May
27
I’m still on the fence about the upcoming “Watchmen” film. The desktop image on my home computer is of a blood-spattered smiley-face, a download from the Paramount Pictures’ “Watchmen” site, anachronistically boasting a 2006 release date. Paramount obviously never got the film off the ground, not even with director Paul Greengrass attached to the project. Warner Bros. has since snatched up the rights to “Watchmen,” and Zach Snyder — director of the “Dawn of the Dead” remake and “300,” both style-over-substance geek-gasms — recently announced that production on the film has wrapped. But am I overly enthusiastic? Not so much.
Today, Aint-It-Cool News has posted an exclusive image of the Minutemen from “Watchmen” in all their sepia-toned, pre-WWII glory. I guess I like it alright.
For those of you who haven’t heard of “Watchmen,” it’s been hailed as the “Citizen Kane” of graphic novels. I think that comparison sells the series short. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ essential comic book opus is without equal in the film world. Moore has called the series “unfilmable,” and for almost 20 years, Hollywood proved him right. Director Terry Gilliam was the first auteur who failed to get the project in front of cameras, and this was before Tim Burton’s first “Batman” was released. Inasmuch as comics seem like a no-brainer when it comes to adapting them to film, the two visual media are more divorced from one another than you’d think.
Films are stripped down. Comics — or “graphic novels,” arty-farty comics — are dense. Narration is something that’s to be avoided when making a film, but it’s a key component to driving a story in a comic book. Films are two hours or less. Comics are typically twenty-two pages per month, spread out over sometimes 40 years of one epic, episodic, unending story. Films, like comics, both require the audience to suspend disbelief, and in their own ways, they provide the illusion of movement, space and time. But, films achieve this through editing, comics through page layout. Audiences are simply engaged differently when exposed to one medium or the other, which is why a “Watchmen” film is almost guaranteed to be a lesser work than the graphic novel it’s based upon.
There are just so many great elements in the “Watchmen” comic book — excerpts from the first Nite Owl’s “Under the Hood” autobiography, Rorschach’s psych profile, etc. — that will be lost or relegated to the Special Features on the eventual DVD. I’ve read that the “Tales from the Black Freighter” comic-within-a-comic will be released as a straight-to-DVD animated film, but losing that thread from “Watchmen” — though seemingly extraneous — peels away yet another layer from the original text.
I honestly do want to like the “Watchmen” movie. I’m one of the small minority of “V for Vendetta” apologists, though that movie, too, lost a lot of elements from the comic, and to the dismay of co-creator Alan Moore, became more of an anti-Bush treatise than a dated assault on Thatcherism in Great Britain.
So who watches the “Watchmen?” On March 9th, 2009, I suppose I will.
-Brad Lohan
Comments
2 Responses to “Who Watches the Minutemen?”
Leave a Reply
“For those of you who haven’t heard of “Watchmen,” it’s been hailed as the “Citizen Kane” of graphic novels. ”
I’ve oft had a problem with the phrase ‘the “Citizen Kane” of …’, just because for those of us who are rabid Welles fans, it doesn’t tell enough as to whether something is heralded because it’s brilliant, it’s claimed to be brilliant, it’s over-hyped as brilliant, or it’s someone’s first attempt at knocking something out of the park. Clarification?
The project had seen mostly diminishing returns on the string of directors that have been attached to it, from Terry Gilliam to Darren Aronofsky to Paul Greengrass to Zach Snyder. I guess I’m just relieved it got made before it ended up in the hands of a Brett Ratner or a Stephen Sommers. Although, “I’m Ozymandius, bitch!” would sound good in a red-band trailer.