Now that The Dark Knight has finally hit theaters, you might be tempted to think, “Well, gee. Everything from this point on is going to be a let down. Shucks.”
WRONG!!!
If you saw The Dark Knight then you were fortunate enough to see the Watchmen trailer on a big screen. You guys, seriously. We’re talking about what could be an amazing movie here.
Watchmen advertises itself as the most celebrated graphic novel of all time. That might seem like a stretch to some people, but it’s actually the truth. There have been more popular graphic novels, sure, but that’s mostly because they contain popular heroes. I quote from Wikipedia about Watchmen:
To date, Watchmen remains the only graphic novel to win a Hugo Award, and is also the only graphic novel to appear onTime Magazine’s 2005 list of “the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present.”
There’s a reason for that. Watchmen is awesome. But the reason Watchmen is awesome is because it’s different than most comic books. The attitudes are different, history is different, and the characters have to deal with things that comic book heroes almost never have to deal with (or at least things that they didn’t have to deal with at the time when Watchmen was written). The heroes are based on other heroes, but they are different. So when a character does something, you’re like, “Wow this guy is so much like so and so… but his motives are so radically different.” The best thing I can think of to compare it to is Superman: Red Son, a stand alone “what if” comic that explores what Superman would have been like if he had crash landed in communist Russia instead of American farmland.
I think I’m going to like this movie. By the way, if anyone is wondering what song they use in the trailer, it’s “The Beginning Is the End Is the Beginning” by Smashing Pumpkins.
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There’s actually another comic series that can be compared to Watchmen. It’s called The Authority. It really sucks, though. The dialogue is well written, and the artwork is incredible, but the moral agenda is absolutely terrible. Hopefully the Watchmen movie won’t lean in that direction.
Amen to Watchmen. I read it recently; it’s going to be hard to adapt it into a movie, but after seeing that trailer it seems Zak Snyder has at least got the aesthetics pretty much perfect.
It was funny; when I was in the theatre, waiting for the Dark Knight to begin, I saw the beginning of the trailer when it says “Everything you know will change” or something. I leaned over to my companion to say something like “if I see one more trailer that claims something like that, I’m going to explode,” when I saw the guy in the chamber get turned into bluish dust. At that instant, I knew what preview I was watching, and almost all of my fears about the movie were allayed. (The shipwreck comic book is going to be difficult to work in, as are some of the somewhat-extraneous characters; there’s a big cast, with lots of names to remember if they try to do the entire script…).
Anyway, I can’t wait…
[...] – bookmarked by 6 members originally found by lon3lydemon203 on 2008-10-14 The Most Celebrated Graphic Novel of All Time http://nomoredarkness.wordpress.com/2008/07/21/the-most-celebrated-graphic-novel-of-all-time/ – [...]
It is an amazing story with an array of characters so deep and complex that they could have been ripped from reality and placed right onto paper. It seems more as an observation of humanity than it does a comic book and even though Zack Snyder could not put every single detail into the movie (or else it would have been a 6 1/2 hour movie) and he had to make a few changes because of those omitted details it still keeps the spirit and intelligence of the graphic novel.