Have you read the graphic novel? The graphic novel appeared on Time's list of the top 100 English-language novels! That is a huge acheivement. Additionally is the only graphic novel to achieve a Hugo Award. Saddly when I read this novel of novels I was seriously disapointed.
What makes The Watchmen book so special? Well this is the first comic book where character development was put before the special powers and super tights! ...and that might be the problem with it for me. I'm a huge fan of character development. I beleive great characters are defined by their faults not their strengths. However, with The Watchmen all of these characters have too many faults and too few strengths.
*Spoilers*
Throughout the story you mainly follow Rorschach which is easily the best character with out twistedly fucked up he is, and nite-owl who is clearly a batman rip off to the extreme. Every characters seems to dwell in the grey area, dont get me wrong I realize all of us do in real life. ...but these guys are hanging out in that grey area that is getting a little black. Nite-Owl is banging booty with another super-hero's wife. Rorschach has no problem killing people in cold blood however most of the time he simply assaults them to an inch of their life.
Actually of all these super-hero's there is only one, "Dr. Manhattan" who can seemingly do anything and everything, yet does really nothing.
The super-villian turns out to be a super-hero who decided that he needed to become a villian to give the others purpose. I know i'm paraphraseing here, but honestly that is the short and skinny of it all.
This is why I think the movie is going to be terrible. The previews make one assume they are watching the standard super-hero movie. ...but this is far from it. There will be no superpowers going on. There will be no clearly defined evil until you find out at the very end that one of the good guys when bad. ...and none of the characters are really "likeable" since they are all so seriously screwed up.
I'll be passing on this movie.
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2 comments:
For once, my friend, we're in complete agreement, in regards to your assessment of the comics and your prediction about the film.
I had much the same problem you described when reading "Watchmen"--I found the characters, ALL of them, so loathsome that I had trouble caring what would happen to them. The writing itself is so dense and inaccessible that you need an annotated version just to pick up all the literary nuance that Alan Moore builds into it, and of course all of that would be lost in a film version. Moore was out to completely deconstruct the super-hero archtype, which had really not been done to this extent in 1985, hence the book's landmark status.
The trailers for the film do indeed dress the film up with as much eye-candy as possible, to show how cool the characters LOOK, but once into the flow of the film, if it's faithful to the source material at all, people will discover a story that's simply joyless. That's the best description I can think of to describe "Watchmen" as a reading experience: "joyless", unless you can REALLY get into deconstructionist and postmodernist literature. Case in point, Ryan Showman, Poley's cohort in "Night of the Nightwolf", LOVES the graphic novel, partly because he's well-read in postmodern criticism and literature.
Oh but it'll be even worse then that, because once the movie exec's see how shity it is. They will want to "spice" it up, and make it more "hip" to today's generation. Just like they did to Vin Diesel's Babylon A.D. film. The movie was re-edited and thus destroyed from the original vision of the writer/director team.
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