Owing to the small problem of why there would be any.
Mhm. Exactly. But I don’t see this as a criticism of Watchmen. It’s one of the points of the work.
*Hurm.
It seems a lot of people are saying that one requires an understanding of the book to appreciate the movie. I just wanted to say that I think Watchmen is one of the most brilliant graphic novels ever created. It taught me what comics can do that other mediums cannot. I didn’t think it would adapt very well to film, and I was right. Even appreciating the depth of the story, I didn’t think it was a very good film. But I also can’t say how it could have been made better.
Well, I think that the comic book is good and the movie is not so good. I think what I’m saying is that the not-so-good-ness of the movie doesn’t reflect the goodness of the comic book.
Well, as others have suggested, there might have been more of a chance as a mini-series, but not even that’s a guarantee. Notably, Moore’s works in general don’t translate well to film.
Yeah, but it’s not that controversial a point. “Superheroes need superpowers and suprvillains, or else they’re just weirdos in costumes”? Well, duh. But actual superhero comics *do *have those things, so how is **Watchmen **a commentary on them?
Well, consider the guys we see and hear about in the comic. Big Figure got busted by Nite Owl and Rorschach; he’s – been in prison for maybe twenty years. Moloch got busted by Ozymandias and Doctor Manhattan, which would scare you or me straight; he came out of prison scared straight; the Screaming Skull also got put behind bars and then, y’know, also went straight. We don’t find out what happened to Underboss, but he presumably got stabbed to death in prison over the ownership of a cigarette lighter or something.
I don’t see it. I think most people are saying that some things that seem pointless or confusing or uninteresting in the movie are better expressed in the comic.
They’re weirdos in costumes regardless. The idea there is that if these people had become active in the real world - a world where people usually are not declared pure evil for no reason, where most criminals try not to be really distinctive and eye-catching, where crazy people tend to be really bad at planning stuff instead of really good at it - you’d have seen this kind of thing, and the weirdness would be more obvious. When one person with a genuinely supervillain-ish level of intellect and plotting ability shows up, the heroes don’t stand a chance against him. How does beating up robbers and thieves and even killers prepare you for Ozymandias?
uhh, yah that would b awesome…
Take anyone out of their natural environment and there’s a good chance they’ll come across as lame. Robin Hood in 12th Century England is a folk hero; Robin Hood in 21st Century New York is just another weirdo in green tights and a silly hat. Maybe it’s because I’m good at the whole suspension of disbelief thing, but I’ve never had a problem with the idea that superheroes existed in a universe that was fundamentally different from our own.
My point is that Moore seemed to stack the deck against his protagonists. Of course they were losers - they had no business existing in the world he created. In my opinion the story would have worked much better if it had been set in a universe more similar to that of Marvel or DC.
As least as much as I can remember, I’ve never nitpicked like this, but I had to point out that the Comedian did indeed have a scar in the movie. It was just MUCH more superficial than the one he had in the novel that made the lower part of his face look like hamburger. Go back and watch, and you’ll see that they really only used the bare minimum amount of makeup to create a scar there. I remember this only because it was the first thing I commented on when I left the theater with my friend after watching the movie.
Of course. But the point of the story is not that superheroes are secretly lame. It looks at them in a different context, which involves placing them in a world that’s supposed to feel more realistic than the one they are usually in.
Was it this book? [Action Comics #270](http://www.dcindexes.com/database/story-details.php?storyid=14738 Issue )
There’s a synopsis in the link. I think it’s a stretch to claim he’s had no original ideas based upon this particular book. C’mon.
It’s another of the fun ‘dream’ issues from the Silver Age, not an aged Superman like in Kingdom Come.
As to the issue of using Charlton characters, he’s said it was due to them being up for grabs. Since DC decided they wanted to keep them, at least Captain Atom, alive for future use; he created his own line of characters based very much on the Charlton ones.
He did this precisely because that line had only one ‘super powered’ hero and the rest were regular folks in costumes. The whole point of using Charlton characters to begin with.
Oh my lord this.
The opening credits were incredible. I watched the movie opening night with a bunch of my college buddies who loved the GN, and we had tears in our eyes. Just amazing. Sometimes, I pop the DVD in, watch the credits, and take it right out again.
Also the Hallelujah scene. I’m not a prude, but that was the most pointlessly graphic sex scene I’ve ever seen in a movie. It added nothing, but joke about the lighter didn’t work because of changes to the earlier scene, and it completely ruined that song for me. Yuck.
Whoops. I just noticed that someone beat me to the punch about the Comedian’s scar by a day… I guess that’s what I get for posting before I’ve read the whole thread just so I can remember what I was going to post about!
One thing I will give credit to the movie for: I think Ozymandius’ plot in the movie was better than the original in the comic book.
SPOILER WARNING
In the comic book, Ozymandius had to get Dr Manhattan out of the way in order to make the fake alien invasion work. But other than that, there was no connection between the two. Once the alien had “arrived” and destroyed NYC, there was no real reason Dr Manhattan couldn’t have returned to America which would have left the problem of his future influence over world affairs open-ended. Moore just threw in a deus ex machina about Dr Manhattan deciding to leave Earth at the right moment.
The movie changed this. Ozymandius’ plot was to place the blame for the attack on Dr Manhattan. That way the nations on Earth would come together against a common enemy. But this also forced Dr Manhattan into exile and removed him as a future problem.
Interestingly, in the original movie script, Ozymandius’ plot didn’t involve an attack at all. His plot in this script was to invent a time machine that would change the outcome of the experiment that turned Osterman into Manhattan. In this story, Ozymandius changed history so that Manhattan never existed and history followed its “natural” course (which it implied is our history).
I lack a knowledge of comics history, so there is a lot in the book that makes me feel like I’m at a contemporary art museum-Moore is doing something important, but I don’t quite get all of it. But damn, did it ever give me flashbacks to the sense of impending doom that hung over the late Cold War era.
The lack of supervillians seems like it’s a banality of evil thing, IMHO. Human nature is already more monstrous than some dude in a funny outfit in a secret lair. When the world is a couple of phone calls away from nuclear armageddon, how can a villian compete? What kind of bad behavior did Moloch, Big Figure, et al. even get up to? I don’t recall it being mentioned in the book, and it’s certai
nly not a plot point, so whatever their crimes were, they pale in comparison to atomic death courtesy of Nixon and the nameless Soviets.
Heroes are crazy people. Villians are less frightening than the the real world. Super-powered peopl would be inhuman, making distinctions between superhero and supervillian irrelevant. Am I off base here?
I think much of the criticism for the film comes from 2 camps, there are people unaware of the original work and not predisposed to like something like Watchmen for whatever reason, and encounter something they are unprepared for and so it just makes them crinkle their nose, “This is nothing like Batman!” Then there are the people who know of the original work, have read it or about it and have a sentimentality about it and probably also have read that Moore does not approve and has refused to watch it ect, These people can’t appreciate any derivative of the divine especially when Jesus himself says he wont have anything to do with it.
The result is a very unpopular movie regardless of being amazing and groundbreaking and amazing. Unfortunately movies like these are the lesson directors, producers and other movie investors are taught that makes each successive generation of movies worse than the last. Compromise. Compromise or be punished and see your opportunities dwindle until maybe we let you make a transformers or Pirates of the Caribbean movie for us… maybe.
Moloch operated vice clubs: gambling, prostitution, the sort of stuff that justified keeping thugs on the payroll to protect. (We get a one-panel flashback of Doctor Manhattan dispatching a gunman while scantily-clad women are recoiling in horror, and a one-panel flashback of Ozymandias crooking a finger at Moloch after having laid out a bunch of guys and overturned a roulette wheel.)
Thank you. This was going to gnaw at me until I looked it up.