Reviews
Watchmen – I watched them.
So last night I finally got to see Watchmen.
It was good – not great, but not horrible and certainly the best Alan Moore adaptation so far done. While totally overscored, the acting was pretty good, the look/design of the film was astonishingly loyal to the comic, as was the casting and direction. Most importantly, while the plot was shorn of side stories, it was also (with one fairly major exception) ripped almost entirely from the page.
But that’s a big part of the problem. When you film a book you are interpreting prose description visually – one of the reasons that the Lord of the Rings movies were so loved by so many people was because they managed to make our imaginations live on screen. the Watchmen film just took the pointers from a visual source and recreated them on screen. And ultimately that seems a little empty. Why bother to do that? I’ve already seen the comic and the illustration that accompanies the plot – I don’t really need to see it again, especially when there is so little reinterpretation of anything – themes, characters or story.
Where they did change things, there were mixed results. The comic is much less violent than the book. At least one major and brutal fight scene in the film is covered in four cells in the comic and the violence is largely implied. And from the evidence of the comic, Laurie doesn’t stab a gang member in the neck with his own knife and then use his body to shield herself from gun fire.
The violence in the comic is much more sparing and with the exception of Rorschach and the Comedian’s sections of the story, actually fairly tame. It’s two-fisted silver age superhero comic book stuff, not the sort of violence that came after Watchmen. And violence in the movie is graphic – to me, it seemed out of character for Nite Owl and most of the other characters. The violence was well done and fun to watch (in the fight scenes at least – Rorschach and the Comedian’s violence was largely horrifying), but it jarred with me thematically.
That leads me to another point. To me, Watchmen is largely a mediation on what the world would be like if people really had dressed up in costumes and fought crime. What sort of people would do something like that? And what effect could it have on the world, especially if some of them really did have super powers? Perhaps necessarily, the movie doesn’t delve into that, but there’s not a whole lot of mediation on the thematic themes of the story.
One thing I did really like about the movie was how much it made me appreciate the comic. I’m now three ‘chapters’ in to my reread and I’d never previosuly noticed how filmic some of the scene changes and the like in the original work were.
It also did manage to take a sprawling, complex and dense plot and par it back to essentials. The ending, as has been widely reported, has been changed. It needed to be because the original ending is reliant on pages and pages of foreshadowing and sie plotting that needed to be cut form the film, but the new ending is clever, well put together and thematically appropriate which was probably the biggest surprise of the whole evening.
Watchmen was a good action film based on vastly better material – as Ciaran said as we left ‘if it had to be done, I’m glad it was done like that’. I’m glad I saw it.
Dollhouse – Nick’s take
So the second episode of Dollhouse has aired and so I thought I’d offer my opinions on it. Overall, I’m jsut not that impressed. I find the premise slightly creepy, Dushku’s acting exactly what I feared it would be and it’s just not very Whedon.
This last point is particularly important – I understand it’s on purpose but I like the snappy dialogue and quips and without those it’s a substandard sci-fi thriller with a very pretty but slightly crap actress in the lead role.
I trust Joss so I’ll give it a few more weeks, especially given the first line in this week’s Onion A.V. Club episode review where the review says
the line [Dushku] was pushing on the show was that it really kicks into gear starting with the sixth episode, which is written by Joss Whedon.
But after six weeks if I don’t give a crap still, I’m gone until ‘teh interweb’ tells me I’m making a mistake.
Brisbane geek shopping
I’m in Brisbane for a day for work and thought I’d take a break this afternoon and check out a couple of geek-related shops: Ace Comics & Games and Pulp Fiction. This is the first of my travel related shop reviews – I’ll do them as I go to visit places but please note that they’re just impressions from (usually) a single visit. › Continue reading