Ha.

/I'm still excited
//Haven't read it either

I heard it's about men who make watches or something.

They probably could have gotten the real David Hayter.

In a Solid Snake outfit.

A movie I'm paying a babysitter way too much money to watch my kids for the midnight opening.

I work at a movie theater. One of my managers has been babbling about this movie incessantly ever since it was first announced, and has subsequently been updating virtually every employee at the theater about every twist and turn the Watchmen legal battles have been taking. On top of that, whenever I work upstairs concessions, I'm in direct earshot of about a half-dozen animated preview screens that cycle a 45-minute collection of roughly a dozen movie previews and commercials, including the Watchmen preview with Billy Corgan's trademark scratchy whinge wailing in the background.

I'm almost sick of this movie, and it hasn't even come out yet. Still, I'll probably go see it, despite knowing almost nothing about it.

xadrian: How many people saw Iron Man, never having read the comic?


I did and really regretted it. (the watching)

wildcardjack:

Seriously, is the book worth it?
...
I suppose $11 from Amazon might be worth the gamble.


On the one hand: It's one of the great literary works of the 20th century.

On the other hand: Have you re-read 'The Grapes of Wrath' since that High School book report?

The gripping hand: It's very much a product of its times, and has to be read in context. And it's a very bad -first- graphic novel. If you're unfamiliar with visual storytelling and not conversant in Silver Age comics tropes, and if you don't remember the Cold War, much of the book will go sailing over your head. What's worse, the post-modernist approach to superheroics has grown somewhat stale in the 20+ years since Alan Moore et al inaugurated it, and the story certainly doesn't play the same way to a modern audience.

Mileage may vary, of course.

First of all, nice video, but it's one of those 'you get it or you don't' funnys, so I can see the 'huh' reactions here.

Second, I'm not really looking forward to the film, mainly because I enjoy the book so much. There's a lot of reasons why 'Watchmen' is a literary landmark, all of them deserved. However, yes it is a product of the times and yes you do need to be a bit of a comics geek to fully appreciate it. This is not going to be the 'Citizen Kane' of the comic book movies.

Some of the viewing public will go see it and be blown away by the visual effects...and promptly move on to the next eye candy film without really taking anything away from it.

Some of the viewers will go in hearing about how great the source material is and will be underwhelmed because the film had to be 'dumbed down' for the general public.

Comics fans who have read the novel will go in and be disappointed because everything that made Watchmen great seems to have been stripped away, based on the clips I've seen.

In other words, this is going to end up being another mediocre Hollywood spectacle that will have it's 15 minutes of glory before the general public moves onto the next celluloid distraction. Everyone that's expecting anything more is going to be disillusioned; stick with buying and reading the original material.

In fact, that's good advice for anyone interested in anything by Alan Moore. The guy writes way too deep for anything of his to be translated into mass market film well. The problem is that Hollywood keeps trying because Moore is so well-regarded in the comics world as a storyteller, so they think they can cash in on the built-in audience for his work. Yet they loose that audience when they have to strip things down to bring in the rest of the viewing public, who ultimately don't stick around the way the comics fans would.

FWIW, the best adaptation of an Alan Moore work was the Justice League Unlimited episode, 'For The Man Who Has Everything'. It stays the truest to the source material and still maintains the exceptional and deep storytelling of Alan Moore.
Link (new window) Part 1
Link (new window) Part 2

Moviewise, I'd say 'From Hell' is the best adaptation, mainly because it's the closest a Hollywood film has ever come to mainaining Moore's overall story. Even then, it's still not as good as the source material.