Muzman on 26/3/2009 at 05:34

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I haven't seen it (still), but fett dude: the jump from "felt nothing for these characters, there's no arc, no purpose, no one writing this really seemed to have distilled it" to "Must be something wrong with the source material"
:weird: I might be another fanbuoy leaping to the defence of the sacred text but, hang on a minute. Never seen a bad (or even weak) adaptation of anything ever? It's got to always be the source material?
Traditionally it's almost never the source material, why now?


(from what I've read and heard from trusted folks, even the ones who really enjoyed it, I think I'll probably find it a bit thin. Moore's stuff can be like that, particularly the denser short series like 'Watchmen' and 'From Hell'. He makes symbols and connects them and it's not clear that it adds up to anything initially, but after a while the sheer density of it all creates a sort of critical mass of the imagination that'll send you reeling if you let it. Most good sci-fi authors do the same and history nuts like Eco etc.
The divide between that effect and just joining dots between things to no avail is, I think, pretty slight and subtle. I think it would be very easy for Hollywood to do a Cargo Cult job on it and hope it can create the same magic by just repeating the same points, or a lot of them, and hoping it'll work the same way reverse engineered and optimised.
In the right hands it can be done. I think Alfonso Cuaron would have been the sort of guy to eat it up. But once you start making decisions like having a one page fight scene last longer and be more brutal because there needs to be some action, things can lose start to their way. Comics don't have to structure themselves like films, and the reader can stop and re-read or stare and the pictures as long as they want. The adaptation to film would have to be deep.
Honestly, the closest thing to a lot of Moore's work, structurally in a moving picture medium, is The Wire. The first series manages a long arc and lots of characters and symbolism, but still has great personalities and narrative drive. That would have been the thing.
Anyway haven't seen it. Ought to shut up.)

Starrfall on 28/3/2009 at 15:14

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So we saw this yesterday and I managed to go into this with basically zero prior-knowledge baggage. I knew the general idea (the incredibles during the cold war with more violence) and a tiny bit about some of the characters. Haven't read the novel. I didn't read this thread. I still haven't seen any of the trailers. I thought it was a pretty awesome movie. The story was enjoyable, it seemed like it was cast really well (hard to tell without having read the novel but I thought they did a good job), it looked really fucking good, and bonus glowing blue dong.

I thought the violence was more comic-booky than other movies have done and so I actually thought it was less obtrusive/distracting than it could have been. One specific scene I remember is when Ozymandius gets attacked with the captains of industry and a bullet goes through the chicks shin and comes out cleanly though the back of her calf. It was graphic, but not distracting because it looked like a comic book frame (and I suspect it might be one the frames they recreated from the novel). It didn't always work, but it did for the most part.

Opening credits were BOSS.

I didn't have a problem following things despite the cuts they had to make. It would have been nice to see some things fleshed out more, but the movie couldn't have been any longer and it wasn't really necessary - there weren't any gaping holes. (For example I wanted to know the story behind Rorshach's mask but it's not like it was necessary to the story and I found out afterward by asking gbm anyways.)

One complaint I have when it comes to the story-trimming is that it seemed like Oymandius barely does anything until the very end when all of a sudden he's kicking everybody's ass in his secret antarctic pyramid lair. It's fine in theory (maybe they wanted to keep him more low-key so people didn't suspect him as the bad guy or something), but if he's going to be tossing Rorshach and Batowl around they could have shown him kicking ass earlier (the fake assassin scene didn't really do it) so it doesn't look like he all of a sudden became a kung fu master. I guess technically they DID show him kicking the Comedian's ass at the beginning but we (I) didn't know it was him then so the end fight looked like the stereotypical "good guys come to save the day but despite the prowess they demonstrated earlier the smart nerd bad guy is going to totally own them until secret backup good guy comes to help" thing. Although I understand that the ending was pretty much completely made up so there were probably going to be some problems like that no matter what.

I plan on reading the novel but probably won't be able to give it the right attention until august or september so I'm probably going to go back to not reading this thread in case people are talking about the novel too.

WingedKagouti on 28/3/2009 at 19:27

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It's actually not that far from the original story. The story is told in 6 parts, one for each major character: The Comedian, Nite Owl, Silk Spectre, Rorschach, Dr. Manhattan and Ozymandias (not in that excact order iirc). The characters do not get much in the way of characterization outside their own chapter and Adrian doesn't get much space at all until the final part.

vurt on 15/5/2009 at 19:53

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Can't wait to get this on BD, loved every minute of it.

Scots Taffer on 9/7/2009 at 00:21

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I really want to see this movie on blu ray and enjoyed (most of) the theatrical cut, I don't want to buy the director's cut before seeing it unless I actually don't like it as much. It's the same issue I had with T2, I like the director's cut but I personally feel like it's bloated enough already without dream sequences and extra flashbacks and would've rather opted for the theatrical cut (stupidly my release was an "unmarked" director's cut so I have it anyway).