seemed to me that the director was trying to play up rorscach's insanity and the craziness of these folks who dress up and fight crime in general

I was talking to my roommate about this. Maybe they filmed that sequence like it was in the book and it just didn't work cinematically so they went with their alternative, the axe to the head...It's a least a possibility.

I was reading an interview with Jackie Earle Haley on A/V Club and I didn't think about it at the time, but the way he worded it, that could've been the case. He said that he thought that they were finished with the scene, but then he had to come back and do an axe to the head bit.

I think the new ending was done fairly well, especially since they were omitting the squid from the get go.

But, I had a slight problem with them pinning this on Doc Manhattan as he is a known quantity. If Manhattan wants to end the world, he's going to do it. Nothing a united world can do about it. The beauty about the squid attack was not just that it was an unknown, but the whole layer of psychological warfare Ozy also attributed to it... whereas if you weren't killed by the blast, there was information encoded that would be absorbed, adding a fear that there could be more attacks to come, therefore sustaining world peace. With the movie's ending, Manhattan would have to keep checking in on us for peace to remain.

You don't get that in this ending... but since Manhattan is already hated by the people and gov't, it still works.

I haven't seen it yet, and I'm not even sure I will for awhile (hence my reading this thread), but I think it should be expected that Hollywood will try to shape the book into a movie, i.e. making Rorschach look more badass, blowing the sex scenes (I'm trying to guess which one) up, etc... You can't really blame Snyder for that, since I'm sure that was well out of his hands.

That said, it just strikes me as possibly too confusing for the average audience. With apologies to Mick the Stripper, there's just a lot going on, and given that it's being presented 25 years after it was written, there's a lot that's going to be lost on a movie audience, especially a younger one wanting to see Batman 3. The cold war tensions/"President Nixon"/Lovecraft allusions... I just can't see it being received well unless it's slapping the audience in the face with it. I mean, how many people under 30 will know who Kitty Genovese was? Or why the Nite Owl character is based on the Blue Beetle and not Batman, as it looks like to me in the trailers? I guess a lot of that can be changed in the film, but these things (even/especially the Black Freighter story and text inserts) go a very long way for setting the tone and pace of the storytelling. Moore said when he wrote it that it would be impossible to make a movie out of it, and I'm not certain he was wrong.

Also, I don't think comics have improved much since this. Sure it was a cornerstone for many, many stories told since then, but I don't think very many of them have come close to telling them as well. Just like the Dark Knight book, or Love & Rockets, these books can't be underestimated in just how much they affected the genre as a whole. The art has gotten better almost across the board (though you can thank printing processes as much as the artists for that), but that doesn't mean the writing's any better. Ask Todd McFarlane. Sure, Moore is kind of a pompous windbag, but I can't hold that against him. So are most of my favorite musicians, filmmakers, etc... I still can't think of many writers who have shown half the ingenuity that he has, excepting maybe Grand Morrison or Warren Ellis. Maybe Ennis, but I think that's more because he's fucked in the head.

I like what Patton Oswalt has to say here:

black freighter was filmed and will be included with the dvd, but i think there're only 2 scenes at the newsstand. no kitty genovese, no blue beetle references.

I think I need to forgive Patton Oswalt for King of Queens and start paying attention to him.

I'm kinda pissed I didn't go see him at The Earl last month. Heard it was great. All new material.

start? he's awesome.

absolutely. He, PFT, and Louis CK are the best standups working, as far as I'm concerned. Though there's a hundred that are closing in on their heels.

dude, his bit on jazz musicians cracks me up every time. . .

IMAX, tonight.

hah. i hate jazz.

Knowing next to nothing about the graphic novel/comic book, I went in knowing it was a "noir" film, but didn't expect it to be as dark as it was. There were some gratuitous action scenes (inside the prison, where all of the inmates on this specific block seemed to turn into asian kara-te masters before your eyes), but being stoned and seeing this movie on IMAX combined for an entertaining night even though I spent nearly $30 at the fucking theater ($13.75 on the ticket and $15 on two SMALL drinks and a SMALL popcorn).

a friend jsut forwarded this. . . good points. didn't ruin the movie for me the way it did for this guy, but what he says is absolutely true

http://www.movieretriever.com/blog/282/ ... to-dismiss

I didn't care for the comic a whole lot, but I thought this was as adequate adaptation--probably as accurate as they can make it in the movie format.

I wish they hadn't played up the violence and sex so much, and the soundtrack was completely overdone, but it's a decent movie.

At the risk of being unpopular, I thought the comic was convoluted and the movie actually was improved by parring out some of the less important layers that Moore had going on.

was the movie really loud (especially the music) for anyone else? i plugged my ears at a couple points.

i dunno but the imax theatre has subwoofers in the seats, which was kind of cool and annoying.

How it all should have gone down, Saturday Morning style...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDDHHrt6l4w

I thought this was just OK. A lot of it was done pretty badly, frankly, but the main problem lies with the fact that this is a movie based on a comic book about comic books.

The use of music was awful. It was almost laugh out loud cheesy at a few key moments. I felt like it totally killed a few of the scenes. I actually thought that the use of "The Times They Are A'Changin'" in the opening credits was the least bad use of a classic song in the whole movie.

Sex and violence in a comic book do not have the same impact that they do on the big screen. This all could have been done way more tastefully, and it would have made the movie seem way more grown-up and less adolescent, at least as much as is possible with this particular subject.

While the movie lifted dialogue and compositions straight off the page of the book, I felt like the spirit of the book was missing. I felt like I was watching The Crow or some other humorless, "gritty" '90s action/thriller movie. While the book is kind of bleak, there are moments of humor, satire, and humanity littered throughout that kept it from feeling so oppressive. This all felt really muted in the movie.

What was with all the silly poses that Silk Spectre II kept striking in the action scenes? The fight choreography and the fast/slow speed warping were pretty lame.

Let's face it; there are problems with the source material. It's overly pessimistic and sexist. Alan Moore has been finding ways to work lesbian scenes into his books since the mid-'80s, and the female characters are all sort of non-entities. The Comedian is a lovable rapist. The whole thing comes off as overly self-serious, but it's original context and that it was largely, I think, a sort of dark spoof on superhero comics, made this sort of forgivable as a comic book. As a movie, it just seems loud, ugly, and pointless.
....

When I was walking into the theater, I really had mixed feelings about what I was about to see. I really didn't know what to expect. I'd read so many bad things, but I'd actually heard good things from most of the people I know who had already seen it. Then I suddenly had a rush of excitement that I was actually about to sit down and a see a Watchmen movie. I mean, it really happened. It's finally been made into a movie. So maybe my hopes were inflated just a little.

Some positives: Casting was spot-on, looks-wise, and for the most part the acting was good. Rorshach was great. The Comedian and all of the other characters were really executed pretty well (with the minor exception of the stiff CG on Dr. Manhattan's face). There were a lot of really pretty scenes, totally slicked up with CG, but visualized about as well as I could imagine. The opening credits sequence was excellent. It didn't really feel overly long, and moved along at a good pace.

It's easy to say that it could have been done better, but of course it could have been done much worse. In a lot of ways, this seemed like a move made just for fans of the book. I'm actually surprised that anyone who hasn't read the book likes it. My wife hasn't read it, and I think her ultimate opinion of it was about the same as mine.

yeah, rorschach and the comedian were cast pretty well. i didn't even really have a problem with nite owl. but i thought ozymandias was pretty mediocre. and i won't even get into silk spectre or silk spectre 2 because it's not like the source material is good for female roles anyway.

Why does everyone keep calling the Comedian a rapist and saying "watch out for the rape scene"? I don't mean to sound boorishly insensitive, but he didn't actually rape her. Or was the Australian version toned down?

no, he doesn't in that scene. it's implied he actually does in the book.

If you're keen on a new rape scene for your files, go see Last House on the Left.