…may be happening. Some details here. This could be great if it happens.
meh. Watchmen had a interesting idea- see just how dark and gritty you could make Super heroes. Hollywood has already run with this idea. Dark and Gritty is passe.
I know I may be insane, but I thought the film adaptation was wonderful. Nearly perfect. I see no major reason to make a show. I’d watch if the reviews were good, though.
I still would prefer that Dune be a Game of Thrones style show instead of another movie attempt. That’s the universe I want to see on TV.
I thought it was quite good. But Moore makes a pretense of hating any movie made from his stuff, so of course the fanboys also hate them.
I would actually, at this point, rather the show just be set in that world. It doesn’t have to follow the plot of the Graphic novel.
This is what I would prefer. The movie has been made. Let’s see the characters get outside of the “Watchmen” plot. Could be a prequel or a sequel. Along the lines of Gotham, perhaps.
I would guess this is what they are doing. I’m not sure about a sequel, since some of the characters that would be most marketable would… uh… not so much be around for a sequel. But you’ve got decades of history that is only vaguely sketched in the original work - everybody’s origins, in particular - that would make good serialized TV.
The movie got the surface of the book right. And missed what the book was about.
Moore wrote Watchmen to address one of the central overlooked issues of the superhero genre: the unnaturalness of it. Most superhero stories, comic books and movies, treat being a superhero as if it’s just another career choice - some people work in an office and some people dress up in tights and punch criminals. Moore pointed out that regular people don’t choose the latter option. You’ve got to have some pretty severe mental issues if you want to be a superhero. And those mental issues don’t disappear when you put on the costume.
But what about the superheroes with powers? They weren’t driven to become superheroes by their mental problems. They simply became superheroes because they had superpowers. But then those superpowers would create mental problems. You can’t pretend to be a regular guy with a normal family life and a 9-to-5 job when you’re actually one of the most powerful beings on Earth. It doesn’t matter how sane you were going into that situation, you’re going to end up with problems.
Moore set Watchmen in as realistic a world as possible so we could see how poorly superheroes would fit in the real world. He made sure to include lots of non-superhero characters living normal lives so we could see the real world that existed outside of the small circle of superheroes.
The movie missed all that. It treated Watchmen like it was a typical superhero story. It accepted the conventions of the genre rather than questioning them.
One point both the book and the movie made is that Superheroes fighting for the status quo can lead to authoritarianism which would make this story very timely I think.
That I would watch.
As an incidental note, there’s a passing reference at the end of Chapter 2 (in a segment from Hollis Mason’s Under the Hood autobio) that “[w]ithin twelve months of Hooded Justice’s dramatic entrance into the public consciousness, there were at least seven other costumed vigilantes on or around America’s West Coast.” None of these are ever specifically named or otherwise referenced. I could picture a period piece set in late 1940’s L.A., showcasing these characters and their interactions - they likely stayed relatively low-key and didn’t form a memorable team (albeit a dysfunctional one) like the east-coast Minutemen.
No. I read Watchmen and V for Vendetta when they were published. I thought both movies were great and that Moore’s being an unshaven old fuddy-duddy.
I, uh, always figured that was simply a mistake: he’s just been going on and on about eight costumed adventurers that we get to know – Hooded Justice and Nite Owl and Mothman and Dollar Bill and Captain Metropolis and the Comedian and the Silk Spectre and the Silhouette – and, right when it would make perfect sense to sum up with a line about how all of them happened to be operating near each other on the East Coast, the Brit writing about America either slips up or throws in a complete non sequitur.
My money is on “slips up”.
I’ve not read the comic, but the movie did seem to me to illustrate that the “superheroes” all had mental problems, and that nothing they did was normal.
Interesting take, and could be correct, though the various editors (including Dick Giordano, Len Wein and Barbara Kesel) would have had to miss it, too.
Sure, but, again, the way you read that one sentence is possible. It’s not like Moore has the guy say that New York is on the West Coast, which an editor could spot all by itself; instead, it’s a line that only draws a “hey, wait a minute” in context.
IRL, what mental state would you expect a costumed vigilante to have? Exploring that is the whole purpose - it’s Moore’s objective, yes?
Ah, shame on me. I misread - your point is that the movie DID have communicate that the costumed vigilante were all off a bit, except maybe Hollis Mason. I dunno - I enjoyed the movie, but went in assuming that a movie form would have to imply all of the deep Mythos-deconstructing pondering that Moore baked in the text.
I have to say, and shame on me here, too, but Moore’s disdain of movies, and Zack Snyder’s other failures do color my view of the movie. I kinda think “given Snyder’s other heavy-handed misses, he can’t have handled the complexity and subtlety that is Moore’s signature very well, right?” So I am more inclined to assume that my fanboy brain fills in the gaps. Kinda like a less extreme form of Lynch’s Dune ;).
But it really is a solid movie. Now, what that means for a series, not sure. The series shouldn’t just be another version of the original though. We don’t need to be Spider-Man’d.
- subtlety* that is Moore’s? subtlety? He’s about a subtle as a wrecking ball.