Snyder!

[andrewducker]

[Poll #1597903]

Comments

[andrewducker]

Dawn Of The Dead - had to stop watching half an hour in, because I am a great big wuss.
300 - Made Of Awesome.
Watchmen - A valiant attempt that sadly failed to understand the point of what Alan Moore was saying. Pretty though.
Legend of the Guardians - looks like a good, fun, kids adventure film. With owl-related combat.
Sucker Punch - looks like Terry Gilliam armed with machine guns. Can't go wrong there :->

[broin.livejournal.com]

"Watchmen - A valiant attempt that sadly failed to understand the point of what Alan Moore was saying. Pretty though."

Mr Moore made his point and Mr Snyder made a different one.

[andrewducker]

I'm not sure what point Mr Snyder was making then. And why he used Watchmen to make it. He seemed to think he was making something utterly faithful, from what I read.

[cybik.livejournal.com]

300 is good in certain ways. I own it because it's enjoyably ridiculous, but I think that those who say it is terrible have a point.

[broin.livejournal.com]

How many times have we had this conversation? :D

For starters, you can't make anything 100% accurate, because it's a different time, different place, and different medium. That actors are involved rather than just Dave Gibbons's somewhat static art means everyone interprets the material in unexpected ways.

For example, you could try and reproduce the 9-panel layout, or the recurring symbols, but it would look incredibly heavy-handed and gimmicky in film.

For me, the movie was much more about secret history, which wasn't something I'd really gleaned from the book, even over multiple readings. cf that gorgeous credit sequence. The book lacked that stuff, and seeing that theme explored was enjoyable. And while the movie tackles questions of power and control, Veidt is much less of a Bill Gates character in the movie. In the comicbook, he has amazing influence so it's a shock when we find out his plans. In the movie, it's not such a surprise.

Y'know, they do different things in different ways.

[broin.livejournal.com]

Or here's another one - with 25 years of violent cinematic anti-heroes, Rorschach seems almost cuddly. You can't revisit what a shock he is in the comics in movie form, because we even find ourselves rooting for cannibals.

[andrewducker]

Oh, I don't mind changes in plot, place, etc. None of that was the core of the book.

But the comic was very much about the characters as real people. The whole point was that they weren't "superheroes", they were people in costumes (except for Dr Manhattan). Which is why I hated that Snyder sexed up the combat scenes. In the alley fight in the comic you see Dan and Laurie utterly exhausted, because they're two out of shape people who hav suddenly been in a stressful, very physical bit of combat. In the movie we saw them performing moves that are physically impossible unless you are a superhero, and looking super-sexy at the end of it. To me, that was a massive failure to get the point of Watchmen, which is that ordinary people in masks are not the same thing as superheroes.

[andrewducker]

Terrible? Naah, can't see it.

Cartoonish, ridiculous and over the top? Sure.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Ah, I hadn't realised he was the guy behind the Dawn Of The Dead remake. Thought he did a tremendous job of that, it's far superior to the original.

[broin.livejournal.com]

So if the comic did that, why did the movie have to?

[andrewducker]

It didn't have to.

They could have had two hours of blue screen while someone narrated poetry over the top and called it Watchmen if they wanted to. They owned the rights, they can do that.

I'm talking about what I didn't like.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

It was pretty much a scene by scene conversion wasn't it? With a few changes at the end because the comic book ending had already been ripped off by Heros.

(In that way that Heros ripped off pretty much everything.)

I'm not sure though, it's many years since I last read the comic.

[andrewducker]

There were numerous changes, most of which I was fine with :->

Did Heros have a giant psychic octopus in it? I never saw more than a few episodes.

[broin.livejournal.com]

No you're not. :)

You said 'A valiant attempt that sadly failed to understand the point of what Alan Moore was saying. Pretty though.'

I'm saying it doesn't have to understand it. Making a comic and making a movie will produce completely different works (obviously) and can't even get close to covering the same themes.

The Movie got close to lots of similar themes, but ignored or had to ignore others. Another example - the comic lacks thought bubbles, and everyone is static, so we have to read a LOT into the emotional life of the characters. In the movie, that's clearer because the actors are emoting as actors do.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

No psychic octopi, but there were enough... homages, that the fuss lead to a NY POst article...

http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/item_AKku4yOgqzJ7HKnkaviKXO;jsessionid=4808CC42C9352868CAB2959B3938EBD2

[andrewducker]

So, I'm saying he didn't understand it. You say it doesn't have to. I say that I don't like that.

I think that the fact that movies and comics look different is a completely different issue. There's no reason why a movie couldn't cover the same themes as the comic. To change them either means that he didn't understand or he deliberately changed them. It seems unlikely that he deliberately changed this, as he constantly talked about being as faithful as possible, so I can only conclude that he didn't understand something that was, to me, pretty much the point of the story.

It's like producing a version of Sense and Sensibility which isn't about the differing attitudes of the two sisters (i.e. the representations of sense and of sensibility). Sure, you could, but I'd much rather have a version in which they're cyborg dinosaur hunters who have those two diffrent sensibilities than a version in the original setting which doesn't contain those themes.

[broin.livejournal.com]

Sure, multiple media can explore similar themes, but the _medium_ affects the exploration. The question asked is different. Questioning nostalgia or first loves or the nature of war is different in a poem, comicbook, or sculpture.

It's not that they look different or that the trappings are different. They're a whole 'nother language.

Secondly... that theme wasn't one I took away from the comic. :) The comic is jam-packed with themes, but that wasn't *so* important to me, and probably wouldn't be a theme I'd pick up on now as so many comics mix reality and superheroics.

Darren Aronofsky says that the comic's treatment of conspiracies was pioneering, but after so many conspiracy shows, you can't present that in the same way. Rorscach looks almost kitsch now - his passions don't have the same impact now.

[kvlt-kitty.livejournal.com]

I must say, I'm shocked how many people haven't seen Dawn of the Dead :P!

[andrewducker]

Interesting. I never considered the conspiracy stuff to be that interesting, because it's fairly standard detective stuff. A murder happens, people trace it back, turns out someone in high places has an ulterior motive going on, etc.

I still don't see how the medium affects this particular theme. Which is one that Moore talks about a lot, both in an out of the actual comic. The textual bit after the first issue is all about an event where the ridiculous costume worn by someone distracts from their real life emotion - and concludes with something about how the costumes in the rest of the book are even more ridiculous.

Watchmen is Moore's deconstruction of the superhero genre, his looking under the shiny exterior (or behind the mask) to show that they're a bunch of vigilantes, doing what they do for very human reasons. That they are, in the end, a bunch of messed up human beings with very different motivations. He captured bits of that really well, I just wish he'd not gone into superhero mode for the combat.

[natural20.livejournal.com]

I was going to say something about Watchmen and the taste of your lj friends, but then I saw the conversation with broin and decided not to. :)

It wasn't so much that it was bad as devoid of any passion, energy, point, pathos, emotion or life. And yes, I know I'm basically repeating myself there, I felt I needed to for emphasis. :)

[broin.livejournal.com]

"I still don't see how the medium affects this particular theme."

Imagine if the artist was instead Paul Pope. Or Frank Quitely. Or Rob Liefeld. Wouldn't they each make a difference to what you perceived the story and/or theme to be?

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

I think there are lots of ways you can rate 300, but a simple good/bad axis isn't one of them...

[broin.livejournal.com]

Ha! The option was a Duckeresque GOOD or BAD. If I could have scored it as a percentage, I'd probably have agreed with the overall score here.

It did lack passion and energy. But... I'm struggling to think of the emotion in the comic. Apart from Rorschach's general RAEG and maybe Laurie's whining.

[andrewducker]

Not really. Some people do more realistic people, some less, but so long as the writing was there to emphasise whatever the theme happened to be then suspect I'd pick it up. The main problems I have tend to be when artists don't actually draw what the writer told them to (cf bits of both Arkham Asylum and The Invisibles).

Of course, with writers who write less comprehensive scripts than Alan Moore or Grant Morrison the themes would be more in the hands of the artists in the first place.

[natural20.livejournal.com]

Pshaw, you clicks your button, you takes your chances, we all knew what we were getting into. :)

But really, I'd disagree, I think all of the characters were certainly emotional in different ways, even Dr Manhattan. They also displayed passion and energy at different times. I just never got that from the screen. But hey, it's subjective. You enjoyed it, I didn't. On other days I'd debate for hours, but not today. :)