Friday, July 18, 2008

Watchmen News

The trailer for the movie is up. It looks nice, but we'll see what they do with the characters, plot, and theme. The trailer also focuses on the parts of the book that make for Summer Action Thrill Rides, especially Dr. Manhattan, the only real supernatural character. They certainly made Laurie Juspeczyk hella sexy. I want to see how Zach Snyder handles the visuals for the parts of the book that happen in the 30s. It is fairly important that the superheroes of the 30s look really cheesy. From the way Snyder's been talking, he will use visual feel of 30s serial movies for those parts. That should work.

My big fear, really is that they will take all the nuance out of the politics. If they made it a simple story about power corrupting, it would fit well with Hollywood norms about the moral content of movies: A movie should have a bland message that everyone will find uplifting. That's what they did to V for Vendetta. One of the things that makes Watchmen interesting, though, is that we see different kinds of power represented and according different ways it gets corrupted. Hurm.

In other news, the final version of my Watchmen paper has been accepted. So at least I have accomplished one thing this summer.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I knew I could count on your for Watchmen trailer-blogging, Rob.

When I saw the trailer in front of Dark Knight, my first thought, on seeing the DC logo and then the scenes of Dr. Manhattan's origin, was "What, are they making a Captain Atom movie?"

Then I saw the Archie. "Duh!"

I'm worried though, that the March release date means that the studio has no confidence in the movie.

Rob Helpy-Chalk said...

On the other hand, if the studio has no confidence in the picture, it might be because it isn't just another piece of lame superhero fluff. The less confident they are about the quality, the more confident I am.