This is something I've been wanting to do for a while, and what better place to do it than here?
I've seen Watchmen twice now. Upon my first viewing, I was not impressed. I scrutinized it heavily against the graphic novel and concluded that it was, as Alan Moore told Terry Gilliam so many years ago, simply unfilmable.
When I watched it again months later, however, I enjoyed it much more, and that is because I didn't constantly compare it to the graphic novel. I watched it simply as a movie. I still have issues with it, though. The violence is, in places, gratuitous. Not that I'm morally opposed to it, but I feel that it detracts from the realism of the movie. Same with the ultra-slow-mo, which was awesome in 300 (Zack Snyder's previous film), but feels out of place here.
Still, all in all, Snyder made a great movie in Watchmen. It's smarter and deeper than the average superhero movie.
However, I can't help but wonder how much better it would have been if it had done a few things a little more in the spirit of the graphic novel...
I'll start with the characters. I feel that the casting of the characters was good with the exception of Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias. In the graphic novel, Adrian Veidt is a complex man, both exceptionally intelligent and exceptionally powerful. (I always saw him as a cross between a jock and a genius.) In the movie, Matthew Goode portrays Ozymandias as a soft-spoken aristocrat. The graphic novel's Ozymandias is beyond any stereotype, which is more than the movie's can say.
I was a little disappointed with Dr. Manhatten's portrayal, as well. Billy Crudup is a great actor and he does a decent enough job, but he failed to carry the godly quality of the graphic novel's Dr. Manhatten over to the big screen.
More disappointing to me than the aforementioned flukes, however, is that the movie is devoid of the graphic novel's spirit. In the graphic novel, the Cold War plays a huge role in the plot and the sense of imminent armaggeddon is constantly felt. This is what made the climax of the story so poignant and so intense that it transcended the page and gripped the reader. THE ENTIRE PLOT HINGED ON IT!
The film, however, spends far too much time with the characters and far too little time on the plot. From what I can deduce, Snyder tried to cram as much of the graphic novel into the movie as he could. While his effort to remain as dogmatically faithful to the source material is commendable, it ultimately proves to be the film's worst attribute. The climax (which was altered from the graphic novel in order to save time) works, but not nearly as well as it could have. What I would have done had I made the movie is focused less on the details of the characters' backgrounds and spent more time on the Doomsday Clock (figuratively speaking).
painting again
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This time trying to paint less from the head and more from the heart. The
middle one is vaguely inspired by Mark Rothko. All still in progress.
5 years ago
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