Re: [Movie] The Watchmen

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last night, i watched my "dr. manhattan's head" copy of the film. haven't watched any special features yet, just the director's cut.

going to go back and re-read this thread now that i've seen it, but initial thoughts:

first, i didn't see the theatrical release. second, i haven't read the series since probably 1990.

this comic has always been thought of as "unfilmable". while i think that's true to a point, i think this film is as close as you could ever get to successfully telling the story in film. mostly true to what i remember of the source, i think that's both a positive and a negative. i think it's difficult to do a frame-by-frame true-to-the-source film while at the same time making a good movie - that's the crux of it being called "unfilmable". so much of the story relies on non-verbal imagery and what it conjures in the mind of the reader. because of that, and trying to compensate, some parts of this film are kind of a jumbled mess for anyone not familiar with the books. watching it with my sig other and my son, they both thought it was good, just kind of long. my sig other then started comparing it to GI Joe, i guess since it's the last movie we saw, and both were based on comics she never read. said it was much better than Joe, heh.

at the end of the day, there were some really impressive parts. casting was mostly good, clearly the comedian and rorshach being perfect, although i would have tried to get rorshach some height. i think i need to go re-read the books, then watch this again to really form any decent opinion. not a film you can really take all in with one viewing, i will say that.

Re: [Movie] The Watchmen

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Watched this yesterday afternoon while home with a cold--Snyder makes a couple of big missteps here, the first being, don't shoot every goddamn scene in bullet-time 2.0. Take all the fucking slo-mo out and you've got a tight entertainment. With it, you have a clumsy attempt at recapturing the feel of lingering over the frames of a comic book page when what you're really trying to do is make a movie. Works fine for Zac's fetishistic love of violent impacts, but not so much when we're slogging through backstory or potentially dramatic current-time dialogue scenes. Second problem, speaking of which, is the dialogue. Moore is a comic book writer, not a screenplay writer, and it shows in the fairly faithful cut and paste job from his talky bubbles. They could have punched up the banter significantly.

Overall not a particularly enjoyable exercise, just rather sullen, occasionally downright ugly, and almost always badly paced. After re-reading Watchmen after Xmas of last year, that may be paying it a compliment as a faithful adaptation, though.
"I'm like a dog chasing cars, I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one. . . . I'm not a schemer. I just do things."

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While Straczynski is one of my favorite writers, my gut says no one but Moore should touch these characters. I guess if they're going to rape his work at least they got in some good talent to do it. But I'd rather not see it done at all.
Just cut them up like regular chickens

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Straczynski posted a response to address some of the concerns people have. I admit he makes some good arguements and I'm almost swayed to the other side of the fence.
J. Michael Straczynski wrote:Rather than answer the questions about Watchmen piecemeal in separate topics, I figured I’d address the key ones here, all in one place.

Let me start out by tackling head-on the most frequent question: “how would you feel if Babylon 5 was being done without your permission?” It’s a fair question, and it needs to be fairly answered...but it has to be an honest comparison, apples to apples, not apples to pomegranates.

First, we have to take the word “permission” off the table. Warner Bros. owns Babylon 5 lock, stock and phased-plasma guns, just as DC owns the Watchmen characters. DC wasn’t making creator-owned deals back in the 80s. Moreover, they were variations on characters that had been previously created for the Charleton Comics universe. Main point is: neither of us owns these characters in any significant legal way. Consequently, neither company needs our permission to do anything.

But I get that we’re talking about the emotional aspect of all this, not the legal stuff, which is pretty cut and dry. So again: apples to apples.

How would I feel if Babylon 5 were being made and I were shut out of anything to do with it, despite my desire to be involved? I’d feel pretty crummy about it. But as it happens, that has absolutely nothing to do with this situation in any way, manner, shape or form.

If at any point in the last 25 years, Alan had said, “you know, there’s a Watchmen story I’d like to tell,” there’s no question that DC would have given him both the freedom to tell that story and a check big enough to dim the lights at their offices for a week. And there were frequent overtures for him to do just that. In 2005, DC actually offered to give him ownership of the characters if he’d come back to do more stories with them.

They wanted his involvement, solicited his involvement, would have been thrilled at his involvement. He declined at every point. Fair enough. It’s his choice, and it’s his right to make it.

So now – apples to apples – let’s make the B5 comparison. Let’s say Warner Bros. came to me and said, “we want to do more Babylon 5, and we want you to run the whole thing. We’ll pay you anything you want, give you a proper budget, and you will have complete creative freedom.” (Actually, they made that offer last year, and I said yes enthusiastically, because I love these characters and that universe. At the eleventh hour the distribution system they had been trying to put together fell apart, and so did this, but let’s stick to the subject, shall we?)

So let’s say that Warners makes that offer, and I said, “No, I don’t want it, take your accursed money, your big budget and your complete creative freedom and begone, get thee behind me Satan!” Let’s say they came back and said “Okay, then how about we pay you vast sums of money just to consult? How about that?”

“No,” let’s say I cried, “no, no, a thousand times no.”

“How about just to meet with us? Just for an hour?”

“No, absolutely not, nuh-uh, no way, not a chance.”

“What if we sweeten the deal? What if we offer to give you full ownership of Babylon 5, legally and contractually, so you own it? How about that?”

“Fie, I tell you, fie!”

Well, where does that leave us?

If Warners offered me creative freedom, money and a budget to do the show the way I wanted, up to and including my completely owning the show, and I said no to that deal, and if after Warners waited TWENTY FIVE YEARS for me to change my mind they finally decided to go ahead and make B5 without me...then I would have absolutely zero right to complain about it. Because it was my choice to remove myself from the process, it wasn’t something foisted upon me by anybody else.

And frankly, and I’m only talking about me here, if I made that choice, I would be an idiot. Because I love those characters and that universe, and would greatly enjoy the chance to play with them again. Every TV writer in town would show up at my door just to personally kick the crap out of me, and they'd be right to do it.

On to the next topic.

“These were one-off characters, they were never intended to be used again.” A really good point whose only problem is that it’s not actually true. That was certainly never DC’s perception of the characters, and Alan himself floated an idea about doing a Minutemen prequel back in 1985.

Alan didn’t walk away from Watchmen for artistic reasons, he walked away over contract language regarding ownership issues. It was a contract dispute. In time that morphed into something else, but that was not what happened at the time.

“These characters are sacred, nobody else should write them.”

If we’re going to talk about the sanctity of characters, let me point to an observation I made in one of the interviews:

“Alan has spent most of the last decade writing some very, very good stories about characters created by other writers, including Alice (from Wonderland), Dorothy (from Oz), Wendy (from Peter Pan), as well as Captain Nemo, the Invisible Man, Jekyll and Hyde and Professor Moriarty. I think one loses a little of the moral high ground to say, “I can write characters created by Jules Verne, HG Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle and Frank Baum, but it’s wrong for anyone else to write my characters.”

Some folks have replied to this with “well, Alan says this is different because he’s using those characters in different situations.” (I’m not vouching that Alan said that, only that this is the most common reply. If he never said anything to that effect I’m happy to be corrected.)

I’m really good with the English language, but I’ve turned that sentence over several times and I can’t parse it in any logical way. What the heck does it even mean? The moment you have Mr. Hyde do anything not in Robert Louis Stevenson’s book, it’s a “different situation.” I think that the argument being made here is that by putting Mr. Hyde in a modern context, then that makes it Alan’s and that makes it legally and morally okay.

If that’s true, then I invite Alan to try that with James Bond, or Jason Bourne, or any other character where the writer or the estate is still around to fight for the rights of their characters. Legally, yes, you can do what you wish with public domain characters. But one ends up on a slippery moral slope to say that all of these other writers' characters are fair game but Alan’s characters are sacred on a moral or emotional basis.

I would suggest that there are just as many people around the world who hold Wendy from Peter Pan sacred, or who might think it untoward that Alan had Mr. Hyde literally sodomize the Invisible Man TO DEATH after the latter serially raped a bunch of girls at a private school. How would Robert Louis Stevenson or H.G. Wells have viewed such a story?

Despite this, somehow, by Alan’s lights, that’s not just okay, it is right and proper. I’m not saying he shouldn’t have done it. Alan’s a genius, and if it were in my power I’d set him up with a big distribution system, ten million dollars, and publish anything he wrote, up to and including the phone book.

I’m just suggesting that one needs to be consistent in one's moral stance if one wishes that moral stance to be taken seriously.

“This will dilute the legacy of the original Watchmen.”

Can’t happen. The book is the book is the book. It will always be up on the shelf. You can read it alone, or after the prequels, or before...it doesn’t change a word of it. The original book has twenty five years of legacy standing behind it. It’s not that fragile. It’s a work of art, and art endures.

“So how come you left Thor because they were messing with the story?”

Apples, meet oranges. Thor was a work in process, versus a finished work in the case of Watchmen. No one's suggesting a mid-course correction in the original book. I would have been happy to remain on Thor for decades, but when I saw the ominous approach of an Event that would once again erase or damage the story that I had worked so hard to create, I opted out. By contrast, nobody is infringing on a story Alan wants to write. Finally, again, opting out of Thor was my choice, just as it’s Alan’s choice not to be involved in any further Watchmen projects. I have no more right to complain about what came afterward than...well, anyone else in that situation.

“You didn’t like what Mongoose Publishing did with Babylon 5.”

True. Leaving aside that they were trying to include novels into a licensing contract that was intended only for game books and reference...leaving aside that instead of going to quality writers they picked up fan fiction on the cheap from amateur writers...the books were dreadful and not in keeping with the standard that I applied to anything done in the B5 universe. I’d bounced a couple of properly authorized and sanctioned novels previously because I didn’t feel they were up to snuff. The quality was the issue, not my involvement, because under contract I was involved and had approval. Had the books been better, they would’ve come out. They weren’t, and they didn’t. Apples and oranges.

I think those are all the major points that have been repeatedly brought up here and online elsewhere. To which I would add only the following codicil.

When I met with the others in New York to discuss these books, I was in awe of the assembled talent. These were, and are, some of the brightest lights in the comic business. (And me, holding up the rear.) Listening to Brian A, I frankly thought I should be sitting at the children’s table, not here. And beside me was Len Wein, who was involved with the original Watchmen books. Amazing.

I wish you could’ve been there. I wish you could’ve seen the passion, the care, the creativity in their eyes and in their voices. There was no talk of money, or of deals, it was all about digging into characters for whom we all shared a profound reverence and appreciation. No detail was too small to delve into. What really happened to this character, who died or disappeared? Why did this other character dissolve into madness and alcohol? Who the hell was the Twilight Lady? There was an excitement and a dedication to preserve the quality of the characters that I wish you could have been present to witness firsthand.

It. Was. Awesome.

I have always put a great emphasis on doing right by the money fans have to spend on product. This is because I come from ridiculously poor circumstances, and equally ridiculous fannish circumstances. I saved all summer to buy a membership in the Supermen of America Club. Another summer got me a wonderful envelope from FOOM. I was the only kid in my neighborhood who not only ordered a pair of X-Ray Specs, but expected them to actually work...and was devastated when they didn’t.

So I’ve always viewed things from a perspective of, “Is this going to be worth somebody’s hard earned cash?” I won’t speak of my stuff, because the specter of enlightened self-interest raises its head...but when I think of what Brian and Darwyn and the others are doing with their books, the stories they’ve chosen to tell, and the reaction I think these stories will meet, the quality of the art and the storytelling...for me, as a fan, the answer is an enthusiastic “hell, yes.”

The books will speak for themselves.

Everything else is just foreplay.
Just cut them up like regular chickens

Re: [Movie] The Watchmen

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i don't know anything about B5 but love all of those comments and thoughts. i feel like alan must feel about DC/watchmen how david lynch feels about dune. the relationship is irreparable. except, i'd wager that if someone came to david and offered him unlimited budget and complete creative control to make his ultimate vision of dune, he'd consider it (also, not his characters). i love moore. i enjoy reading his stuff. i think he's an incredibly interesting person and his work is always thought-provoking. that being said, when it comes to how he has continually dealt with anything watchmen-related for the last quarter century, fuck him. he comes off as really high-and-mighty, stubborn, and vindictive. that ship has sailed.

i love the characters and refuse to believe that anyone but moore could tell interesting and worthy stories with them.

i personally feel kind of burned by the watchmen. for quite awhile, original first printing editions of the miniseries along with all the other original watchmen stuff i have from back then (pin sets, t-shirts, posters, etc) was worth some pretty high dollars. i thought with the popularity of the film they would only go up in value. wrong - the film spawned endless reprints in really cool editions, toys, endless merch, etc., to the point where all the actual original memorabilia's value has been diluted to almost nothing.

and i will still likely buy these.

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terry gilliam's proposed ending:
/film wrote:Find Out How Terry Gilliam’s ‘Watchmen’ Would Have Ended

When it finally opened in 2009, Watchmen had been developing for decades under a great many different people. One of them was Terry Gilliam, who’d been attached in the ’90s to helm from a script by Charles McKeown with Joel Silver producing. Alas, they were unable to make it work, and the project eventually fell into Zack Snyder‘s lap.

And while the version he turned in wasn’t bad, really, it wasn’t great, either. Certainly it’s not as great as Silver thinks Gilliam’s movie would’ve been — and after hearing his description of it, we’re inclined to agree. Hit the jump to find out the crazy-brilliant ending Gilliam had had in mind for the Alan Moore-based superhero saga.

Silver spilled the details in an interview with Coming Soon. Though he claimed that he liked Snyder’s Watchmen “very much,” he wasn’t shy about declaring that Gilliam’s would have been “a MUCH much better movie.”

For one thing, he said, Snyder “was too much of a slave to the material.” Though Snyder (or rather his screenwriters) rewrote the ending, he more or less stayed faithful to the plot of the books. In contrast, Gillian’s conclusion would have added a completely new twist.
What he did was he told the story as-is, but instead of the whole notion of the intergalactic thing which was too hard and too silly, what he did was he maintained that the existence of Doctor Manhattan had changed the whole balance of the world economy, the world political structure. He felt that THAT character really altered the way reality had been. He had the Ozymandias character convince, essentially, the Doctor Manhattan character to go back and stop himself from being created, so there never would be a Doctor Manhattan character. He was the only character with real supernatural powers, he went back and prevented himself from being turned into Doctor Manhattan, and in the vortex that was created after that occurred these characters from “Watchmen” only became characters in a comic book.
Silver explained further:
So the three characters, I think it was Rorschach and Nite Owl and Silk Spectre, they’re all of the sudden in Times Square and there’s a kid reading a comic book. They become like the people in Times Square dressing up like characters as opposed to really BEING those characters. There’s a kid reading the comic book and he’s like, “Hey, you’re just like in my comic book.” It was very smart, it was very articulate, and it really gave a very satisfying resolution to the story, but it just didn’t happen. Lost to time.
Granted, since Gilliam never actually got to make his Watchmen movie, we’ll never see how his proposed ending would’ve actually played out. Maybe it would’ve looked silly in practice. In theory, though, this sounds like a great idea — bold, smart, and genuinely surprising. Which ending do you prefer?
snyder's response:
/film wrote:Zack Snyder Blasts Terry Gilliam’s ‘Watchmen’ Idea

Last week, producer Joel Silver said a little something about how Terry Gilliam‘s Watchmen would have been “a MUCH much better movie” than the one Zack Snyder turned in, complete with a detailed explanation of the ending that Gilliam had had in mind. Snyder himself has read Silver’s words, and (unsurprisingly, and understandably), he’s inclined to disagree.

Bashing Gilliam’s conclusion as “completely insane,” Snyder declared that he’d made the movie himself “to save it from the Terry Gilliams of this world.” And he’s pretty happy with the way his Watchmen turned out, even if Silver wasn’t — Snyder says it’s “probably” his favorite of his own films. Read Snyder’s defense of his movie after the jump.

Snyder discussed Gilliam’s Watchmen with The Huffington Post.
f you read the Gilliam ending, it’s completely insane. [...] Yeah, the fans would have stormed the castle on that one. So, honestly, I made “Watchmen” for myself. It’s probably my favorite movie that I’ve made. And I love the graphic novel and I really love everything about the movie. I love the style. I just love the movie and it was a labor of love. And I made it because I knew that the studio would have made the movie anyway and they would have made it crazy. So, finally I made it to save it from the Terry Gilliams of this world.

While Silver criticized Snyder for being “too much of a slave to the material,” Snyder argued that Gilliam’s version wouldn’t have been faithful enough. “If you love the graphic novel, there’s just no way,” he said. “It would be like if you were doing Romeo and Juliet and instead of them waking up in the grave area, they would have time-traveled back in time and none of it would have happened.”

Snyder attributed the poor reception to his Watchmen to a hard-to-please fanboy culture that misunderstood Watchmen‘s satirical elements.
That’s the problem with comic book movies and genre. And I believe that we’ve evolved — I believe that the audiences have evolved. I feel like “Watchmen” came out at sort of the height of the snarky Internet fanboy — like, when he had his biggest strength. And I think if that movie came out now — and this is just my opinion — because now that we’ve had “Avengers” and comic book culture is well established, I think people would realize that the movie is a satire.

You know, the whole movie is a satire. It’s a genre-busting movie. The graphic novel was written to analyze the graphic novel — and comic books and the Cold War and politics and the place that comic books play in the mythology of pop culture. I guess that’s what I’m getting at with the end of “Watchmen” — in the end, the most important thing with the end was that it tells the story of the graphic novel.

The morality tale of the graphic novel is still told exactly as it was told in the graphic novel — I used slightly different devices. The Gilliam version, if you look at it, it has nothing to do with the idea that is the end of the graphic novel. And that’s the thing that I would go, “Well, then don’t do it.” It doesn’t make any sense.

while clearly snyder should not be mentioned in the same paragraph as gilliam, i'm 100% with him here. if that ending had happened, i'd have burned the theater to the ground on principle. that is a fucking ridiculous cop-out ending.

Re: [Movie] The Watchmen

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last night, i watched "the ultimate director's cut" version, which i bought years ago but hadn't watched yet. it takes the director's cut and integrates the "Tales of the Black Freighter" stuff for a complete vision. it is nearly 4h long, i think. but really, it's the best version of the film for me. it plays even more exactly like the comics than the stand-alone film. the occasional "breaks" for black freighter stuff both give the film some breathing room and show you the massive parallels of the story happening in the black freighter comic with the story happening "in real life" which is something missing in the stand-alone film. the pacing is better, it plays better, and feels right. it's essentially the best watchmen film i think we could ever hope for. zack is absolutely loyal to the comics as much as humanly possible, going way out of his way to essentially use them as a storyboard for most shots. if i have one complaint about the film, it's that it's too polished looking. it looks digital. would love to see what it would have been like on film. but, with so many effects, i guess this was easiest. but that is also a difference in some comics - some are/were laser-printed when those came out, dropping the traditional half-tone stuff, and i hated those. i think it's a little "uncanny valley" for me. other than that, casting is great, story is essentially the same as the comics, the costumes are great... i have a hard time understanding why it failed. i mean, maybe all the watchmen nerds like me saw it but that's it? the story is extremely nihilistic, which i'm sure doesn't go over well in the bible belt, for example.

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The idea that some kind of broadly appealing film could be made from an Alan Moore title is a little silly to me--that's not what Alan Moore does.
"I'm like a dog chasing cars, I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one. . . . I'm not a schemer. I just do things."

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Snyder did a really good job (yes, I just said those words) of keeping what works best of the original comic and staying pretty true to it, but changing the things that just wouldn't really work cinematically. It's definitely his best film, and the one I find myself watching from time to time. Maybe he's best when he has a pretty concrete frame to adapt (Watchmen, 300) vs going off and coming up with his own story (Sucker Punch, Man of Steel, BvS).
Just cut them up like regular chickens

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Alexhead wrote:The idea that some kind of broadly appealing film could be made from an Alan Moore title is a little silly to me--that's not what Alan Moore does.
yeah. plus, i guess the younger audience doesn't really remember the height of the cold war.

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Worshiping a second century human headed snake is no sillier than worshiping a 2000 year old zombie carpenter.
The same name thing did make me laugh.
And Malin Åkerman is a horrible actress.
Just cut them up like regular chickens

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darkness wrote:Worshiping a second century human headed snake is no sillier than worshiping a 2000 year old zombie carpenter.
The same name thing did make me laugh.
And Malin Åkerman is a horrible actress.
she acts? i hadn't noticed.