The contracts for Watchmen were signed a quarter of a century ago, and Moore’s attitude towards adaptions of his work has changed since then. After his experiences with the film of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, not being able to retroactively rescind the rights he granted in the past, he has insisted that he receives no credit on adaptations, and refused to accept any payment.
I’ve been holding off sharing this, but I can hold off no longer:
I think the movie really missed the mark in a lot of ways, though. Consider how Ozymandias is portrayed. In the movie he’s an icy cold elitist. You can tell right away that he’s a dick. But in the graphic novel, Ozy is warm. He’s affable. He’s friendly. He’s human. He cares about people. He doesn’t believe only the elite matter. Yes, he comes off as a self-important douche at times, like various real-life celebrities who spout off about world affairs. But he doesn’t have the glaring psychological problems that all the other characters have. He’s figured out that Bruce Wayne could do 100 times more good as Bruce Wayne billionaire industrialist than he does as Batman, the guy in a mask who punches the mentally ill in alleyways.
In the movie, when it’s revealed that Ozy was behind the plot the whole time, it doesn’t mean anything, because we’ve been given no reason to care about Adrian in the first place. It’s not a twist. He never get the idea that if nice, sane, reasonable Ozymandias came up with this crazy plan, then maybe we should listen.
As for the notion that Watchmen endorses the notion that the ends justifies the means, what does Dr Manhattan say? “Nothing ever ends”. There are no ends, so no means can ever be justified by an end.
As for complaining that Ozymandius made a fortune from insider trading betting on the destruction of New York that he was secretly planning, well, you know, he also killed a couple million people. It makes the insider trading aspect a mite irrelevant. He killed a million people because he thought it would avert an otherwise inevitable nuclear apocalypse, not because he wanted to make ONE MILLION DOLLARS.
It’s reprehensible for the same reasons that allow modern armies to bomb cities, but not loot them.
I liked the film, but I was a fan of the book, so that certainly influenced how I viewed the movie. Snyder made some excellent music choices and I just really enjoyed the way the film looked. On the other hand, Dr. Manhattan’s long speechs about the marvels of the randomness and complexity of existence do work rather better in print than on film.
I liked how the Comedian’s death was the exact sort of dark humored joke that he would have enjoyed. The Comedian is just about as immoral as they come. He’s a rapist, a murderer and a fascist. The only hint of morality he displays is when he finds out Ozymandias’s plan, and feels guilty about it. The guilt causes him to start drunkenly spilling the plan to people, specifically, a former enemy, since a guy like the Comedian doesn’t have friends. It’s pretty much the only sign of morality he shows in the film or book, and it gets him killed.
I agree. You know who would have made a good Ozymandius? George Clooney. Then people would have been properly shocked when he revealed his plan to commit mass murder.
Of course some people would have complained the movie was trying to create a Batman connection.
One of my favorite insights about the book is that Big Figure shows so little fear of Rorschach when they meet in prison because Big Figure never had met Rorschach - BF had only met the relatively sane Kovacs dressed as Rorschach, before R had his real break with reality (the kidnapping case).
I couldn’t agree more. The movie-Ozymandias was the film’s greatest failure, just as the movie-Rorshach was its greatest success, at least in terms of characterization.
As a geeky fan I think that single issue did more than anything else to tamp down my enjoyment of the whole.
:dubious: Pfft. Moore never wants films to be made of his work; he’s been a curmudgeon about it for forever. If I gave that much of a shit about his opinion, I’d have never seen it, and would be sulking around the thread, huffing about how the separate issues are way better than the TPB collection and anyone who has that is just a wannabe, and blah blah whatever.
I wanted to goddamned love this film. I almost cried when I saw the trailer; I nodded over and over as I saw the characters and scenes appear in it. It looked perfect. This was the same way I felt when I saw the Lord of the Rings trilogy trailers, which I also suspected would be unfilmable and would do no justice to a book series that I’ve been reading repeatedly since I was 10.
I fucking adored the LotR trilogy (even as I freely acknowledge flaws and still don’t give a crap), and was left cold by Watchmen. RotK even omitted the Scouring of the Shire. Still love it! Watchmen didn’t connect emotionally for me. It left out much of the humanity in these not-super-humans, not to mention the regular humans as well.
But hey, that’s my opinion.
Giving him a German accent didn’t help.
That’s an interesting take, given that the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie was a huge gamble on an unhelpful franchise in a historically money-sucking genre that starred Orlando Bloom but didn’t give him much screen-time. That it proved so popular is a testament to experimentation in film.
Maybe the movie should have overturned movie tropes, the way the GN overturned comic book tropes. I don’t know how to do that and still end up with something you can call Watchmen.
I liked the flick, but loved the GN when it came out. While it was being published friends of mine - more familiar with Moore’s work than I was - said Ozymandias was the bad guy. I strongly disagreed! After all, he was the man in the Veidt hat. Wrong again, Typo!
And people, it’s Ozymandias - two A’s, no U’s. If the Typo Knig corrects your spelling, you’ve got a probmel.
I agree that the movie wasn’t great. But no, you didn’t.
There is nothing wrong with a little hyperbole :).
I think Anaamika’s point is clear enough - too much Comedian for her taste. Which is reasonable enough, even if I don’t necessarily agree with her POV.
If I ever need to expose you as having no perspective on film I have the perfect quote right here, and anyone who chimes in to agree with you is similarly making themselves irrelevant to anyone with a brain.
I’m perfectly fine with individuals not liking Watchmen, personal taste is one’s own thing, but I’ll always believe the vast majority of people are disliking it for reasons they are not aware of and try to justify that after the fact with whatever descriptive gymnastics they feel necessary to sound defensible.
I found some of the beginning scenes pretty interesting (the warped “where are they now” kind of sequence for example), but it didn’t sustain that. I never finished watching it. At first I meant to, but then I realized that I just didn’t care enough about how it ended to watch for myself.
nice petty insult there, I intended to use amazing twice, it’s called emphasis. It’s amazing and retarded how amazingly retarded you are lol. I’m allowed to like something and have an opinion about it. Someone saying Pirates of the Caribbean was an exercise in experimental, risky film making is just stupid. It’s like his opinion is that black is really green. It’s not subjective. For instance I think you’re a moron. That’s a perspective. That’s subjective.
It’s perfectly fine to have an opinion. But if you’re going to condescend to anyone who disagrees with you -
- then you better be able to walk the walk. If the central point of your post is that you’re smarter than everyone else, you should at least try to make it appear that it might be a possibility. Otherwise people will just be laughing at you.
wait wait, who started this again? I never said I was smarter than anyone. Just smarter than that guy about movies clearly. But if you’d like to go ahead and agree with his appraisal of Pirates now go on ahead.
This must be the first time someone has ever said that about something I have written.