m i s o s e r i o u s

Unedited thoughts from a Facebook message to Seventy:

so i liked it too and recognized all the problems that everyone else had.  most of them i was able to explain to myself even though they didn’t feel right (bloody action scenes, veidt’s arc, malin akerman, the music).  my biggest issues is the ending.  i don’t necessarily think that the squid should have been there, but the shock of seeing the carnage after it attacks is totally gone.  all the action scenes are over the top bloody but this wasn’t shocking at all.  i’m not sure if it was intentional but it made me remember this movie Fail Safe from the 50s (the president drops a bomb on new york to keep the russians from attacking everwhere).  plus they showed the explosion in the trailer, which took away any shock value.

overall, he had a pretty impossible task.  but i dont agree the book is unfilmable, its all there… more than most adaptations of books.  the thing that could never be replicated was the impact it had on comics.  how could that possibly translate, since comics have been building off of watchmen for years, and there’s nothing in book that would revolutionize movies the way the comic changed comics.  if citizen kane were made into a comic, the story would be there but the importance could never make that transition.

knowing this, i still felt there was something intangable missing from the movie.  casting a better silk spectre couldnt have changed it.  i was actually rooting for her since everyone across the board has been shitting on her.  she’s not terrible, she just doesn’t pull you in.  its not like she’s someone in the star wars prequels.  i liked veidt and hope he’s in the directors cut a lot more, probably cause my roommate was calling me ozymandias before and after the movie.

for the music, some works some doesnt, but what doesn’t works as shorthand for the audience.  hearing ride of the valkyries somehow makes the vietnam scene fuller even though there are really only two shots in the entire combat section.  vientam + music is so overdone anyway, might as well pick the best of the bunch.  but at the same time its like the movie is winking at the audience, like “hey remember that important movie/song/etc?  this is us taking the piss out of it.”  so this, like other things works in theory but still pulls you out of the movie a little.  he wants to link them to real events, eras, culture so he picked the things that would do that the quickest.  a compromise would be to have someone with a deeper music background picking deeper cuts, like tarantino or cameron crowe would.

the screenplay is solid and doesn’t have that pulling you out of the movie effect except for the “i’m not a comic book villain” line.  it undermines the scene and actually doesnt make sense in the world of the movie.  if it were true to the watchmen universe, he would have said “i’m not an evil pirate” or something, but that wouldn’t make sense.

so like every review, its mostly nitpicking but then the person says they enjoyed it overall.  the movie loves the source material, and that comes across.  its not stripmining it like LXG.  he just doesn’t have the subtlety to not make things “awesome” at all times.  but there are worse things, i guess.  the sex scene is ridiculous and could have been toned way down, but now fanboys forever can jerk off to a real silk spectre, so where’s the harm?  i can’t tell if the over choreographed fight scenes were put in there for people expecting a “real” superhero movie or if that’s really what he imagined in his head when he read the comic.  sort of indicative of the whole movie…has it purposely been made more digestible for a mass audience?  if so, you have to respect that its still so dense and so much is retained.  but, i think it failed in that regard…i can’t imagine two people on a date seeing watchmen and knowing nothing about it and liking the movie at all.  seeing this a lot with print critics.  some of them fucking hate it (ebert is always in awe of ambitious movies so he gave it 4 stars even though he said he didnt get it all).

ok this is getting really long and starting to not make sense.  its always going to inspire more discussion than anything.  there’s never going to be a consensus, like dark knight, but it may inspire more repeat views.  i’m probably going to re-read it right before the directors cut comes out.  i’m kinda reserving final judgment until then.