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Just saw Watchmen at the neighborhood moviehouse. Been waiting 24 years for a movie of this book. My judgment?
Meh.
That's actually kind of depressing. I think I'd rather have hated it than just shrugged. But by twenty minutes in, I knew it wasn't going to get me. It was meeting Ozymandias that did it - WOW, was that guy wrong for the part. And Christ, I couldn't understand half of what he said.
It is a stylistic triumph...in some ways. The design work has a faux-future-romance look to it, like when Disney revamped Tomorrowland to look like it was desingned by Jules Verne. You're looking at America in the 80's, if history had taken certain turns about fifty years before. It's the same as now, but not the same; its ideas aren't quite the same. The film's design captures that parallel-veering-away aesthetic well.
But in other ways, the style very annoying. McG is not what I'd call a great director; he's far too egotistical to realize when his fillips just get in the way. That stop-and-start thing, now. I'm sorry, but that's commercial bullshit. This is a heavily anticipated, major motion picture, not a fucking Apple ad. There's other crap like that as well, including the horrifying use of songs on the soundtrack. Heavy-handed would not be nearly adequate to describe it, but here's an example: there's a fuck scene accompanied by Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. 'Nuff said, I hope.
The whole thing's like that. Really great stuff coupled with just plain lame. Not to mention the necessity of cutting so much of the background and underground of the book, which just leaves the topmost layer, the superhero plot, and that was always the framework, not the whole thing. A lot's been lost, and that I don't blame McG for; a film of Watchmen could never contain the whole thing. (That's a mistake that a lot of people make about Alan Moore's work. They think that his use of framing as a device similar to camera work makes his work cinematic, but it doesn't. Just because Watchmen looks like a movie doesn't mean it could ever really be one, or at least a good one.)
Haley Joel Osment was one of the first actors offered the role of Harry Potter. He refused, saying "Some books should stay books." Whether you agree with him about Potter, he is damn right in a general sense. Some things translate, others don't. I suppose it could have been far worse.
And that's kind of depressing.
Just saw Watchmen at the neighborhood moviehouse. Been waiting 24 years for a movie of this book. My judgment?
Meh.
That's actually kind of depressing. I think I'd rather have hated it than just shrugged. But by twenty minutes in, I knew it wasn't going to get me. It was meeting Ozymandias that did it - WOW, was that guy wrong for the part. And Christ, I couldn't understand half of what he said.
It is a stylistic triumph...in some ways. The design work has a faux-future-romance look to it, like when Disney revamped Tomorrowland to look like it was desingned by Jules Verne. You're looking at America in the 80's, if history had taken certain turns about fifty years before. It's the same as now, but not the same; its ideas aren't quite the same. The film's design captures that parallel-veering-away aesthetic well.
But in other ways, the style very annoying. McG is not what I'd call a great director; he's far too egotistical to realize when his fillips just get in the way. That stop-and-start thing, now. I'm sorry, but that's commercial bullshit. This is a heavily anticipated, major motion picture, not a fucking Apple ad. There's other crap like that as well, including the horrifying use of songs on the soundtrack. Heavy-handed would not be nearly adequate to describe it, but here's an example: there's a fuck scene accompanied by Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. 'Nuff said, I hope.
The whole thing's like that. Really great stuff coupled with just plain lame. Not to mention the necessity of cutting so much of the background and underground of the book, which just leaves the topmost layer, the superhero plot, and that was always the framework, not the whole thing. A lot's been lost, and that I don't blame McG for; a film of Watchmen could never contain the whole thing. (That's a mistake that a lot of people make about Alan Moore's work. They think that his use of framing as a device similar to camera work makes his work cinematic, but it doesn't. Just because Watchmen looks like a movie doesn't mean it could ever really be one, or at least a good one.)
Haley Joel Osment was one of the first actors offered the role of Harry Potter. He refused, saying "Some books should stay books." Whether you agree with him about Potter, he is damn right in a general sense. Some things translate, others don't. I suppose it could have been far worse.
And that's kind of depressing.
