- Image by Lord Jim via Flickr
Say your buddy is wearing a kick-ass t-shirt and you tell him so. He’s very proud of it. He can’t believe himself that such a finely designed garment could ever have been produced. It’s just about the coolest shirt you’ve ever seen. It summarizes your personality in all of its cotton and silk-screened glory. You’re impressed with your buddy’s good taste. You ask him where he got it from and he tells you it’s a Threadless shirt. Days later you can’t get that shirt out of your mind. You like it so much you look it up online and buy the shirt.
You wear the shirt out and about and elicit the same rain of compliments you showered upon your friend. It’s so great, you think about picking up a spare, cuz you may very well want to buried in this shirt.
Then a month later you bump into your buddy and you’re both wearing the shirt.
That’s kinda what seeing Watchmen feels like.
In the adaptation and interpretation of the original, Watchmen suffers from too much of the former and not enough of the latter. What you end up with is a version that’s true to the original, but anemically so. It hits the high points with incredible accuracy, but that isn’t the same as making a good movie.
In fact, the best part of the movie is the opening credits/montage of milestones of superhero history (as it pertains to the film). It’s meant to bring you up to speed on the history of this alternate universe. It’s all interpretation and it’s beautifully done, but it wasn’t in the book.
I got goose bumps watching the trailers, especially the first one. Having seen the movie, I think the trailers do a better job of being interpretations of the graphic novel. Maybe the comics industry should hire Hollywood studios to make trailers for the purpose of selling books.
This Movie Retriever review summarizes it very accurately:
The disjointed pacing of Snyder’s brutal film allows for none of it to register. And that’s the true tragedy of Watchmen – you take nothing away from it… One of the most powerful books in the history of the graphic novel has been rendered impotent, a loud, two-dimensional film with none of the impact of the source material.
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- A Brilliantly Creative Watchmen T-Shirt (tcritic.com)
I really liked it.
I felt like the movie was too faithful to the graphic novel, and lost any bit of emotional payoff that the book had.
The worst thing about the film is raving about the graphic novel, taking someone who never read it and them being confused and bored with everything but the action forty minutes into it.
Could the director have a lot of extras on the disc when it comes out, sure. Watchmen DID make 56 million, but I expect those numbers to REALLY slide in the next couple weeks.
I agree completely.
On top of that, when the movie deviated from the GN, it made no sense at all. Like Veidt being the guy who is trying to get the Crimebusters together instead of Captain Metropolis. If I were trying to mentally solve the whodunnit, I’d have seen the scowl on Veidt’s face at the end of that scene and said, “Well, there’s your murderer.”
Dreiberg’s “unzipping” dream which ends in the silhouetted nuclear explosion, a linchpin image through the book, lost all meaning without his fantasy villainess being replaced by Laurie.
My parents called to ask what I thought of it. I told them they would not enjoy it if they haven’t read it. You can’t expect people to sit through a nearly 3 hour movie that doesn’t stand alone. J sure didn’t enjoy it.
I’m thrilled E. didn’t join me.