"Watchmen" movie - Trailer!

[simonsays]

Campy 80's Saturday morning cartoon style Watchmen: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/485797

If you havn't seen the movie or read the book then this does have some spoilers, but if you know the story and you grew up with terrible 80s cartoons then this is pretty hilarious.

edit: you have to click the Watch This Movie link

[kermitology]

Originally Posted by Eastern Girl

"99 Luftballons" made me think, "What?" but even that one seemed to work within the feel of the movie.

Well the English translation makes perfect sense since it's about nuclear apocalypse.

[Eastern Girl]

I wasn't aware of that. Even so, I was speaking about the sound of the song anyways. It's pretty 'flighty' and light sounding.

[truth14]

Terrible movie.
Waste of 3 hours.

[Yeah_Baby]

Originally Posted by truth14

Terrible movie.
Waste of 3 hours.

Care to share why you thought so?

[Jing]

I actually quite enjoyed the movie, due to the fact that it is not your typical super hero movie.

[Iowa_Flames_Fan]

I just watched it. I have to write a review tonight--I'll post my thoughts when it's done. My main criticism is how they mangled the ending, which seems in its current form to lose any vestige of moral complexity--but maybe that's just me. Can't say much more than that without spoilers for both the comic and the film.

[Yeah_Baby]

Originally Posted by Iowa_Flames_Fan

I just watched it. I have to write a review tonight--I'll post my thoughts when it's done. My main criticism is how they mangled the ending, which seems in its current form to lose any vestige of moral complexity--but maybe that's just me. Can't say much more than that without spoilers for both the comic and the film.

Spoiler Text in White


You missed the giant squid didn't you

[Iowa_Flames_Fan]

Originally Posted by Yeah_Baby

Spoiler Text in White


You missed the giant squid didn't you

Yes. Yes I did!

[Iowa_Flames_Fan]

Here's draft 1 of my review: fair warning, it's a little long--so don't read it if you're pressed for time. However, comments are appreciated, as it's not due until to-morrow A.M.

One of the recurring motifs in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ graphic novel Watchmen is an ad for ladies’ perfume that appears here and there on billboards and in television advertisements. The fragrance is called “Nostalgia”—and it is a fitting place to begin talking about Zach Snyder’s springtime offering of the same name, a nearly 3 hour adaptation of Watchmen to the silver screen that winds up feeling less like a superhero movie and more a movie that longs for the past—like a kind of love letter to the 1980s.

Snyder, part of the creative team that brought us 300, doesn’t exactly have the sort of resume that inspires confidence of a steady directorial hand—and like his last film, Watchmen has a few too many Michael-Bay-esque slow-motion action sequences, and not enough close-in character studies to allow the virtuosic performance of Jackie Earle Haley to shine in the way that we sense it might have. On the plus side, there is much less yelling—and many of the twists and turns of Moore’s Byzantine plot are recreated faithfully (with one gigantic exception, which I’ll avoid spoiling here). In the end, it’s an enjoyable movie, well-paced and well-photographed and (mostly) well acted. But the problem is that its devotion to the visual iconography of the original comic book—and indeed, to the 1980s more generally—makes of this film precisely the sort of “nostalgia” that Moore implicitly critiqued by depicting “longing for a distant past” as the sort of impulse that can be patented, bottled and sold to a waiting army of suckers, desperate to be told what they should consume.
Fans of the graphic novel will likely approach this film with perhaps the least interesting question that can be asked about it: is it faithful enough? This is understandable. After all, many of these young people have been waiting for this film, we may say, for their entire literary lives. Watchmen is a graphic novel that inspires missionary zeal; it is passed around with the hushed reverence of a sacred ritual, and the world is divided accordingly into the rapt faith of those who see Watchmen as a virtuosic expansion of the possibilities of the graphic novel and the sad apostasy of those who decry its misogyny, its ultra-violence, its moral simplicity and its utter lack of characters with redeeming qualities of any kind.

And is it faithful? Mostly yes, with a few crucial omissions and one huge exception. But the spirit of Moore’s novel is lost in the sands of time, and Snyder’s film makes almost no attempt to retrieve it. Snyder’s Watchmen elegizes the aesthetics of the 1980s—and the soundtrack, which includes every youth anthem from Bob Dylan’s “The Times They are a’ Changin” to Nena’s Cold War protest song “99 Luftballons” is a heavy-handed accompaniment to a movie that is likewise about the impending threat of nuclear holocaust. And this may be why Snyder’s tribute to Moore comes up a little short of the profundity of the original: Moore’s novel was not a love letter to the 80s—and his was not an 80s that was cutely populated with 3.5” floppy disks (as a high-tech office in Snyder’s Watchmen is) but with stark and awful moral choices, and a trenchant criticism of the empty mathematics of nuclear war in which we must ask ourselves: how many lives are worth how many other lives? This was the ghoulish arithmetic that helped Harry Truman sleep at night, but Moore offers it up as the urgent question of 1985, and refuses to allow his reader to walk away from the choice without staring, horrified into the utilitarian abyss that it opens up.

Watchmen ends up being a complex film—filled with riveting action sequences and stunning visual effects. It runs nearly 3 hours, and at that length we might fairly expect that it would address itself more clearly to some urgent crisis of today, the way that Alan Moore addressed himself to the peculiar crises of the 1980s, of Cold War, of Reaganomics and Lee Iacocca. To be sure, all these things are present—but here they are viewed through a haze of nostalgia, and the novel’s most urgent criticisms now seem a little quaint and empty. What remains is the bare bones of a comic book movie; and that’s not so great.

[Yeah_Baby]

Thanks for sharing. Am I simplifying to much to say that you believe that something was lost in the translation to film?

[Iowa_Flames_Fan]

Originally Posted by Yeah_Baby

Thanks for sharing. Am I simplifying to much to say that you believe that something was lost in the translation to film?

Not at all. Thanks for reading it!

[Yeah_Baby]

I'm curious to see the director's cut to see what Snyder puts back in. But for as complex as the novel is I think they did a damn good job.

[Coach]

I have to say, I enjoyed the change on the ending. It seemed less hokey than the one in the book and it still had the same outcome. In the book it was fine, but I think a lot of mainstream audiences would have found it corny and out of nowhere in the context of the film

[peter12]

Originally Posted by Iowa_Flames_Fan

I just watched it. I have to write a review tonight--I'll post my thoughts when it's done. My main criticism is how they mangled the ending, which seems in its current form to lose any vestige of moral complexity--but maybe that's just me. Can't say much more than that without spoilers for both the comic and the film.

Couldn't agree more. Hated the ending and I can't figure out why they changed it.

The first 3/4s were pretty good so far as a film adaption of the book could go. I thought Rorshauch was brilliant.

[3 Justin 3]

I will go today, running on the will to stay awake (I have been up for like 35 hours or something). Pack the 4 pack of red bull and lets do this. 3 hours is a long movie though.

[VANFLAMESFAN]

I enjoyed it, visually awesome, 7.5/10......It wasn't mind blowing good, but it was solid.

People are complaining about the length, but I didn't find it long at all. I thought the pace was really good, I was totally into it.

[Ronald Pagan]

Who's the review for IFF?

[Iowa_Flames_Fan]

Originally Posted by Ronald Pagan

Who's the review for IFF?

The Iowa City Press-Citizen. I don't live in Iowa City any more, but the opinion editor is a friend of mine, and I occasionally write the odd editorial or review for him.

[Jables16]

Originally Posted by CaramonLS

Blah is all I have to say.

I hadn't read the comics before, so this is where I am coming from.

Spoiler review:

Amazing visuals (loved Rowsap's mask) and Rowsap as a character was pretty spectacular. However, the movie seemed to really drag on in a lot of parts. I thought the dragging out on the back story of the comedian didn't add too much value to the movie - we get it, that chick is your daughter, you were a bad dude, you got killed, you were on to Veidt - I don't need to see you for half the movie explaining this back story. The whole introduction/plot was really unclear. It was kinda of hard to follow it in that respect as well. I didn't go in expecting much in terms of a superhero movie - but I would have liked to see a little more in terms of action (don't get this confused for violence/gore, which in the movie was actually pretty over the top in some areas). I'm not sure if that could've fit into the story, but that was more of what I was hoping for. You've got this awesome cast of characters and it seems you didn't use them or you got to see their full potential.

Anyways just my opinion. Maybe you should read the comics before going and you might enjoy it more than I did.

Not trying to criticize to harshly if you haven't read the graphic novel or aren't a big reader in general but the character of The Comedian is a CRUCIAL character to the message of both works. Watchmen is a novel in every sense of the word because the writing, storyline, and commentary has the depth and subtext of any classic literary work. It just employs another medium by being set to illustration in a comic book style which being as the story is about heroes is fitting. I don't want to get into all the metaphors and aforementioned subtext since I don't really have time and I would definitely sound like an arrogant prick but trust me it's worth a read and maybe another view to pick up on a few things. There's a lot of movies, albums, books etc. out there that get better the second, third, hundredth time you partake.

I do agree there were a few scenes where the violence was a bit gratuitous and was actually added for the movie such as Rorschach's treatment of the little girl's killer and the fat guy during the prison scene.