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Watchmen Proves The Cold War Is An Alien World
San Francisco, 11:03 PM
Fri Dec 11
27 posts in the last 24 hours
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03/04/09
When I saw the first trailer for "Watchmen", I thought, "What an overwrought, pretentious piece of crap!" Not that there's anything wrong with those things, in a comic book movie. But "W" seems to be taking itself very seriously, even above and beyond the recent "Batman" movie. So, DVD yes, theater no. Rent, not buy.
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No it didn't. Comics were pretty much exactly the same before and after, although Watchmen is a great speed bump. It's tempting for everybody to say "this thing that I love revolutionized the world" but it's almost never true. Unless what you love is the lightbulb or something. If you're going to go the "treanchant analysis route", CJA, then you probably shouldn't make incredibly sweeping statements about things.
For now, though, I suspect it's really one of those instances where style and substance collide.
Ugh. Although I'm a professional crank. This had a lot of good effort in it, and it's a nice piece. Just be more delicate with sentences, please.
I'm really amped to read the New Yorker review of this. I wonder what it'll be like?
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Great review, thanks for couching it in terms of the Cold War. It's essential to the story and such a significant part of the world we live in even as its "mass hallucination" is swiftly, perhaps dangerously, forgotten.
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03/04/09
Gives me bad dreams every time I read it. I'm not going to see the movie because of that, but I hope it does well.
03/04/09
This sounds like Saving Private Ryan to me. I hate that movie. But I own it. I have never watched it since buying it, but I saw it twice in the theater and I hate every second of it. But I feel obligated to that movie because it felt so REAL, this was the horror that real people faced at that time, I was terrified while watching it, not because of its special effects (though they were gut-wrenching visually as well), but because I know this happened, because I know those boys died and their friends had to keep going, both to stay alive and to fight for what they believed in. I truly believe that was the Greatest Generation.
Nihilism in Watchmen sounds like the flipside to that coin. I love the book, but a movie version can only do its job if it shows the absurdity of "not caring." Saving Private Ryan shows me what it meant to care, Watchmen sounds like a reminder to keep on caring, otherwise we succumb to our very own dystopian society.
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I've seen the movie theater's true face. It's afraid of me... and when the projector breaks and the accumulated film of a three-hour reel spools up around their faces, the projectionists will look down to me and shout, "Go to the concession stand while we get this sorted out!" and I'll whisper, "I want my money back."
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And are people who learn about the past few years in schools going to think that "everyone knew" there were WMD's/connection to 9/11 in Iraq, simply b/c the gov't operated on that assumption and wanted folks to believe it for their purposes? I know many dumbasses do, but they're dumbasses.
(is both old enough to clearly remember the Cold War and heard stuff from military and civilian intel folks who served there, in the field, from the 50's-80's)
03/04/09
While Moore gives welcome insight to the Russian view of post-WWII geopolitics, another detail that dates Watchmen is its premise that the solution to mutually assured destruction was forcing mean aggressive America to back of on the poor beleaguered USSR.
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I might have to get one if I become a actor though...
03/04/09
If an actor uses a middle initial, it's for the same reason -- there was an actor in like the 1930's or 40's called Harrison Ford, so in his early roles, the guy we all know and love had to use an initial till the older man died.
That's why a lot of the younger generation use three names, like Sarah Michelle Gellar.
03/04/09
Imagine it's 1979, and you go to a screening of Donner's Superman. And then a mysterious time-traveling stranger whispers at you as you are coming out of the theater to come see another movie. And in the other theater there is a movie that was made after the deconstruction of the superhero, and shows the superhero in that light. You would be blown away. Absolutely blown away.
But that movie could be Burton's Batman, or X-Men, or even Hancock. Or any of a dozen or so movies made since Watchmen was published. So watchmen does not have the impact it once did, at least not for me, a new reader a generation after publication.
Then you have the fact that the comics themselves have been completely revamped since Watchmen, with The Dark Knight being one of only literally hundreds of graphic novels exploring the very nature of being a Superhero. Indeed, the deconstructed superhero is so common now that when you see the Donner Superman once again--this time in the form of Brandon Routh in Superman Returns--he seems almost self-parodying.
So when I read Watchmen, all the things that Watchmen presaged had happened. The Cold War was gone. Superheroes were human and flawed. And the elements of the book that were subtly parodied in Watchmen--the villain's monologue being one of the more significant concept--had been already parodied to death in an over the top way in everything from Austin powers to The Incredibles.
Reading Watchmen in light of all that had come in the 24 years since it hit the public left me with the impression that while the book was very well written and very expertly constructed, it was, itself, kind of dead and dull. Extraordinary storytelling--but dead and dull. Does that make sense?
Anyway, Snyder may have succeeded in bringing Moore's vision to the screen. But with that, for me, will invariably come the feeling of deadly dullness that I experienced reading the book for the first time 23 years after it was published.
So maybe Zack got it right. But it's too late.
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hahahahah have you ever read a real book?
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The whole reason I fear the making of a movie based on the Foundation trilogy is for some of the same reasons -- it would be a movie out of time. They would make it visually stunning, but I'm afraid the story, no matter how faithful to the original work it would be, would come across as flat and uninteresting, even though the series is a great study in human behavior writ large.
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Too meta. Brainmeltttttt...
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