18.7.08

Watchmen trailer

http://www.joblo.com/video/joblo/player.php?video=watchmentrlr

I don't have time to write this. But it's such an I-told-you-so moment that sacrifices must be made.

So for the years preceding a definite in-production Watchmen movie, I was on Moore's side that the comic was unfilmable, insofar that the most one can do in adapting a limited series is to present the story exactly as-is, adding one's own stylistic choices with regards to the storytelling in the shift from paper to film. Ususally directors mess up in one way or another. V for Vendetta, for example, could've been a better thinly-veiled political allegory if the Wachowskis adjusted the plot and characters a little more, and had their own original story only inspired by Moore's as a result. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen could've made a better film if the directors and movie studio had ever read the comic at all and tried to apply the actual plot to the characters, or even the characters to the characters. (Both examples are Moore books, but damn do his works get filmed badly.)

So Zach Snyder's falling in line here. If you've watched the trailer and read the comic, you'll have noticed two things: that the movie is exactly the same as the comic, word for word, shot for shot. But now it's moving, which I suppose justifies the umpteen million dollars it took to make the drawings move about in high definition. Which brings us to the second point, which is that somebody, maybe Snyder, maybe the movie studio backing him, maybe Gibbons himself, didn't get an important part of Watchmen, which was the art style. Certainly the movie retains the art design--down to the least fractal on Manhattan's crystal Martian palace from what I can see--but none of the style. Watchmen was the lovechild of the 1980s and you can see it in everything from the plot to the dialogue to the themes to the way the pencils and colors were applied to the page. But this trailer was crisp and clean as 300. Which should've been brilliant and clear. But Watchmen shouldn't, for the same reason watching Nosferatu in color or DBZ in live-action would unsettle me.

Gilliam made the right choice when he abandoned trying to adapt the film a few years ago.

And Rorschach's voice sucks.

1 comment:

Thaine said...

Dunno wut ta say. The trailer gets me excited, but I know that's what they wanna do. And I wanna hate the movie so bad.

I noticed though, that the song in the trailer is the Smashing Pumpkins song "The End is the Beginning is the End." "Where have I heard that before?" you may ask yourself.

ANSWER: BATMAN AND ROBIN. The movie. Yeah, with the Governator and Poison Ivy and Batgirl. The one that sucked the most. So the marketing department gets a nod for ironic references.