when Moore or Iain M Banks or Raymond Chandler or Patricia Highsmith or James Ellroy create something genuinely engaging and rewarding on multiple levels from genre material that has been well-trod and seek out this experience versus what it appears that Snyder has brought to the screen. Just copying and pasting scenes to the screen isn’t Watchmen.
But we’ve been over that. Have fun when you go see the movie.
Pretty much everyone who can actually *read* agreed with you… A film of Watchmen is about as good an idea as a film of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
I, too, like using my brain, and Watchmen was certainly brain-engaging –
I don’t think it’s possible that the movie could be as good or as brain-engaging as the comic and so I’m not sure whether I’ll bother with the movie at all. I guess I was just saying that a movie can fail to be as good as its inspiration and still be an OK movie, that’s all.
I can’t read Variety. Their Hollywood industry jargon makes me want to gouge out my own eyes and hurl feces at bystanders.
And I’m saying that I’d rather Zak Snyder made the best movie possible versus the most faithful movie possible. Most of my favorite adaptations-to-film either feature no small amount of pruning of the source material so the themes and characters can breathe: the third Harry Potter film, LA Confidential or they take material that’s pretty sparse and build on it: The Third Man and Memento. There’s a difference between making a movie and transferring images and dialogue from a book, even if it’s a comic, and everything I’ve seen from this movie shows that Snyder can’t bridge that gap effectively unless it’s based on paper-thin material – like 300.
Ah, OK. I’m with you on that.
Re: Andrew Hickey
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony… that was the one with the big dog and Charles Grodin, right? Or was it Judge Reinhold?
Also, Dan, I would love to see an all-dwarf Shakespeare. But it wouldn’t be as awesome as Time Bandits or Terror in Tiny Town.
Heh. Someone I was talking to today asserted that all-dwarf Shakespeare productions must actually exist… I haven’t seen Terror in Tiny Town, but Time Bandits is certainly awesome.
I’ll respectfully disagree with Dan: the superhero isn’t just “silly” or ephemeral, it’s a product of twentieth-century culture — how could a literary examination of it be “wasted”?
Also, whether watching it will be fun or not has not yet been proven. It might well be boring and annoying, and not fun at all. You never know.
Sorry, that should have said “a waste of effort” instead of “wasted”.
Re: “the film seems to yield to the very superhero cliches it purports to subvert.”
On a somewhat related topic, I wonder if, now that Watchmen’s skewering of genre conventions have been appropriated by mainstream superhero comics, it would be possible for a new reader to look at Watchmen and only see a murder mystery with superheroes (albiet a particularly well-written one).
As in, if you started reading superhero comics a few years ago, read Identity Crisis and Civil War and THEN Watchmen, might it seem less revolutionary?
I remember watching a dramatisation of the first performance of Beethoven’s 3rd symphony (Eroica) on TV a few years ago and it was pretty good. Of course they crammed all the stuff that was happening in Beethoven’s life at that time into that one afternoon, had a couple of the orchestra comment on the structure and had the dramatic moment at the end where, hearing that Napoleon has declared himself Emperor, he crosses out Sinfonia Buonaparte and writes Sinfonia Eroica (“Heroic Symphony”).
So I’m sort of agreeing with Kevin; you can make a good film from Watchmen or a Beethoven Symphony, but you need to start by taking examining the elements of the work and deciding which will work (almost) unchanged for film, which need to be changed, which need to be thrown out and what additional stuff do you need.
I messed up the html and forgot to say – yeah, the 25ish years since Watchmen came out hasn’t done Snyder any favours. Just about every comic writer AND superhero film writer and director has read Watchmen and taken things from it. When The Dark Knight has already asked is “Batman a Hero or a Monster?*” Watchmen has to work twice as hard interested in it’s question “When you get down in the abyss to fight monsters do you have to become a worse monster to defeat them? Who watches to make sure heroes don’t become monsters?”
A: He’s a hero of course! A hero who happens to be a monster.
The Hollywood Reporter give it a similar review.
I fixed your hinky HTML, Neil, and deleted a comment from “COD4,” who apparently loves either fish or World War II FPSes because they were a rude twat. You all can go about your business. Move along, move along.
Oops I meant:
There’s this from The Guardian.
Got rid of that first link, Shawn. What the hell did you do there? ARE YOU A HACKER?
And I’m not surprised the movie’s getting good marks from a lot of critics. It’s very flashy and offers something that a lot of people seem to think was missing. I’m obviously not the target audience and I have very specific reasons for not seeing it that some people seem to have decided is a personal attack against them.
Yeah, Kevin, your thoughts about the movie weren’t too far off. It’s less of a direct adaptation than a lot of people expected, but the scenes that are taken wholesale from the book are really, really annoying, and pretty much killed any interest I had in the project.
The scenes where he looked at the material, and found ways to get those ideas into the movie in a way that worked for a Hollywood action movie in 2009 were immeasurably better, but there just weren’t enough of them.
“On a somewhat related topic, I wonder if, now that Watchmen’s skewering of genre conventions have been appropriated by mainstream superhero comics, it would be possible for a new reader to look at Watchmen and only see a murder mystery with superheroes (albiet a particularly well-written one).
As in, if you started reading superhero comics a few years ago, read Identity Crisis and Civil War and THEN Watchmen, might it seem less revolutionary?”
Don’t forget that the revolution Watchmen sparked led to the Iron Age of comics, where it was darkness for its own sake.
But to answer your question directly, yes. It happened to me. I only read Watchmen because I thought I should, not because I think ALAN MOORE IS GOD’S GIFT TO COMICS! And well after I’d read more contemporary comics. Watchmen didn’t engage me, and seemed too weighted down by Moore lavishing technical competency and literary technique upon it to have any soul or emotion. I don’t think it’s well written because the work is too much of its time and doesn’t seem to stand well without the society it tried to comment on (something I don’t think is true of, say, V for Vendetta – that story’s timeless with its sic semper tyrannis). The only thing I felt when I read Watchmen was, “when’s this going to get good? when am I going to see what all of the fuss is about? jeez, not more of this pirates stuff!” And I can’t help but hate it because everyone who reads Watchmen touts how smart they are and lords it over everyone else that they’re so intelligent because they get Watchmen – and anyone who doesn’t is a mouth-breathing submoronic knuckle-dragger.