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Who Will Be Watching?
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:
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:
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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.
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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.
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I dunno, she still looks more undressed in the live-action than in the comics.
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I read Watchmen when I was about twenty and already has about five years of comic book reading under my belt
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I'm serious about the Bats hate, though. :p
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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.
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Watchmen was the comic that got me back into reading comics as an adult, after my teenaged phase with them.
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I'm going to see The Dark Knight this evening!
Yayz!
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