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Rottenwatch: WATCHMEN

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Spirit of Jazz said:
Obsessively like a child? I always assumed it was him being hungry and needing energy all the time due to his obsessive dedication to eliminating evil. He doesn't have time for meals when he becomes himself (nothing suggests he eats properly ever) hence he eats whenever he has the opportunity whether it be sugar cubes, tins of baked beans or raw eggs. Well, that and I've never seen kids munching on sugar cubes.
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i feel like it's less about obsessive dedication, more about just utter neglect of everything else (which in a sense is sort of the same)
 
Regulus Tera said:
From the comments:
It's rated R, and based on a GRAPHIC novel. You can't get anymore blatant than that.
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Also, how much do we all complain about trailers that give away the entire plot of a movie, let alone the ending? Or comedies that have all the best jokes in the trailer? I don't think it's too much to ask that we continue spoilering things.

Heh: 104 ways to hilariously ruin the Watchmen movie
 
OK somethingawful nailed their joke review. Replacing Alan Moore with Neil Gaiman was inspired.

http://www.somethingawful.com/d/truth-media-reviews/watchmen-review-spoilers.php

Technically, Watchmen is a triumph. The cinematography and special effects are excellent. The casting is fairly good, although I don't think Adrian Brody quite works as Doctor Atomic. Fans of the comic will not find a completely faithful adaptation, but they might be willing to forgive the changes for the obvious love Snyder puts into the set design and the details.

Those of you who aren't familiar with Gaiman's comic masterpiece and those of you looking for something a little more cerebral than, say, "Fantastic Four" should steer clear of Watchmen. It is a thrill ride and a treat for old fans, but it is not going to being winning new audiences to Gaiman's elegant work.
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Neil Gaiman Joke made some people mad.

http://www.somethingawful.com/d/truth-media-flames/truthmedia-flames-watchmen.php :lol :lol :lol
 
Look I'm sensitive to spoilers. I haven't seen BSG past season two. That's why I stay the fuck out of BSG threads. That's why I don't read the AV Club break downs of each episode.

What I won't do is walk into a BSG convention or thread and tell everyone to shut the fuck up because I'm too fucking lazy to get the DVDs from Netflix. I fully understand that if I get BSG spoiled it's my fault -- because the story of BSG is being broadcast to MILLIONS OF PEOPLE AROUND THE PLANET. It's not a secret once its aired and its my fault for not keeping up with the show.

I totally respect NeoGAF's spoilering rules. It's an attempt to be cool. And I think it's best applied to shit like Lost and BSG that is happening right now.

When it comes to The Watchmen I'll play along. But, seriously, if you haven't read the goddamn book right now I don't know why I'm wasting my time talking to you in the first place.
 
Flynn said:
But, seriously, if you haven't read the goddamn book right now I don't know why I'm wasting my time talking to you in the first place.
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:lol

Do you have any friends? Don't bother answering.
 
Had a private press screening of this today and g'damn I loved it. Brutal isn't the word for it. Dr. Manhattan just blowing people to hell caused my jaw to drop more than once. But I was very impressed with the film. I can't wait to buy the Director's Cut in July to see what all was taken out. Bravo Mr. Snyder, bravo.
 
Flynn said:
I totally respect NeoGAF's spoilering rules. It's an attempt to be cool. And I think it's best applied to shit like Lost and BSG that is happening right now.
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This is the thread for discussing the movie, which is happening right now. If you'd like to discuss the comic book, make a thread for the comic book.

When it comes to The Watchmen I'll play along. But, seriously, if you haven't read the goddamn book right now I don't know why I'm wasting my time talking to you in the first place.
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Is this poorly worded? Or do you seriously think that talking to someone who hasn't read this particular comic book is a waste of time?
 
Ri'Orius said:
Is this poorly worded? Or do you seriously think that talking to someone who hasn't read this particular comic book is a waste of time?
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Go back a page and see his retarded rant about being tired of us idiot masses enjoying our narratives unfolding for the first time, while he's content enjoying every Shakespeare story over and over again because he doesn't need it.

Yeah, he's that awful.
 
I'm gonna have to start bulking up on the energy drinks if I'm going to make it through this tonight... I am excited though-- love midnight showings of any kind.
 
*clicks thread

*sees some moron arguing that people who haven't read the book yet and would prefer to go into the film unspoiled are some kind of lesser form of life

*leaves
 
I am watching it tonight with my friends. Hopefully it is good. I've been hearing bad things.
 
JayDubya said:
Already linked.



Incidentally, this is the same guy that made that very mocking American Akira cartoon. :P

So this is kind of like David Hayter reading Metal Gear Awesome.
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I expected someone already linked it. Thanks. I'm editing the post.
 
ezekial45 said:
Just curious; To all the people who've to screenings already, did you happen to see any kids?
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People brought their kids to the screening I went to. Didn't see how they or parents reacted.
 
ezekial45 said:
Just curious; To all the people who've to screenings already, did you happen to see any kids?
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I didn't see anyone younger than 16. There were a lot of cops at my screening, too. They sat behind us, it was kind of uncomfortable.
 
Coin Return said:
I didn't see anyone younger than 16. There were a lot of cops at my screening, too. They sat behind us, it was kind of uncomfortable.
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That worries me... I hope we don't get busted for curfew.

Damn youngins.

Off to see it in an hour, can't wait.
 
So uh I didn't know where else to post this but I just finished the motion comic...I didn't really like the ending.

Jon just blows the shit out of rorschach and the world just comes together. That kid is gonna pick up rorschachs journal. I dunno, felt like it didn't end the way I wanted.
 
Akim said:
So uh I didn't know where else to post this but I just finished the motion comic...I didn't really like the ending.

Jon just blows the shit out of rorschach and the world just comes together. That kid is gonna pick up rorschachs journal. I dunno, felt like it didn't end the way I wanted.
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How else would you have wanted it? For me it's one of the great endings of all time, particularly that final frame.
 
Gary Whitta said:
How else would you have wanted it? For me it's one of the great endings of all time, particularly that final frame.
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I dunno, I really liked the final frame too. Maybe I just didn't want it to end?
 
Ok, so is this movie gonna be good or not??

The Tomato Meter is down to 65%! There must be something rotting under here somewhere.
 
Jokergrin said:
Ok, so is this movie gonna be good or not??

The Tomato Meter is down to 65%! There must be something rotting under here somewhere.
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It's very divisive; I don't know that there's any way to know whether it will be good or not until you see it.

I think I'll probably love it, though; Roger Ebert's review made it sound like it was just my taste.
 
Cheebs said:
The only trailer officially attached to it is Star Trek. The others will be as well I imagine but Star Trek is the only one officially known to be attached to every print of the movie right now.
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Overseas, maybe (where it's a Paramount release) but not in the US. Trailers are only attached to every print when they're from the same studio.
 
The attached trailer for the Watchmen prints at my theater was Observe and Report. Star Trek was just shipped out seperately.
 
Just got back. Freaking awesome.

Doesn't touch the comic, of course, but as a movie, it was fucking amazing.

Also, had some newbs in my theatre who were wondering why they would kill Rorschach as it ruins the potential for a sequel.
 
Enjoyed it quite a bit. The worst part was
Adrian flying in that final fight scene. That was not jumping. That was flight. What the hell?

Also I would have liked to have seen/heard the News Vendor more than a passing shot.

When the explosion happens and he jumps to cover the kid, I got chills. None of my friends understood the significance of it though.

Ah well. They managed to fit most all of it in without it feeling rushed or overly long. New ending works better in a movie, but I still prefer the comic.

Oh, and the sex scene was too long.
Hollis Mason's death could have fit if they cut that scene in half.
 
Buttonbasher said:
Enjoyed it quite a bit. The worst part was
Adrian flying in that final fight scene. That was not jumping. That was flight. What the hell?

Also I would have liked to have seen/heard the News Vendor more than a passing shot.

When the explosion happens and he jumps to cover the kid, I got chills. None of my friends understood the significance of it though.

Ah well. They managed to fit most all of it in without it feeling rushed or overly long. New ending works better in a movie, but I still prefer the comic.

Oh, and the sex scene was too long.
Hollis Mason's death could have fit if they cut that scene in half.
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I think we'll see all the vendor and the kid scenes in the Director's Cut, which will be over 30 mins longer.
 
Watchmen

It knows the notes but doesn't hear the music.Watchmen, Zach Snyder's long-awaited, over-hyped adaptation of Alan Moore's venerated graphic novel, is technically proficient and occasionally beautiful-looking but also flat and nerveless. It has no heart and, more damning, no real understanding of the irony of itself, save for a title sequence set to the tune of Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'" that's bound to be the best five minutes I'm going to see in any movie this year. In this stirring montage, a travelogue through the three ages of comics against the backdrop of American history, Snyder captures the idea that what Moore accomplished in casting a conversation about idol-making through the most populist medium of pop culture is in fact translatable through film, this other most populist medium of pop culture. Where the film missteps is in restoring the superhero group Watchmen to the heavens, resurrecting pop icons in impossible, perfect, virtual tableaux: the character designs are impeccable, the suits are clean, and the violence is obscene, yes, but glossy enough that when things stop for a moment to delve into one character's appalling creation story, it feels unearned and exploitive--so much so that the question that fast follows of why the rest of it feels removed and inhuman almost derails the entire enterprise. Coming from a guy who more admires the Moore source than loves it, it occurs to me thatWatchmen is a movie made by Dr. Manhattan; it should've been made by Rorschach.

Freeze any frame of the film and find in it the panel that inspired it. With each section separated by grabs from the covers of the comic book's initial run, fanboys should have no quarrel with the fidelity of the piece--but the reaction to the picture will likely continue to be fairly muted, as devotees of the graphic novel didn't exactly appreciate it for its slickness and sexiness. I'd hazard that what attracted people to the book is that Moore's vision is one of absolute respect for the power of the image in molding human history. Snyder does seem to understand this in restaging the Kennedy assassination with one of his masked heroes as the culprit, drawing a line pure and true from Zapruder's inauguration of film as history to the comic-book medium's inextricable hold on the collective imagination-in-formation. The power of Moore's work is that it takes the divine and, like Milton's mission, explains the ways of these gods to men in terms that men can understand: they're corrupted by their power and governed by their avarice and the essential baseness of being human. This sentiment is all but jettisoned, alas, by the time Snyder recasts the pathetic victories of sexually-reawakened schlub Night Owl (Patrick Wilson) and paramour Silk Spectre (a severely overmatched Malin Akerman) as triumphant victories. Watchmen--filthy with its director's now-trademark ramping technique--sees itself as a superhero adaptation of a human book. The failures of these characters are just weaknesses our übermenchen must overcome, not the foibles and hubris that lead to their downfall--and ours.

The picture makes icons that are impossible to identify with. As They mourn and rail, it's the preface to heroism as opposed to the portent of doom. Should it be "wicked cool" when omniscient, omnipotent Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup) causes Charlie to explode with a wave of the hand, or should it be laden with the kind of ambivalence and dread that imbues a statement identifying Dr. Manhattan with "God is real, and he's an American"? (A statement that strikes the same chord as Oppenheimer's invocation of the Bhagavad-Gita: "I have become death, the destroyer of worlds." He was an American, too.) Maybe Watchmen fails because it comes at the end of a cycle of superhero films; maybe it fails because Bryan Singer already did it better with Superman Returns. Accordingly, characters like The Comedian (an excellent Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley, ditto) don't exist in a grey area as sociopathic, pregnant-women-killing, convict-deep-frying, mask-wearing freaks (as they do in The Dark Knight, for the most obvious example) but are instead glorified in this bleakly ironic stroke as the very golden calves Moore sought to dissect. The bedevilling conundrum of filming Watchmenisn't its non-linear storyline, its broad shifts in tone, its scope, its explicit sex, blue full-frontal nudity, or gruesome violence. No, the conundrum ofWatchmen is that it's a commentary on idol-making in our culture, the near-instant transformation of any atrocity and cause into buzzwords and ad art--and yet, armed with all that mainframe memory and truckloads of cash, the temptation is to turn Watchmen into an exercise in idolatry. Rorschach, deeply unpleasant and clearly unhinged, is seen in the film as an antihero rather than as something sad and dangerous. The Comedian, a rapist and murderer, becomes the voice, completely without irony, of the American Dream's unravelling.

Consider a moment where The Comedian arrives to dispel a crowd of protestors in a Nixonian 1985 (Tricky Dick is on his fourth term, buoyed there we gather by a victory in Vietnam courtesy God-like Dr. Manhattan), shot by Snyder exactly like Kilgore's arrival on the beach inApocalypse Now but granted here the lustre of a bona fide hero's arrival. It's possible that Watchmen serves merely as a reflection of a cynicism so ingrained in our culture that it's nigh impossible to create ironic heroes--possible, too, that because we're saturated with these indelible, iconic images from popular culture, we're no longer able to resist cheering the well-staged homage. See the scene in Forrest Gump taking its cue fromMidnight Cowboy for another example of what can happen when the sign is violently divorced from the signifier. Or maybe all heroes in 2009 are ironic to us and subject to instant suspicion and mistrust--but what aboutThe Dark Knight? Or Hancock? Isn't it possible, too, to have dark heroes that represent to us the potential in the midst of all that chaos and ambiguity to embody a notion of hope, however tenuous? Perhaps that's beside the point, since Watchmen fails because it never suggests a product of mature conception. It's the computer that plays Rachmaninoff.

For the uninitiated, Watchmen opens with the murder of The Comedian, setting off self-styled hardboiled gumshoe Rorschach to launch an investigation into what he suspects might be a vendetta against masked vigilantes, who were once allowed to flourish in this askew United States. His voiceover advances the narrative (bits from a journal he keeps read like a cross between Dashiell Hammett and Arthur Machen), and it's through his providence that we meet the surviving members of the eponymous legion of superheroes as he seeks to warn them before whatever it is does whatever it wants to do. While the basic twist of the thing is still taken from one of the best hours of the original "The Outer Limits" called "The Architects of Fear" (which Moore references directly--the film only obliquely), the much-discussed revised ending of Snyder's film is actually a marked improvement on the graphic novel's. After 2.5+ hours of flashbacks and interlacing stories (and really, is this difficult for anyone reared on five seasons and counting of "Lost"?), its new sting has about it an utterly modern, completely sensible conclusion to the sense of doom that a creature like Dr. Manhattan should have engendered in the first place. It plays on a culture of fear, not of the unknown "out there" but of the unknown within--the one distinguished by our essential inability to understand the products of our hand anymore. One thing to puzzle out the mechanics of levers and axles, another altogether to explain Blu-rays and Ethernets. The rest of Watchmen--book-ended as it is by a wonderful opening and a solid conclusion (though a long fight in the arctic between three antagonists is distended and moronic)--is a wax effigy and a camp curio. A piffle, a pittance, and everything of which critics of comic-book movies accuse the genre, it's faithful in every way except the poetry and philosophy. It's sleek when it should be ugly and its darkness is a child's impression of nihilism. The movie's all about the jerking-off, not the yawning emptiness and self-loathing that immediately follows. It's pretty. And it means nothing to me.-
Walter Chaw
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http://filmfreakcentral.net/screenreviews/watchmen.htm



I got sent that at work from a mate... I agree with it 100%. Exactly how I felt about the movie.
 
Scullibundo said:
I think we'll see all the vendor and the kid scenes in the Director's Cut, which will be over 30 mins longer.
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That's good.

I totally agree with what someone said a while back about the theatrical run being a preview for the Directors Cut though.
 
Onix said:
So ... IMAX watchers ...

what previews where shown before the movie?
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Half-Blood Prince, new trailer, sort of a re-arranged version of the one posted earlier in its own thread today on gaf.
 
Just got back from seeing it.

As an adaptation, it was very much in the range of high quality, given the deep and complicated source material. Of course, they had to make some cuts here and there, but none of it was detrimental to the story in general. The biggest cut made was better elaboration on the backstory of Ozymandias, but other than that, the movie captured the book quite well.

Additionally, the casting and acting were both top notch. I was almost surprised at how well Rorschach was casted.

Overall, looking at this film as an adaption, I cannot see how anyone could truly have any real gripes. Like I said, there were far more things that the movie did faithfully (and did well) than not. And little changes like
a bomb killing 15 million rather than a monster killing only a few million
actually made sense in the context of the movie.

To any fans of the book, this comes as recommended viewing. It far exceeds the adaptations of any other Alan Moore works.
 
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