Watch Out
The first mainstream reviews of Watchmen are out and the news isn't good. Both Variety and The Hollywood Reporter give it a thumbs down, the latter really slamming it.
What I feared seems to be happening. The film is too devoted to the graphic novel, trying to recreate (while necessarily compressing) the experience. A movie has to be a movie, not a recreation of a comic. The reviews suggest the film will be of greatest interest to fans, which suggests to me it'll be the greatest disappointment to them.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:05 AM
1 Comments:
I'll see it when it opens, but I'm sure I'll hate it.
Remember "The World According to Garp" and "The Hotel New Hampshire"? I liked both books (though I'd probably find them annoying if I re-read them today). The movie of TWATG omitted many plot points, and treated the ones it kept well. The movie of THNH tried to squeeze in every single plot point, and felt like a rushed synopsis of a long book. I see these as the template for what to do, and what not to do.
With the Watchmen movie it will be worse, because they not only will try to include the whole plot, but will try to match the paper-and-ink visuals with cinematic visuals. Very bad idea.
(That's why, e.g., the X-Men in the movies do not wear spandex! The old Batman 1960s TV show seemed like a parody, but that was partially because they literally replicated the comic book visuals... tights and all. Superheroes in comic books wear tights to show the viewer that they are muscular, not because real heroes would do so. In a movie you can tell that someone is muscular even when he is clothed.)
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