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So!
Remember that Minas Tirith cake? Someone made a beautiful, detail replica of Minas Tirith, and it's an amazing thing. Watchmen was like that - the director had taken the comic and turned it into a great big comic cake. We could check out all the little figures in the right places, and see that cool bit with the Comedian going through the windows! And the glass palace on Mars! But it brought nothing new to the table.
Some of the actors (the Comedian, Silk Spectre I and Ozymandias in particular) brought good things to their roles, although they were very circumscribed by using so much of Alan Moore's dialogue verbatim - what works magnificently on the page does not always carry over to the screen. Rorschach's journal, read out loud, had me in fits of inappropriate laughter. I liked the fight scenes, though - Silk Spectre and Nite Owl were really amazingly violent, and they fought in a really strange straight-limbed way. I couldn't think what it reminded me of, until I remembered the Terminators in Sarah Connor Chronicles - they fight using their limbs as levers and crushing weights, not like regular people. The heroes were fighting with super-strength, as the Comedian showed in the first scene and Ozymandias towards the end, and the sight of that being used on regular people was truly disturbing, especially in the alleyway fight. It went a long way to justifying their banning, and why people came to hate them.
While I liked the changed plot at the end - Dr Manhattan IS the giant tentacle vagina squid! - the second it veered away from the tight pacing of the comic, the movie slowed down greatly. Ten minutes could have been taken out of those end scenes - mostly reaction shots - with nothing lost. One place where they did make cuts - to all the street scenes in New York - meant that attention was unduly focused on the one bit player left, who was, of course, Walter Kovacs. It was a bit odd. Oh, one thing I did like better! I felt that I understood Sally Jupiter of the movie and her decisions better than Sally of the comics - in the comic, she seemed to still care for Eddie himself, at least as part of nostalgia for her own past; in the movie she could forgive him, but all her love and care was for her daughter, in both good and bad ways.
We didn't get to see a Wolverine trailer! Boo!
But we did get to see a Star Trek trailer! Sulu got to fight someone! Yay! *flutters eyelashes like Uhura does in every shot so far*
Remember that Minas Tirith cake? Someone made a beautiful, detail replica of Minas Tirith, and it's an amazing thing. Watchmen was like that - the director had taken the comic and turned it into a great big comic cake. We could check out all the little figures in the right places, and see that cool bit with the Comedian going through the windows! And the glass palace on Mars! But it brought nothing new to the table.
Some of the actors (the Comedian, Silk Spectre I and Ozymandias in particular) brought good things to their roles, although they were very circumscribed by using so much of Alan Moore's dialogue verbatim - what works magnificently on the page does not always carry over to the screen. Rorschach's journal, read out loud, had me in fits of inappropriate laughter. I liked the fight scenes, though - Silk Spectre and Nite Owl were really amazingly violent, and they fought in a really strange straight-limbed way. I couldn't think what it reminded me of, until I remembered the Terminators in Sarah Connor Chronicles - they fight using their limbs as levers and crushing weights, not like regular people. The heroes were fighting with super-strength, as the Comedian showed in the first scene and Ozymandias towards the end, and the sight of that being used on regular people was truly disturbing, especially in the alleyway fight. It went a long way to justifying their banning, and why people came to hate them.
While I liked the changed plot at the end - Dr Manhattan IS the giant tentacle vagina squid! - the second it veered away from the tight pacing of the comic, the movie slowed down greatly. Ten minutes could have been taken out of those end scenes - mostly reaction shots - with nothing lost. One place where they did make cuts - to all the street scenes in New York - meant that attention was unduly focused on the one bit player left, who was, of course, Walter Kovacs. It was a bit odd. Oh, one thing I did like better! I felt that I understood Sally Jupiter of the movie and her decisions better than Sally of the comics - in the comic, she seemed to still care for Eddie himself, at least as part of nostalgia for her own past; in the movie she could forgive him, but all her love and care was for her daughter, in both good and bad ways.
We didn't get to see a Wolverine trailer! Boo!
But we did get to see a Star Trek trailer! Sulu got to fight someone! Yay! *flutters eyelashes like Uhura does in every shot so far*