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Will you watch these Watchmen?
Alex C:
Oh, yeah, I nearly forgot about the way he shits all over video games everytime he's forced to sit through another god awful adaptation. Oddly though, I think he's relatively even handed about that, even if he does take a few unnecessary cheap shots along the way; for example, he gave Hitman a relatively decent review despite his biases. He didn't just crap all over it just because Uwe Bolle inflicted Blood Rayne on us or because the average video game has about as much plot as a porno.
I do think that Ebert's being a bit myopic about the issue though. I don't think that all video games are art, necessarily, or that the mechanics of video gaming are even in any way truly conducive to creating art. But I do think they can at the very least contain art. You can tell stories and create images with video games. Whether or not wrangling a joypad diminishes the power of that story or not is quite a different matter from saying there is no art present in games at all.
Surgoshan:
--- Quote from: Alex C on 04 Mar 2009, 20:27 ---Yeah, I get that, and I enjoy Ebert's reviews in part because I like that about him. But I still didn't expect this movie to really turn out very well. I find the idea that my trepidation may be unfounded slightly disorienting.
--- End quote ---
See, my trepidation is slight.
The modifications (and they are legion) have nothing to do with the substance of the novel. They practically used the novel as a storyboard. The changes have made it more modern in the sense that what people expected to see in the costume of a hero 30 years ago is entirely different from what we expect to see now. That's the largest stylistic change. 30 years ago, a guy named Night Owl (II) was expected to look like an owl. Now we expect him to look like a badass with a hint of owl. Function before function.
The major story changes were, I believe, dropped because they simply couldn't be adapted to film; caveat: not without keeping the film both A) watchable and B) under 4 hours in length. Like dropping the Black Freighter subtext. The film will be more straightforward, but keep the basic suspense... insofar as an adaptation of such a seminal work can be suspenseful. I believe that it will try to keep the story... along the lines of The Usual Suspects. Perhaps it's because I was only 14, but the end of TUS took me completely by surprise. In fact, Watchmen can't even achieve that level of suspense, if only because Dreiburg and Rorschach already knew Veidt was behind it when the went to Antarctica...
Basically, the big problem most reviewers have with the movie is that the fact that they're ignorant. They don't know the purpose of the story. Okay, huge caveat, I'm assuming most reviewers are ignorant fucktards who got jobs as reviewers because they couldn't get jobs as producers' assistants.
The story of Watchmen is a deconstruction of the masked hero. Hence the negative colors (purple, green) rather than primary (blue, yellow, red). You're not meant to like and approve of the crime-fighters. You're meant to question their motives. Dreiburg's a bored dilettante. Juspezyck was forced into it by her mother, who was into it for money. The comedian did it because he liked hurting people. Rorschach's a serial killer. Of all of them, the only one ostensibly motivated by heroics is Veidt; he does it to improve the human condition. He's the only one motivated to "good for goodness' sake"... and he follows this to a wholly logical and wholly absurd conclusion that makes him perhaps the worst mass murderer in human history.
This is what Ebert gets, and what virtually ever other reviewer will not.
This is not an action movie; this is a movie with action in it.
This is not a comic book movie; this is a movie based on a comic book.
This is not the Dark Knight; this is a movie with the Dark Knight's budget.
This is not a movie; this is a film.
Because Watchmen was not a comic book; Watchmen was the first graphic novel.
At least... this is what I hope. And given that the early reviews have been uniformly negative (except for Ebert), this is what I expect.
Alex C:
The idea that I was never really upset by it is kinda the whole reason I chose a word as mild as trepidation in the first place. ;)
Dimmukane:
Although I generally hate making comparisons to Ayn Rand, Ebert is kind of like the Howard Roark of movie critics. Basically: he gets it, and nobody else (famous critics, anyways) does. There's obviously more to it than that, but he genuinely seems to do his job for his love of film and literature and not for any other reason.
He's also not nearly as myopic about the video games thing as he used to be. He has commented on his blog about it, something along the lines of "They are still not art, but they are making progress."
KvP:
I'm not really up in arms about his assessments but I have to admit that's not really progress. "It's alright - for a video game" doesn't really contradict his earlier assertions.
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