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.
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.
