Topic: Will you watch these Watchmen? (Read 125153 times)

Blue Kitty · « **Reply #250 on:** 08 Mar 2009, 10:57 »

Quote from: Johnny C on 08 Mar 2009, 00:12

Some of the audience didn't seem to get at first that the violence is supposed to make you kind of uncomfortable but I think they got it by the end. Still didn't justify a bunch of scenes where they BEAT UP THUGS except Snyder actually managed to include a subtext (!) that suggests that the heroes kind of got off on the violence and the idea of vigilante justice which isn't morally vindicated at any point and in fact gets morally muddled when Silk Spectre knocks out a cop. Nixon's nose was dumb as hell.

I thought they were going to get it on right there in the alley from the way they looked at each other, and my cousin turned to me and asked, "Is Nixon's nose supposed to look that bad?"

When Rorschach said his famous, "I'm not in here with you, you're in here with me," line, half the audience laughed hysterically.

ImRonBurgundy? · « **Reply #251 on:** 08 Mar 2009, 11:07 »

http://splashpage.mtv.com/2009/03/02/lee-iacocca-is-alive-and-well-and-not-looking-forward-to-watchmen-movie/

The more things Zack Snyder says, the more I suspect he may genuinely be an idiot.

Johnny C · « **Reply #252 on:** 08 Mar 2009, 13:02 »

Quote from: Blue Kitty on 08 Mar 2009, 10:57

When Rorschach said his famous, "I'm not in here with you, you're in here with me," line, half the audience laughed hysterically.

Yeah, at first I was upset because I didn't find it funny but then I realized it was actually some seriously grim humour from Rorschach.

Quote from: ImRonBurgundy? on 08 Mar 2009, 11:07

The more things Zack Snyder says, the more I suspect he may genuinely be an idiot.

Hahahaha what the hell, did someone get paid to write this article? It was dumb that Iaccocca was included just as someone to be shot but not exactly newsworthy.

EDIT: Oh my god the page of little hidden things has him veering between idiot and idiot savant. Look at this:

Quote

Like Alan Moore's graphic novel, the final confrontation in the film begins when we find Adrian Veidt sitting in front of a massive wall of televisions. As the world's smartest man takes in all the information, director Zack Snyder delights in goosing his audience with dozens of in-jokes. "The original '300 Spartans' is on one of them," said the "300" director, referring to the 1962 movie that predated his tale of King Leonidas. "There's also 'The Road Warrior' that you can see, which was a really influential movie for me in the '80s. ... There's some porn, some real porn — which is cool.

Now look at this:

Quote

There's a Marvin the Martian [cartoon], which is the one where he's trying to destroy the Earth — which speaks to the annihilation of the planet that Ozy's having an issue with at that time. There's 'The Day the Earth Stood Still,' which is featured heavily in the graphic novel, and there's 'Fail Safe,' which is another Cold War-era epic."

Lines · « **Reply #253 on:** 08 Mar 2009, 14:06 »

Quote from: Blue Kitty on 07 Mar 2009, 23:22

The one thing I hated was the sex scene, it went on for way to long and I may never be able to listen to Hallelujah the same again.

I couldn't help but laugh during that scene. I was the only one in the theater laughing (I went to a small local one), but it was funny! I had to agree with my friend when she said it was basically soft core porn set to Leonard Cohen.

Johnny C · « **Reply #254 on:** 08 Mar 2009, 14:33 »

I'm pawing through the comic today and I came across that scene and, well,

Dazed · « **Reply #255 on:** 08 Mar 2009, 14:35 »

It's much harder to depict nipples shaking in comic form.

Johnny C · « **Reply #256 on:** 08 Mar 2009, 15:13 »

ALSO MISSING: cheesy lounge keyboards

Lines · « **Reply #257 on:** 08 Mar 2009, 16:08 »

It's one thing to show them undressing and whatnot and then the flame and to do OMGZ NAKED THRUSTS with a total shoe fetish shot and then the flame thing. It's more implied in the book whereas it's outright shown in the movie. So...I don't think we really needed the whole nipple shake thing.

Alex C · « **Reply #258 on:** 08 Mar 2009, 16:22 »

My low tolerance for silly completely submarined this movie, particularly for some of the music choices and the slo mo action.

Ford Prefect · « **Reply #259 on:** 08 Mar 2009, 20:20 »

So I stayed to the end, in the off chance that there was an additional scene (I'm glad there wasn't. It would have ruined the mood.) As I'm walking out, I hear this conversation :

Woman 1 - It was smart of them to leave it open for sequels.

Man - What?

Woman 1 - Yeah, if this movie does really well, I could see them making a sequel.

Woman 2 - It could be about John's return to Earth.

Quote from: Johnny C on 08 Mar 2009, 15:13

ALSO MISSING: cheesy lounge keyboards

Also missing :

Johnny C · « **Reply #260 on:** 08 Mar 2009, 23:18 »

i am pretty sure the squid thing would have torpedoed the film

elcapitan · « **Reply #261 on:** 09 Mar 2009, 05:38 »

Quote from: Alex C on 08 Mar 2009, 16:22

some of the music choices

Man. I thought the movie was average at best, but the music choices were universally fucking atrocious.

I mean, come on. Let's see a little originality. Failing that, let's see some goddamn CONNECTION to the story.

Johnny C · « **Reply #262 on:** 09 Mar 2009, 08:11 »

A lot of the soundtrack cues came from the comic itself.

KvP · « **Reply #263 on:** 09 Mar 2009, 09:17 »

Quote from: Johnny C on 08 Mar 2009, 23:18

i am pretty sure the squid thing would have torpedoed the film

A blue-skinned pipe-swinging God-man, that's okay. A giant psychic squid, that's pushing it.

sandysmilinstrange · « **Reply #264 on:** 09 Mar 2009, 09:27 »

I was not delighted or disappointed with the film. I thought it was pretty solid in the end.

KickThatBathProf · « **Reply #265 on:** 09 Mar 2009, 09:58 »

My Watchmen experience was ruined by the bros sittin behind me started laughing every time doc's penis was just hangin out

benji · « **Reply #266 on:** 09 Mar 2009, 10:17 »

Quote from: sandysmilinstrange on 09 Mar 2009, 09:27

I was not delighted or disappointed with the film. I thought it was pretty solid in the end.

This matches my opinion pretty closely. I was satisfied? I guess? I was entertained throughout and none of the changes bothered me too much. Thankfully, I was warned (by that other thread) that the characters were going to be portrayed more as "super heroes" with lots of slow-mo action. I still don't think the book needed to be filmed.

Scandanavian War Machine · « **Reply #267 on:** 09 Mar 2009, 10:30 »

saw it, liked it, will probably see it again.

my only complaint is that there were two ten year old mexican kids behind me shouting in spanish and kicking my seat. i blame the parents.

fucking parents.

Johnny C · « **Reply #268 on:** 09 Mar 2009, 10:37 »

Quote from: KvP on 09 Mar 2009, 09:17

A blue-skinned pipe-swinging God-man, that's okay. A giant psychic squid, that's pushing it.

If you can't see why a gigantic horror squid with a vagina eye and an exposed brain – literally a nightmare made flesh – teleporting into Manhattan is kind of a ridiculous concept even in the face of an invincible blue superbeing and especially compared to your garden-variety atomic explosion, something that has actually occurred in the real world, then you really need to readjust your perspective.

Even in the context of the comic – can we admit this now? – it was kind of absurd. We accepted it because the logic of the comic made sense right up to that point and Moore had been telegraphing it fairly well, so we didn't make a big deal of it even if its existence was almost as tough to swallow as the world's reaction to it. (like, really, would the world unite and gird itself against another hypothetical cataclysmic event that couldn't even be predicted, let alone stopped? that's easily the thing that, rereading the comic, i have the most trouble with.) Snyder and Tse made a revision that asks us mostly to accept that Ozy would be willing to frame Dr. Manhattan for the greater good, and that the world would believe that an angered Dr. Manhattan, furious with the arms race, would destroy millions in order to send a message to billions.

Alex C · « **Reply #269 on:** 09 Mar 2009, 11:25 »

Quote from: Johnny C on 09 Mar 2009, 08:11

A lot of the soundtrack cues came from the comic itself.

Yep, it's kind of unfair to trash them for saying it had little connection to the story/comic, even if it didn't work out so well in practice. While I wasn't a huge fan of the period music, it was mostly the original stuff that bookended things which was really bugging me. As Johnny said earlier, the Law and Order type stuff was god awful. The music in the prison break scene also kind of bugged me, although it probably didn't help that the scene made me feel sort of embarrassed to be the theater in general. Again, I just have a low tolerance for silly. It doesn't help that the movie I had seen most recently prior to Watchmen was Coraline, which was probably the best pairings of composer and material I've heard in quite a while.

Dazed · « **Reply #270 on:** 09 Mar 2009, 11:37 »

Yeah, I saw this again last night, this time with my childhood best friend, who has not read the comic. After I finished explaining how it actually ends, with the squid thing he was just kind of like, "What the fuck? Really?" I think altering the ending a bit (i.e. removing the squid) was necessary to make it cinematically viable.

Scandanavian War Machine · « **Reply #271 on:** 09 Mar 2009, 11:46 »

yeah, definitely.

kind of irritating that they took "creative license" with stuff like the ending (even though i know it had to be changed) and Laurie's smoking, and a few other tidbits but they couldn't get even a little bit creative and make some really good original music instead of using the music that was in the comic no matter how out-of-place or inappropriate it was.

KvP · « **Reply #272 on:** 09 Mar 2009, 11:49 »

I'm not saying the squid isn't ridiculous, I'm saying it's equally ridiculous as anything else in the comic. If anything the movie increased the ridiculousness to a certain (apparently unnoticeable) extent by virtue of it being a live-action film.

Johnny C · « **Reply #273 on:** 09 Mar 2009, 12:46 »

The squid is in no way equally ridiculous.

Like, it literally has no basis in reality. The comic's reality, I mean.

it is so ridiculous that it does not exist until the smartest man in the world executes a diabolically evil plan

Lines · « **Reply #274 on:** 09 Mar 2009, 14:05 »

To be honest, I thought the alien thing was kind of silly in the comic. I mean, it didn't bother me that Jon was not set in reality (maybe because he had been human at one point), but everything else was. Creating an alien was not a smart plan, it was a silly one. Just teleporting bombs to cities and blaming it on the one superhuman guy makes a lot more sense.

Besides, that alien was butt-ugly.

Scandanavian War Machine · « **Reply #275 on:** 09 Mar 2009, 14:10 »

Quote from: Johnny C on 09 Mar 2009, 12:46

Like, it literally has no basis in reality. The comic's reality, I mean.

aside from the psychic powers bit, i have to disagree with you. it was established early on that because of Jon the worlds technologies had grown to incredible levels very quickly and diverged quite far from the 80's that we remember. i mean, Veidt had the extinct cat with him all the time that he had genetically engineered or whatever. it's really not so far-fetched that he'd be able to create a big squid monster.

supersheep · « **Reply #276 on:** 09 Mar 2009, 14:32 »

Also, John is completely invincible, short (probably) of a black hole. At least an alien squid being is something you can possibly defeat.

Man did the music jar me. And the sex scene was unintentionally hilarious. And it left me feeling a bit hollow. A friend said that it wasn't good or bad, it just happened, and I sort of agree with him.

Blue Kitty · « **Reply #277 on:** 09 Mar 2009, 15:02 »

Speaking of the cat, my cousin thought they should have mentioned it seeing as how it pretty much came out of nowhere. It kind of made sense when they had the giant squid, but now it seems out of place.

I will admit it looks better in the movie then in the book though.

Scandanavian War Machine · « **Reply #278 on:** 09 Mar 2009, 15:17 »

yeah, the comic had Veidt give a little mini-monologue about how he resurrected it from fossilized DNA or whatever it was, so it made sense; espescially with the squid and everything, and the whole bit about nuclear cars and how technology has changed, none of which was mentioned in the movie.

Johnny C · « **Reply #279 on:** 09 Mar 2009, 15:47 »

The cat was another way Moore foreshadowed the squid so he does seem a bit out of place.

KvP · « **Reply #280 on:** 09 Mar 2009, 15:59 »

Did anybody else catch the hybrid car in the epilogue? Were those in the rest of the movie?

I figured it was just something thrown in to show how Veidt had created a perfect future.

RallyMonkey · « **Reply #281 on:** 09 Mar 2009, 16:34 »

How could you miss the car? They focused purely on it for about 45 seconds as one of the last shots of the film.

Inlander · « **Reply #282 on:** 09 Mar 2009, 17:23 »

Having only just read the comic (finished it yesterday actually, like many other people I probably wouldn't have gone out and bought it if not for the hype surrounding the film), for me the biggest problem with the squid-monster is the "human psychic" bit. Having painstakingly set up a world in which, apart from Dr. Manhattan, nobody has super-powers (unless you count being exceptionally intelligent and wealthy as a super-power), in which the super-heroes are just folks who like to put on costumes and beat people up - all of a sudden Moore asks the reader to buy the line that "Oh yeah, and there are psychics, too." Really? Psychics? Where did they came from? Basically it was massively deus-ex-machina (a phrase which I think is actually mentioned in the comic at some stage, though I can't remember where).

The comic was good, though.

Blue Kitty · « **Reply #283 on:** 09 Mar 2009, 17:44 »

I wasn't going crazy, I knew they had flying scooters

Ford Prefect · « **Reply #284 on:** 09 Mar 2009, 18:56 »

So I was at work today, and I was thinking where I had seen the super-psychic squid, and then it dawned on me:

Psychic Squid -

Flying Spaghetti Monster

KickThatBathProf · « **Reply #285 on:** 09 Mar 2009, 19:05 »

That is not the same thing at all

Johnny C · « **Reply #286 on:** 09 Mar 2009, 19:29 »

Quote from: Inlander on 09 Mar 2009, 17:23

The comic was good, though.

Yeah I mean that's a flaw but not a crippling one, and the ending succeeds despite it. But the movie's ending seems grounded more in its own reality, and while its ultimate meaning is a bit more nihilistic it's also tremendously effective.

David_Dovey · « **Reply #287 on:** 09 Mar 2009, 19:30 »

Quote from: Linds on 09 Mar 2009, 14:05

Besides, that alien was cunt-ugly.

Lines · « **Reply #288 on:** 10 Mar 2009, 14:24 »

carrotosaurus · « **Reply #289 on:** 10 Mar 2009, 19:50 »

Man, I started writing about the movie and just couldn't stop. If anyone's interested in my long rambling review it's here.

KvP · « **Reply #290 on:** 10 Mar 2009, 21:16 »

Watchmen walkouts? Watchmouts?

ackblom12 · « **Reply #291 on:** 10 Mar 2009, 21:36 »

I officially think I may have read an entirely different writing of The Watchmen book than most reviewers did.

WriterofAllWrongs · « **Reply #292 on:** 10 Mar 2009, 22:14 »

Quote from: KvP on 10 Mar 2009, 21:16

Watchmen walkouts? Watchmouts?

Man, that is balls. This film was covering a dense story accurately without leaving out too much of the original story, and people expected it to be a brisk 90-minute Spiderman-esque affair?

Ozymandias · « **Reply #293 on:** 10 Mar 2009, 22:16 »

Those comments about the terrible cover of Hallelujah and how Snyder is ridiculous for having a flaming ejaculation are hilarious.

Johnny C · « **Reply #294 on:** 11 Mar 2009, 00:54 »

Quote from: Ozymandias on 10 Mar 2009, 22:16

having a flaming ejaculation

i was so weirded out by this being in the comic

lprkn · « **Reply #295 on:** 11 Mar 2009, 11:06 »

Quote from: AV Club

All of this, combined with the film's not-bad-but-definitely-weak box-office take spells trouble for Watchmen.

What?

Dimmukane · « **Reply #296 on:** 11 Mar 2009, 11:23 »

Well, it did only make 55 million over the weekend. Domestically, anyways. Which is still a lot of money. I wasn't expecting this to be a blockbuster, personally, just a big-budget film that did moderately well. It seems like many fans of the comic thought this was going to be a lot bigger than it actually is.

KvP · « **Reply #297 on:** 11 Mar 2009, 11:32 »

300 made a lot more in the same time frame. And given its mixed reviews, length, and overall geek factor there's a decent chance it'll drop off in the weeks ahead. It'll probably break $100 million though.

lprkn · « **Reply #298 on:** 11 Mar 2009, 12:39 »

I'm pretty sure it'll do pretty well on dvd.

Alex C · « **Reply #299 on:** 11 Mar 2009, 12:59 »

Pretty well on DVD will comfort the execs, but it won't make them feel truly happy about the whole ordeal. There were legal snafus, a long development and the movie has a big budget to overcome. The budget issue is a bigger problem then you think, because you also have to think in terms of opportunity costs; $100 million is enough to make 2 or 3 movies that could have potentially spawned sequels or big dvd revenue in their own right. Big studios don't spend $100 million so they can "do OK after dvd sales." They spend $100 million to rake in a ton at box office and big dvd sales or to hopefully kickstart a franchise. If this were LAIKA studios or something, I'd nod in agreement and say that breaking even before dvd sales probably made everyone happy all around. But this is Warner Brother's we're talking about here. Warner Bros., Universal and Paramount don't really fuck around with this kind of thing and think of it as a resounding success.

I mean, let's take a moment to look at a movie like Austin Powers, which is exactly the sort of success story that gives the suits gigantic boners. Austin Powers 1 made something around $120 million total box office once you combine US and global ticket sales, but it only cost $20 million dollars to produce, making it an unqualiified success for a low rent Mike Myers vehicle. It was then played pretty much around the clock on cable and home video, leading to a lot of good vibes and a pair of blockbuster PG-13 sequels. When you're in the movie business, that's exactly what you want. You want it to be PG-13 so everyone can go to it, you want it to eventually be on cable all the time and you want to be able to make a full-fledged franchise out of it so you can just just ride that baby into the ground and make as much money as possible with a minimum of advertising costs and guesswork. None of that is really a possibilty with Watchmen. They've got one real shot to make money off of a single film and that's it.

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Author Topic: Will you watch these Watchmen? (Read 125153 times)

ackblom12