The Watchmen

I will say this about the trailer:

It looks just about god damn picture perfect. Snyder has obviously taken the time to study the graphic novel and frame a lot of those shots exactly from it.

It's hard to say if the story will survive the translation to film as easily as the look has, but if he's taken half as much time on the story as he has the look, it could work.

(But this is coming from a guy who thought that "V for Vendetta" was a pretty decent translation to film, so take my opinion with as many grains of salt as you need. :D )
 
I'm sorry but this looked stupid. Really bad CGI effects. All the characters looked muddy and cheap. People have been saying this is the best comic (or is it graphic novel?) of all time. I wouldn't say the trailer made it look "Andromeda Strain on USA" bad, but pretty close.
 
lol damn c.g.... have you made a movie recently... I havent seen any of your stuff before I'm just curious.
 
you don't need to be a chef to know when the food sucks :)

(I'm more a writer than filmmaker btw).

did you seriously think this looked good? I guess I can understand if people know the comic book well and bring some knowledge of it to the table. But from someone who knows nothing about it and just saw a movie preview of the thing, it looks really bad. Like someone who just learned how to use After Effects. It just had a cheap feel to it. Don't you think? I may not have been as harsh but for a full year I've been hearing how "The Watchman" with Zack Snyder directing is going to be the best movie ever and then after all that time I see that?? Who knows though? Maybe the story will be good. They didn't really get into it in the trailer.
 
It's my biggest weakness. I become a victim of marketing and hype. I hate myself for it. I fall for it every time. No matter how many times they say, "This is the greatest comic book movie of all time" and report their "best ever box office numbers", I never catch on. Regardless, as a writer, it's important for me to see what everybody else is seeing. And if this and The Dark Knight are what everybody's seeing and loving - well, I may be in some trouble. Then again, I fall into the theory that the public will go see whatever you put out there (for the most part). So maybe there's still hope.
 
Thank goodness. At least I’m not the only one who thinks this movie is a bad idea. The creator himself thinks so! I feel a little better now that I’m in good company.

From: Watchmen creator Alan Moore
Re: Zack Snyder as director of Watchmen
He may very well be, but the thing is that he's also the person who made 300. I've not seen any recent comic book films, but I didn't particularly like the book 300. I had a lot of problems with it, and everything I heard or saw about the film tended to increase [those problems] rather than reduce them: [that] it was racist, it was homophobic, and above all it was sublimely stupid. I know that that's not what people going in to see a film like 300 are thinking about but...I wasn't impressed with that.... I talked to [director] Terry Gilliam in the '80s, and he asked me how I would make Watchmen into a film. I said, ''Well actually, Terry, if anybody asked me, I would have said, 'I wouldn't.''' And I think that Terry [who aborted his attempted adaptation of the book] eventually came to agree with me. There are things that we did with Watchmen that could only work in a comic, and were indeed designed to show off things that other media can't.

Do you think that any good can come of comics movies?
I increasingly fear that nothing good can come of almost any adaptation, and obviously that's sweeping. There are a couple of adaptations that are perhaps as good or better than the original work. But the vast majority of them are pointless.

I echo his thoughts on 300. The thing that I really connect with, however, is the second question. This is how I feel about films in general. Films should be films. Not adaptations of other mediums. Something made in another medium was made because it was right for that medium. Keep it there.

Link: http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20213004,00.html
 
KyleProhaska said:
Some of the greatest movies of all time started as books my friend...created to be a book first and NOT a film.
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The general rule though is that only bad or mediocre books make good films. Watchmen is considered one of the greatest comics ever written, although I have never read it. I think the biggest hurdle is that it features an entire universe of comic book characters nobody has ever seen before. They have to set up and explain all of them and get people to buy into this world for the story to have any resonance. Zach's got his hands full.
 
It really does not matter to me if the creator of the watchmen thinks it is bad idea or not. Just because he thinks so, it does not mean it will be a bad movie. at the end of the day I just want to be entertained. 300 was very entertaining IMO. I also liked Snyder's dawn of the dead. So he is 2 for 2 and I think the watchmen will be good. Since he created it could'nt he have said no to them making it?
 
Lord of the Rings Trilogy
JAWS
Full Metal Jacket
Jurassic Park
Harry Potter Movies
BOURNE MOVIES!!!
Rambo Movies :P
etc.

There are TONS of good movies based on good books, and lots of decent movies based on great books. Some stuff shouldn't be made into films but I like that they give it a shot, if they didn't and there was just a "don't turn this medium into another" blah blah blah....then we wouldn't have some of the greatest films ever made since film started.

Its on a case by case basis as far as I'm concerned. It depends on whether your talking direct recreation or loosly based, or whatever. Books will always be a totally different medium then movies...they work in a different way so technically it should be impossible for any movie to be a 100% to the book without it being too long, too expensive, too rediculous to watch (watching so much articulation in a visual artform), etc.
 
it's lazy and they only do it cause there's a built in audience. much less risk than developing something original. It's a sad state when they're remaking movies after only five years and that in 30 years nobody will take a chance on anything original. It will just be the same stories told over and over. :(

So what is this Watchmen about anyway? Why is it considered the best comic book of all time? All I know is that one of the characters looked like Batman - but in a much murkier and badly composed frame than Nolan's Batman - which confused me. I wondered if the movie had already started.
 
c.g._eads said:
:(

So what is this Watchmen about anyway? Why is it considered the best comic book of all time? All I know is that one of the characters looked like Batman - but in a much murkier and badly composed frame than Nolan's Batman - which confused me. I wondered if the movie had already started.
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Judging by that last statement and everything that you misunderstood while watching The Dark Knight I would say that it doesn't take much. :huh:

j/k but it's obvious that you just make these statements in order to sway the discussion. Too obvious really.
 
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