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Obligatory Thoughts On the Watchmen Movie
Mar. 15th, 2009 01:36 pmI am a total fanatic for the book, but the movie neither made me angry nor added anything to the experience of the story. Mostly it was OK, and good-looking, with periodic outbreaks of awful.
I thought it was an odd choice to have all of Malin Ackerman's dialogue overdubbed by Cameron Diaz.
Agree that Jackie Earle Haley was a great Rorschach. Sounded right. Sloppy and angry and entirely human.
"The Sound of Silence"? Really? I might have given you "All Along the Watchtower," but not both of these, sorry.
In comics, still pictures suggest action with a series of before-and-after pictures. The reader provides the actual action between the panels, in the gutters. Apparently when Zach Snyder reads the action scenes in Watchmen he sees a slow-motion ballet with multiple compound fractures. (Granted, I've always seen Ozymandias' scenes as graceful, but less so Laurie and Dan.) Also he fills in things that didn't happen, like sawing off a man's arms. Watchmen is a violent book and no mistake, but I don't think Snyder understands the difference between the sort that we should be confronted with (e.g. Dr. Manhattan and the Comedian in Vietnam, Rorschach's flashbacks) and gratuitous, almost pornographic violence like the scene in the alley or the fight in the prison.
I wish they'd kept "Did the costumes make it good?" It's worth hitting that point a little harder, I think.
It looked great. I mean, it was all storyboarded out over twenty years ago, so I'm not sure Snyder should get all the credit for that, but whatever.
I wish they hadn't ditched the squid. Maybe the squid doesn't make a lot of sense, but neither does what they replaced it with. One of the things I like about the squid is that it underlines Moore's assertion that humans are not, in fact, rational beings (see: Rorshach, Sally Jupiter, Nixon, etc.) and are more likely to buy an alien threat than to actually address the nuclear question. Dr. Manhattan was always a metaphor for the nuclear deterrent, so using him as a stand-in for nuclear armageddon creates a nested symbolism that doesn't work, in my opinion.
People really need to get over the blue penis. On a related note, I know what my Halloween costume's going to be!
I thought it was an odd choice to have all of Malin Ackerman's dialogue overdubbed by Cameron Diaz.
Agree that Jackie Earle Haley was a great Rorschach. Sounded right. Sloppy and angry and entirely human.
"The Sound of Silence"? Really? I might have given you "All Along the Watchtower," but not both of these, sorry.
In comics, still pictures suggest action with a series of before-and-after pictures. The reader provides the actual action between the panels, in the gutters. Apparently when Zach Snyder reads the action scenes in Watchmen he sees a slow-motion ballet with multiple compound fractures. (Granted, I've always seen Ozymandias' scenes as graceful, but less so Laurie and Dan.) Also he fills in things that didn't happen, like sawing off a man's arms. Watchmen is a violent book and no mistake, but I don't think Snyder understands the difference between the sort that we should be confronted with (e.g. Dr. Manhattan and the Comedian in Vietnam, Rorschach's flashbacks) and gratuitous, almost pornographic violence like the scene in the alley or the fight in the prison.
I wish they'd kept "Did the costumes make it good?" It's worth hitting that point a little harder, I think.
It looked great. I mean, it was all storyboarded out over twenty years ago, so I'm not sure Snyder should get all the credit for that, but whatever.
I wish they hadn't ditched the squid. Maybe the squid doesn't make a lot of sense, but neither does what they replaced it with. One of the things I like about the squid is that it underlines Moore's assertion that humans are not, in fact, rational beings (see: Rorshach, Sally Jupiter, Nixon, etc.) and are more likely to buy an alien threat than to actually address the nuclear question. Dr. Manhattan was always a metaphor for the nuclear deterrent, so using him as a stand-in for nuclear armageddon creates a nested symbolism that doesn't work, in my opinion.
People really need to get over the blue penis. On a related note, I know what my Halloween costume's going to be!