Fair enough, but those are the things that draw people in from a trailer, in most cases. I think that these action packed “typical” super hero ideas are an attempt to trick the average movie goer to go see it.

Laurie’s costume in the comic was a bathing suit with a neckline down to her navel, covered by a see-through yellow negligee. I’m sorry, but how is that not sexualized? Quite frankly, I think the new costume is, if anything, less so.

I think this movie is going to be a big hit.”

What if I look at it as a movie, and not a comic book movie? Because, I have to tell you, based on that trailer, it looks like a big slice of cheese. Slo-mo sequences that stopped being relevant five minutes after The Matrix was released, bad, wooden acting, cheap rubber suits. I showed it to a couple of friends at work who are not comic book fans, but they did like Iron Man and Dark Knight. They rolled their eyes when they saw it.
It’ll be a hit, if you add a ‘s’ before the ‘h’.

I’m very grateful for you guys responses.

I think my issue with this film, as opposed to say my appreciation of the newer Hulk film, or the Dark Knight, or the Iron Man movie, is that with these adaptations the film teams had decades of ideas, plot-lines, narratives and aesthetics to draw upon.

In some ways they had a job that entailed more difficulty, as the sheer volume of information they were having to edit was much more monumental.

Having said this, what I will say somewhat paradoxically is that I think this results in an EASIER task in adapting these characters to film. This is because, in my opinion at least, having such a wealth of material to adapt will make it IMPOSSIBLE to make a direct story adaptation that maintains true, unaltered fidelity to any one given moment of the 30+ years of stories would be problematic (obligatory origin movies notwithstanding )

With a movie like ‘Watchmen’ I feel like the problem is that Moore had to establish a story which established these conventions of superhero narratives without the 30+ years to do it in. He had to condense in order to achieve the story of the comic in the first place, so with the condensation going on for the film I’m worried that what will be taken from the comics story will be totally stamped with Snyder’s own prejudices and predelictions.

What also worries me is that ‘Watchmen’ is a closed narrative, unlike the other superhero movies, in which it could be said that the movies participate in the greater mythology of a character beyond only the stories actually featured in the comics themselves. With the ongoing story universes of the DCU & MU, having other media forms contributing to the general ideas and principles of the characters is often a valuable a productive mechanism for creativity i.e. Superman’s flight, x-ray vision coming from the radio show etc.

The issues with this adaptation is that it will not add anything to the history of the narrative of the ‘Watchmen’ universe as it evolves over time, as it obviously is not going anywhere!

These means to me, any deviation from the story is just a cynical and narcissistic exercise on behalf of the people adapting the comic to film. If one is not going to remain ‘true’ to what is the content of the comic which is “SO important”, and ‘MUST’ be made into a film, then why make it into a film? It just doesn’t make sense to me.

Plus, I must say, it’s not as if the film is NOT cashing in on the cultural capital attached to the comic. The teaser trailer was all over the ‘best graphic novel ever’ hyperbole. I think this film is being made to make someone a lot of money. Hence my reluctance to buy into a Zack Snyder product, given the history of his film-making not going far beyond making politically dubious, superficial adaptations of other people’s work.

I’m not against a shallow, pop culture piece of entertainment… I loved the OC, for example!

My issue is how a story is adapted. I’m worried that a story written by a left-leaning, most definitely liberal, ex-Anarchist like Moore, will be augmented by Snyder, who seems to me to have an obsession with glorying in quite depth-less celebrations of violence.

I guess I just can’t get over my own distaste for Snyder’s work, on one level, and my own desire to see the key ideas of what I loved in the book to remain.

All the stuff that is being shown of this movie seems to show action, violence, and visuals. I want to see the characters come through, the tensions and emotions of the story.

Plus, I’m very worried about the costume changes, more specifically, Silk Spectre. I’m not liking the fetish gear. Makes her far too much of an object of lust for the audience. I think that will undermine the depth of the journey her character goes through. I think she’s gonna be reduced to being the super eye-candy, without a serious dynamic of her own.

Personally, I don’t think there will be any group known as the Watchmen in the film, it sounded weird in the trailer. And if there IS a Watchmen group, it’s probably the revived Crimebusters that was attempted to be formed with Rorscharch, Nite Owl, etc in one of the flashback scenes, not any kind of team to go up against Ozy. And while your right, any reference to a group of heroes called the Watchmen does distill some of the meaning, I think that generally it won’t hurt the movie in a major sense.

But maybe I just think it sounded out of place because I know they shouldn’t be called that.

Everything was so pompous and serious and then in the last chapter they drop a fricking giant squid in the middle of NY and we’re supposed to take THAT seriously? Yeah, talk about realism…

Hopefully, Zack Snyder & co. will make this more interesting.

I think that’s Republic Serial villain plot.

Cheers,

B

The reason you can’t just drop in some generic replacement for the squid is simple and character based.

Blake doesn’t wig out as strangely (for him) as he does merely because he stumbles onto Veidt’s plot to trick the world into getting along.

What drives him kind of depressed and crazy isn’t just the general idea of a scheme — it’s the added insult/joke of the specific outlandish nature of the scheme, a nature that’s so incredibly stupefying that the general idea of such a scheme when combined with the ludicrousness of what the scheme is, and the fact that something so ludicrous in fact is a reality… THAT’S what accounts for Blake’s state of mind in the period leading up to his murder.

To take away the sheer outlandishness and lunacy of the SPECIFIC SCHEME IN THE COMIC and replace it with little more than a James Bond villain plan completely undoes the foundation of what makes Blake who Blake is at the end of his life.

Blake would not drunkenly visit Moloch in the middle of the night (no idea if he even does, in the movie version) to rant about the big joke someone’s about to play on the entire world over just some cheap-ass Bond villain scheme. The entire reason he’s unhinged is the mere existence of such a scheme PLUS it’s ludicrous specifics.

His character simply does not work when you just replace the squid with some dumb Bond villain plot.

I’m glad there’s no stupid big squid at the end of this movie. All of you complainers seems to forget this is a movie made for EVERYONE, not just the people who read comics, and in particular, have read Watchmen. Get off your high horses, and just enjoy the movie for what it is.

I think this movie is going to be a big hit.

Only fanboys can ruin it for themselves.

Not really…
The point was that he found out millions of people were going to be killed, but it would have to happen for the greater good. It had nothing to do with the Squid at all.
I really hope, however, that it’s not about the world turning on Dr. Manhattan. It’s much better to have the world coming together against an unknown threat, like in the book. They haven’t specifically said whether or not that’s what it’s going to be.
Against God (Dr. Manhattan) what else can you do but try much more deadly techniques and weapons? That wouldn’t cause the world to come together.
Against an unknown alien invasion, you’d have to stop international strife instantly, because the squabbles of different countries have much less importance when the entire planet could be in danger.
Still excited to see the movie, regardless of all of this.

The main problem with changing the ending, as others have noted, is that the whole point of the mock alien invasion was that it united the world against a common, foreign cause. This ending unites the world against Dr. Manhattan, an American soldier/weapon. If they can pull it off, i’ll be impressed, but I don’t really see how they would do it.

And, similarly, I don’t really see what about discovering this plot would drive the Comedian off edge and require him being killed. Honestly, he would probably love that solution.

Ozymandia looks and sounds ridiculous. Shouldn’t be calling themselves Watchmen.

The same way super humans are colloquially referred to as Marvels in MU.

This isn’t about the squid, this isn’t about the new costumes, this isn’t even about using the word “watchmen” or Malin Ackerman’s wooden performance.

This is about the neon tone everything has. This is about bullet-time This is about making 1980s Times Square look “cool”, instead of the whore-infested, trash-littered dump it actually was. A Watchmen film should look like an early Scorsese film, not like a prequel to the Matrix.

I have already mentally and emotionally accepted the idea that the movie is not going to be perfect, and it is not going to come close to capturing all of the complex and nuanced story telling from the book.

However, I’m still optimistic that this film will work. In some ways, I don’t want it to be exactly like the book. I’ve read that story, I know how it plays.

That being said, the fact that they referred to them as the Watchmen really bothered me. ha. I’ll wait and see how it is done in the final cut, but that seemed to be a little too far. I know why they did it, to connect more dots and remove some of the more abstract ideas (since there isn’t enough time in a 2.5 hour film to establish all of those nuances), but really…

Go Mavs!!!

So I find myself wondering if I’m as irritating to “Watchmen” fans as I seem to be to other, more open-minded Trek fans, when I say that I was never a big fan of the Watchmen comics, but I am really liking these trailers for the movie. Love the balletic action, the strict (as my eyes see it) adherence to the look of the characters, the compelling imagery, and the hypnotic music choices. As much as the grumpy comic fan in me hates what “Watchmen” did to the comic book industry by making its caretakers quit thinking of comics as disposable entertainment for the masses and start insisting that it be taken way too seriously as an art form, I feel like I cannot miss this movie! It just looks so daggone cool.

Fire at will, if you’ve been kind enough to read this far….

I’m guessing this name is avoided due to the current poltical connotations around the right-wing vigilantes that patrol the Mexico/America border. My speculation only of course… I would never accuse Zack ’300 isn’t a right-wing, homoerotic, justification for western imperialism based upon the defence of a mythological and historically inaccurate notion of democracy’ Snyder of defending or not wishing to offend right-wing sensibilities……..