Who Watches...? Oh. Wait. Has That Been Done...?
Does posting thoughts about the "Watchmen" movie count as a meme? Because it really feels like it.
I don't know a lot of people who walked out and said, "God, I loved that!" Alexandra DuPont wrote: "I'm starting to wonder if saying '"Watchmen" was okay' isn't some sort of revolutionary act."
But "Watchmen" wasn't "okay". It was a great movie, not in terms of its excellence, but in its reach. I saw it several days ago, and although I walked out of the theater with mixed feelings, none of them were boredom. I flicked back a dozen times between loving and hating it. Successful or not, Zack Snyder set out to make a "Watchmen" movie properly.
It took me a few days to figure it out. If it had been a bad movie - if it had been "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" - I could have shrugged, written it off, and waited for a better remake in ten or fifteen years. If the movie had wussed out; if the heroes had won; if the rape had been skipped; if Dan hadn't been a nebbish; if Walter Kovacs hadn't been short; if we hadn't had awful violence and a giant, unlikely blue dong, I could put it down.
But the adaptation was excellent. Peter Wilson, Jackie Earle Haley, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan were perfect; the Comedian and Rorschach are so difficult to translate to film, I didn't think it could be done effectively. The movie took serious risks in terms of sex and violence, given that uninitiated audiences probably had their expectations set to "The Dark Knight" or "Iron Man". (Yes, those other movies are violent, but Snyder made the violence horrible.) The changed ending kept close enough to the spirit of the book that I forgave it for fleeing from the 9/11 overtones of the source material. Certain sequences, like Mars, were exactly right. Rorschach's final stand brought tears to my eyes.
In short, the movie did some things better than we ever could've hoped, and better than we're likely to see again. It's just a shame, then, that so much of the movie didn't work: loud, sudden, ill-considered music; godawful old-age makeup; the mis-cast Matthew Goode's distracting-if-well-intended accent; Malin Akerman's limp performance; Carla Gugino's hollow acting as the older Sally Jupiter; above all, a tone the director couldn't quite control.
In some ways, it was the "Watchmen" movie so many people spent decades hoping for, so we can't really ignore it. In others... well, it wasn't quite the Hollywoodization most of us feared, but it failed anyway.
I'll probably see it again, partly because I liked the movie a whole lot more after I'd slept on it, and partly because I feel an urge to vote with my dollars for superhero movies that take risks. I don't know that there will ever be a remake, and if there is, I doubt it'll have anything that lives up to Haley's mad performance, or Billy Crudup's hypnotic narration.
So we got our "Watchmen" movie. Now we just have to live with it.
I don't know a lot of people who walked out and said, "God, I loved that!" Alexandra DuPont wrote: "I'm starting to wonder if saying '"Watchmen" was okay' isn't some sort of revolutionary act."
But "Watchmen" wasn't "okay". It was a great movie, not in terms of its excellence, but in its reach. I saw it several days ago, and although I walked out of the theater with mixed feelings, none of them were boredom. I flicked back a dozen times between loving and hating it. Successful or not, Zack Snyder set out to make a "Watchmen" movie properly.
It took me a few days to figure it out. If it had been a bad movie - if it had been "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" - I could have shrugged, written it off, and waited for a better remake in ten or fifteen years. If the movie had wussed out; if the heroes had won; if the rape had been skipped; if Dan hadn't been a nebbish; if Walter Kovacs hadn't been short; if we hadn't had awful violence and a giant, unlikely blue dong, I could put it down.
But the adaptation was excellent. Peter Wilson, Jackie Earle Haley, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan were perfect; the Comedian and Rorschach are so difficult to translate to film, I didn't think it could be done effectively. The movie took serious risks in terms of sex and violence, given that uninitiated audiences probably had their expectations set to "The Dark Knight" or "Iron Man". (Yes, those other movies are violent, but Snyder made the violence horrible.) The changed ending kept close enough to the spirit of the book that I forgave it for fleeing from the 9/11 overtones of the source material. Certain sequences, like Mars, were exactly right. Rorschach's final stand brought tears to my eyes.
In short, the movie did some things better than we ever could've hoped, and better than we're likely to see again. It's just a shame, then, that so much of the movie didn't work: loud, sudden, ill-considered music; godawful old-age makeup; the mis-cast Matthew Goode's distracting-if-well-intended accent; Malin Akerman's limp performance; Carla Gugino's hollow acting as the older Sally Jupiter; above all, a tone the director couldn't quite control.
In some ways, it was the "Watchmen" movie so many people spent decades hoping for, so we can't really ignore it. In others... well, it wasn't quite the Hollywoodization most of us feared, but it failed anyway.
I'll probably see it again, partly because I liked the movie a whole lot more after I'd slept on it, and partly because I feel an urge to vote with my dollars for superhero movies that take risks. I don't know that there will ever be a remake, and if there is, I doubt it'll have anything that lives up to Haley's mad performance, or Billy Crudup's hypnotic narration.
So we got our "Watchmen" movie. Now we just have to live with it.