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'Bourne' Director to take on Watchmen
Here's one of those mixed blessing stories: Paul Greengrass, the director of the Bourne Supremacy has been tapped to direct a film based on The Watchmen, one of the greatest comics ever made. No word on if Paul plans to add Tom Sawyer to the cast.
I first heard about The Watchmen through my g/f this year as it is on the required readings list for one of her English courses at Queen's University in Ontario. I'm looking to reading it during the Christmas break this year, as she really enjoys the book. Thought it was kinda cool to be doing literary analysis of a comic in a university English course. Also great seeing more comic books come to life on screen.. lets hope this one will be better than some of the latest ones that have come out--I won't mention any names as to hold back the flames.
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One of Watchmen's great strengths is its interconnections. How is Hollywood NOT going to screw that up? I mean, movies like Memento are a rarity.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
Even since X-men came out, all the movie makers have been running around snatching up all the comics for "movies" I guess. What happened to reading a comic?
Have you noticed how Alan Moore's comics tend to be a little skruffy in movie form?
The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen and From Hell weren't exactly the greatest movies every made.
"Darren Aronofsky? I'm on the phone NOW!" said Law, clearly excited. "Adrian Veidt, King of Kings!" And then, as if to show off his Watchmen fanboy credentials, he whispered conspiratorially. "I'm tattooed with Rorschach, did you know that?"
Why is this a "mixed blessing"? "The Bourne Supremacy" was pretty good. I don't remember seeing Tom Sawyer in it--and I don't see that Greengrass was involved at all in the LXG movie, to which the Sawyer jab is obviously a reference.
Well going on the Bourne Supremacy, I certainly hope there are no extended car chases in a movie based on Watchmen. That was an absolutely terrible scene, where frantic cutting and shaking cameras replaced actual rapidly moving cars.
As far as I'm concerned those movies were pretty good, so I wouldn't write of a Watchmen movie yet. Who knows? It might be good!
November 23,2004
This city fears me, because I have seen its true face. The Hollywood people want to tell my story. They think they can tell my story? No one can tell my story. No one except me.
In the past there were men who could tell my story. Men like my father or President Eisenhower. But that was before the lawyers and the pornographers and the bleeding heart teachers took over.
Now the smell of their corruption is in the air, polluting everything with their filth and their pornography and their so-called civil liberties.
But their reign will not last. There will be war soon. A Great War sewwping over everything like a storm. And it will wash away the stench and corruption of Hollywood, Las Vegas, New York and all the other cesspools of this country.
And, in their desperation, the people will look up to me an beg me for their help.
And I will look down and I will say
"No."
-------- In Soviet Russia, "Soviet Russia" sigs hate Slashdot.
The book was written in the 80s, and has overtones of an upcoming and inevitable nuclear war between the USSR and the USA. The entire plot of the book is based around it.
IF they try and "adapt" it and make it have something to do with terrorism or whatever... DONE: The movie will suck. No need to read further.
They need to make it an alternate history, along the lines of "What would the world be like today, IF..."
They need to make it clear that if the US _did_ have Dr. Manhattan on its side, the level of tension around the world would have skyrocketed, insuring that the Soviet Union would never have collapsed.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
I always thought an HBO series, 12 episodes, staring middle-weight actors ~might~ be able to pull it off.
No way the depth of the comic is ever conveyed to the screen, even if done shot-for-shot.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
I was a big watchman fan ages ago. I even have the limited edition Hardback (mine isn't for sale).
At the time everyone was for Arnie to play Dr Manhatten. TBH I can't see this movie being as good as the book.
I recently read the book (recently, like two weeks ago) and I was unimpressed. I understand that it was the FIRST of its kind but I was baffled as to why it was the BEST. I will admit that I do not read much into that genre so, but I picked it up because I'd like to read MORE of the genre and I wanted to see where the bar was set. I'll admit that I guess that I expected too much.
The comic-within-a-comic was a nice flourish of parellelism, but why was it there? The link made in one of the later 'pre-chapter text' seemed a little tenuous to justify its prominent exposure through the narrative. The newspaper vendor seemed pointless, he moved the plot forward without adding anything TO the plot.
I did like the 'pre-chapter text' and I thought it added to the overall story. I also liked that the "superheros" were so self-conscious of themselves and their decision to dress up in a costume to fight crime; a jitteriness that adds some 'humanity' to the characters.
But ultimately I think I didn't like Ozymandius and Dr. Manhatten. They edge too close to 'superhero'-dom and I couldn't really identify with either. I thought Ozy...'s justification for destroying Manhatten was lacking and that everyone bought into it at the end (though perhaps because it had been set in motion and unstoppable) (and except Rorshach of course) and just didn't make sense. It felt like he was little more than Travis Bickle with a lot of money and Bickle was nothing more than the criminals and urchins and he despised. Finally, I never really got any feeling for whether Dr. Manhattan had 'settled into' his new skin or whether he would have preferred to remain a non-mutant; he seemed indifferent to the transformation.
So, is this the best the genre has to offer?
I don't want to get into a casting arguement, but the one thing I would be adament about is that Rorshach can't be played by a known actor. If that is the case, the entire plot of him being the crazy doom crier has to be thrown out. As soon as people see Johnny Depp (or someone else famous) in that role, they're going to figure out he's rorshach.
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
There's interesting comments on this in the Onion AV Club interview with Moore.
"What I've tried to do with my work, from Watchmen onward, is to do things that can only be done in comics. For example, with a movie, the audience is going to be dragged through that movie at 24 frames per second. That's the running time of the movie. It's going to take them two hours, or whatever, to watch it. It doesn't matter who they are; that is the speed at which they're going to watch that movie. Now, with comics, it's a much more user-friendly medium. The reader can focus upon one panel for as long as it takes to absorb all of the information that is there, and then move on to the next. If they want to see whether there's some correlation between a bit of dialogue and something that happened a couple of scenes ago, they can, in a matter of seconds, flip back."
Basically, a big part of the elegance of the comic is very deeply tied into its format. In that same interview Moore refers to "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" and "Blade Runner" as a good model for translating one format into another: both are quite good, but they're good for different reasons, they each make use of their form in appropriate ways. I think this is the same kind of reasoning behind the critical praise for the third Harry Potter movie.
On the other hand, I'm inclined to be pessimistic: Moore was hoping that "From Hell" would pull off a Blad-Runner-like success when it moved from comic to screen. Not so.
Rorschach should instead be cast with William H. Macy. I've always been impressed with Macy, and I think that with appropriate study he could bring the role to striking life. Rorschach was a man under intense self control, which in my opinion Macy has striven for in several of his prior roles.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
It sounds like picking up "The Watchmen" as a way to start/renew reading comics(1) may be a bad thing.(2) If it is indeed "the greatest" comicbook,(3) then anything else in the genre won't be as good(4) and you'll probably tire of the genre pretty fast, having sampled its best.(5)
(1)I did.
(2)It was.
(3)It is.
(4)It wasn't.
(5)I did.
The Watchmen is the only comic book story I've ever seen which had to be told in a comic book, because no other medium could do the work justice. It wasn't just a great story which was told through comics, it was a complete work of art which would not be nearly as compelling in any other form.
For example, the comic-within-the-comic that wove through the story. The panels of the kid's pirate comic were juxtaposed agaist the scenes on the street where he was reading it, describing the emotional context of both images as if it could have been the narration box for either scene. Even Terry Gilliam, who briefly considered making a Watchmen film, understood that you could never make something like that work in a motion picture.
The clippings of fictional periodicals which provided much of the depth of the world were also something which could only be done in a comic-book format.
Furthermore, the writers of some of those periodicals, as well as the writer of the pirate comic, were extremely important characters to the narrative, who we got to know almost exclusively through "their" writings. Genius!
The Watchmen will probably continue to stand alone as the most ground-breaking and important work in an art-form which is usually very crass and disposable.
The film however... Let's face it: It probably won't get made, and if it does it will probably suck.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
V for Vendetta is being made into a movie.