Who Will Be Watching?

[eumelia]

I want to be excited about Watchmen, but I'm just not managing.

The Trailer is very cool, visually beautiful, though I'm not sure why Dr. Manhattan is so shiny and Silk Spectre has this whole half naked thing going on... strange, no?

It would seem that Mr. Moore (as in Alan Moore, the one who wrote the bloody graphic novel!) has requested that his name be removed from the credits and wants to disassociate himself from the movie, which is only natural... seeing as adaptations tend to not be similar to their original medium - this is notorious when it comes to Alan Moore comic and their movie adaptations.

I love V for Vendetta, as you know; kind of hard to miss V's introductory speech posted on the side bar (also Vox Populi, Vox Dei, right :). I love the book - which can leave you speechless - and the movie - which makes you run out and read the book! Having read V4V before I saw the movie I went in there with quite low expectations and was not disappointed.

Watchmen is one of those life changing books. You come out of it different than when you went in. Very few books have the power to alter your perspective on things.
I became a comic book reader quite late in life, at around 15 and it started with Neil Gaiman - Sandman is another of those life changing stories - and when I began to delve deeper into the genre and its history you can't not find the Daddy of the Modern Age and read him.
I always think how much more appreciative I would have been of Gaiman (whose power comes from creating a meta level in the stories themselves) if I'd discovered and/or read Moore before hand (whose power comes from completely recreating the foundation of sequential story telling, beyond meta and deconstructing itself).

Watchmen takes the classic comic book genre (super heroes) and completely turns it on its head. After Watchmen heroes could no longer be Good and villains could no longer be Bad. It made no sense for things to be that way anymore.

The ethical questions raised in the story (and answered in one of the most gruesome and brilliant, sequences ever written and drawn) are questions we tend to not ask ourselves, they are too big and most likely not something we think about on a conscious level.
In any event it is a book of great philosophical and social commentary on the simplest of levels, so a deeper reading can be mind blowing.

I'm not excited about the movie. I thought I would be. I want to be. But I really can't imagine what a director like Zack Snyder will be able to get out of it. Especially since his directorial record leaves much to be desired in my opinion: Dawn of the Dead didn't live up to the original and 300 couldn't have been good since the source material was an overrated, indulgent, racist, testosterone laced excuse of Effing Frank Miller's self-congratulatory wank fests.
And so was the 300 the movie.

That's not to say I won't go see it when it comes out, but my expectations that it manages to even capture the atmosphere of the book are pretty much non-existent.

The trailer is cool though:

Comments

[sabotabby]

I too got into comics at around 14 or 15 by reading Sandman. Heh. It makes sense, too; I always thought that comics were all masturbatory superhero fantasies for 14-year-old boys, and then I encountered these graphic novels that weren't like that at all and weren't muscled men and women with huge boobs and no brains and had a very delayed "SQUEE!" Sandman is a better comic book gateway than Watchmen because to truly appreciate Watchmen, one has to have some background with the tradition it deconstructs.

Anyway. I can't help it; I'm excited by the movie. And worried, because I think that the director might be tempted to take the book literally. I sort of go back and forth on the trailer—I like the song, don't think it's appropriate; like the visuals, think they look too polished. When I saw it on the big screen, though, I got really psyched. I'm sure I'll be as disappointed by it as I was by V for Vendetta in the end; you can't really make a comic about comic books come to life as a movie, after all. But I'm still looking forward to it.

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

I read Watchmen when I was about to and already has about five years of comic book reading under my belt, so I see what you're saying. Though Promethea would have been fun to start with :)
Sandman is still the best ever. Period.

I've only seen the trailer on the internet, as The Dark Knight only opens today and with it comes the trailer. Maybe I too will be psyched.
Again, I'm keeping my expectations as low as possible.

[sabotabby]

Oh, also, I don't think Silk Spectre is half-naked. Not that her outfit is great, but it's not much worse than the comic version.

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

It's certainly more dominatrix-y, which would tie in well with the other issues in the Comic, which I very much doubt will appear in the movie since they'll want to keep pg-13.

I dunno, she still looks more undressed in the live-action than in the comics.

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

And that sentence was supposed to be:
I read Watchmen when I was about twenty and already has about five years of comic book reading under my belt

[aesiron.livejournal.com]

I'm interested in seeing it but am not excited for it. Vince is salivating at it, though.

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

Have you read Watchmen? I think I asked you this already, but I don't recall what you answered.

I remember when Sic City came out and the whole Comic Book Fanbase here was having a nutty, except me and a couple of more Miller Haters (we're in the minority, unfortunately, but c'mon. He wrote one seminal Batman books and he's the shits?! Gimme a break *snort*).

Watchmen is by far the most groundbreaking comic book written, I don't think I've ever read anything that comes close to it's underlying brilliance.

That being said, I don't think the movie will be able to translate that brilliance in any meaningful way.

[aesiron.livejournal.com]

I have not. Though I consider myself a comic book nerd, the better description would probably be super hero geek and Marvel fanboy. Most of my knowledge of comics comes from secondary sources like compendiums or wikipedia and I rarely read the source material.

Vince and I both liked 300, by the way, and he is a big Snyder fan based on it and the zombie flick he directed. This, to him, would be like Joss adapting "The Sandman" into a major motion picture and having Nat play Death.

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

Watchmen surpasses companies - it really doesn't matter if DC produced it. If you know comics and like them, Watchmen is what you read.
I bet Vince will lend you his copy (he has a copy, no doubt).

I'm biased against Effing Frank Miller - the only good thing he ever wrote was The Dark Knight Returns which was a great re-introduction of Batman into the Modern Age, beyond that, he's useless IMO.

[aesiron.livejournal.com]

The comment about Marvel was just a reference to the fact that the vast majority of what I follow is set in that universe. My distaste for DC is overblown and tongue in cheek.

I'm serious about the Bats hate, though. :p

[lilacsigil.livejournal.com]

I read Watchmen after about 5 years of sporadic comic reading and 5 years of serious reading, and it was mindblowing. I'm concerned, though, that the director isn't making a Watchmen movie, he's just putting the story from the comic up on the screen. Yes, it's a cool story. No, that's not what the comic is about.

Due to the wonders of channel surfing, I have seen a few bits of 300 and laughed myself silly. I'm not hopeful for the movie, but it may well be pretty, if I call it something else in my head.

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

That's what I'm saying. It will look really beautiful, judging from the trailer, but again, it's not going to be Watchmen... it's going to be a darker JLA, as far as I can see.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

It will be interesting to see if the Director can buck the trend of his past work to make something worthwhile out of the Watchmen... But I suspect there might be a reason why so many people declared the comic to be unfilmable.

Watchmen was the comic that got me back into reading comics as an adult, after my teenaged phase with them.

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

Comics are not an easy medium to translate into film in any event. Comic book movies will always look good, because it's fun to make the larger than life visuals found on the pages even larger and more dynamic on screen, but there are so many bad (horrible) comic movies out there simply because you couldn't put the characters and actual world on screen along with its looks.

I'm going to see The Dark Knight this evening!
Yayz!

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Oh, cool, I look forward to hearing what it's like, and how it compares to the last one...