Comingsoon.net has a synopsis for the Warner Bros. Watchmen movie.
“Watchmen” is set in an alternate 1985 America in which costumed superheroes are part of the fabric of everyday society, and the “Doomsday Clock” – which charts the USA’s tension with the Soviet Union – is permanently set at five minutes to midnight. When one of his former colleagues is murdered, the washed up but no less determined masked vigilante Rorschach sets out to uncover a plot to kill and discredit all past and present superheroes. As he reconnects with his former crime-fighting legion – a ragtag group of retired superheroes, only one of whom has true powers – Rorschach glimpses a wide-ranging and disturbing conspiracy with links to their shared past and catastrophic consequences for the future. Their mission is to watch over humanity… but who is watching the watchmen?
The movie still has no release date, and is still missing many key actors to fill the parts.
10 Comments
Nope not watching.
Might be as bad as 300 on screen? (though Millers comic is awful in printed form as well) Superhero movies always inflate the flaws in the genre tenfold.
Hey 300 rocked! But I gotta say…..
SPOILER ALERT!!!!
…I don’t understand the appeal of this book. I friend of mine loaned it to me, I read it, I enjoyed it, until the final chapter. What a load of crap. Seriously, what a load of anti-climatic crap. It’s basically season one of Heroes, if Malcolm McDowell won and without the lame fight against Sylar (which was also anti-climatic, but that’s a whole other story), BTW Heroes really ripped off the plot of Watchmen.
SPOILER OVER
So, am I missing something deeper here? Please, someone, let me know. Cause at the moment, I could care less about this movie.
I’m sure Warner Brothers will be perfectly happy if Watchmen is as “bad” as 300 considering 300 made over 450 million dollars worldwide and is about to be the biggest DVD release of the summer.
I didn’t think 300 was the greatest movie of all time or anything, but as pure spectacle it was more than satisfactory and worked a hell of a lot better for me in its context than the overrated and awkward (though admittedly entertaining) SIN CITY. Miller’s crude and stilted dialogue works much better in the brutish, pseudo-classical readings of 300 as opposed to the eye-rolling pseudo-noir approach of SIN CITY.
300 really does come across as what it was supposed to be: an exaggerated legend used as war propaganda by a general rallying his troops. It’s outside of Miller’s normal story approach and it almost compliments the crudeness of the storytelling in both the movie and the book (though the movie was nearly pornographic in its loving depictions of stylized hyperviolence.)
Meanwhile, SIN CITY (the movie) works neither as pulp, pulp parody, or pulp tribute as far as story and dialogue go. It manages to be entertaining despite its flaws simply because it’s an amazing exercise in pure imitation and it’s visually exciting to look at. But really, Bruce Willis deserved an Oscar simply for having to put up with Miller’s un-altered comic book dialogue. On a page, Miller can put together a believable inner monologue. But hearing Bruce Willis’ cringe-worthy reading of Hartigan’s “Get up, old man” monologue (through no fault of Willis’) makes me thank Cthulu that we haven’t seen a Miller-directed version of DARK KNIGHT RETURNS–but unfortunately, there’s still time for it to happen…
I doubt on MAJOR SPOILERS I have to post a spoiler warning for a 20 year old comic book series, but… well, whatever…
Adam, WATCHMEN loses its power if you hold it against the last 20 years of comics that have borrowed liberally from WATCHMEN, DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, and 3 or 4 other specific books I won’t get into. But WATCHMEN deconstructed the mythos of the costumed hero and their effect on a “real” world more effectively than any other book before its time.
The ending did not live up to the rest of the book in my opinion either, but its intentionally bleak in almost an Objectivist sense (I’m not going to get all fake intellectual, honest,) in that Rorschach is basically the “last” honest man on the planet and he realizes that there is no room for an honest man in Ozymandias’ new world order. Veidt wins in a sense, but there’s still that last little bit of hope that Seymour picked up Rorshach’s journal and the New Frontiersman began a crusade to expose Veidt…even if that crusade had little chance of success.
I don’t see the “giant monster destroys half of New York” as the real climax though. It’s just another story element. Watchmen really doesn’t resolve its storyline and I think that’s Moore’s point, as blatantly stated in my favorite quote from the story: “Nothing ever ends.” Watchmen doesn’t end; our window into that world simply closes after the last page of issue #12. It still holds up even if the art is a bit bland in this age of computer coloring and high-quality materials and even though because of Watchmen’s direct influence, comic scripts are now encouraged to be more complex and cinematic. Watchmen was among the first though, and I have to believe it will long remain among the best ever examples of the power of the “funnybook.”
Ugh, used “pseudo” twice…
I agree with Mark. The whole “giant monster attack” is only an anticlimax if you’re expecting a climax. In a way, it’s the only real “comic book” moment other than Jon’s unusual powers.
Watchmen is like The Beatles. People can claim that they don’t like them because they sound like everything else (Hi, Kris!) but it’s really the other way around: Watchmen seems familiar because it recreated the archetypes of comics and helped to point the direction for the next 20 years of comics…
Sadly and more often than not, for 95 percent of readers superheroics is all they get.
So if Watchmen is hailed as the greatest comic ever, like every other week, you know where those people are coming from…
Titles like Eightball or Love and Rockets have long since surpassed the importance Watchmen had all those years back and opened up the whole comics thing to a level of maturity that men dressing as owl’s just can’t reach.
I love Eightball and Love & Rockets. But to claim that they’re inherently more “mature” than superheroics because of the costumes seems disingenous. Eightball has a very pointed (and not at all universal) sense of absurdist humor behind it, and Los Bros Hernandez come from a very obvious comic book tradition.
Indeed, both of those titles are working from the same cloth in terms of story, pacing, and art, though admittedly they’re both excellent, and well beyond many of the “just plain ol’ comics” on the stands today.
Let me preface by saying I’m not accusing you of this, Mxy, but I have a serious problem with the knee-jerk Gary Groth “All superheroes is dross” reaction. Watchmen isn’t about ‘men dressing up as owls’ (indeed, one of the plot points deals with Dan Dreiberg’s need for an alternate identity, and the psychological and psychosexual baggage that comes with it) any more than ‘Love and Rockets’ is about ‘big titted Mexican women yelling a lot.’ You certainly don’t have to like Watchmen, but it’s not valid criticism to shoot it down because the trappings of the story include superheroes.
Superhero comics were made from the ground up for kids. And they work only in that respect. Their very nature is childish. Perioid. If you try to inject this with real world themes and personalities it falls apart faster than you can say “shazam”.
And I like Superhero stuff. I just prefer Weisinger’s Superman or WWII’s Captain Marvel to Watchmen.
Both are much better examples of the genre.
Superhero comics were made from the ground up for kids. And they work only in that respect. Their very nature is childish. Perioid. If you try to inject this with real world themes and personalities it falls apart faster than you can say “shazam”.
With respect, I disagree. As with any dogmatic viewpoint, though, I can’t actually DISPROVE your theory, because it’s a matter of perspective. You won’t take any evidence I provide, simply because to you it won’t be evidence. This is a matter of agreeing to disagree.
And I like Superhero stuff. I just prefer Weisinger’s Superman or WWII’s Captain Marvel to Watchmen. Both are much better examples of the genre.
I can certainly see your point, but it might be worth noting that Weisinger’s Superman is over 45 years old and the Captain Marvel closer to SEVENTY. There HAVE been quality superhero stories told since then, and some of them proved more than able to provide an adult take on the medium. I’d recommend Miracleman, (if you can find it) Nexus, (if you don’t mind a little science fiction content) Warren Ellis’ Stormwatch leading into the first thirty or so issues of the Authority, Rising Stars from Image, Marvel’s own Supreme Power (though, sadly, I can’t recommend the ensuing Squadron Supreme issues) and Alias, or even Neil Gaiman’s Eternals.
I don’t give advice (as it’s rude and presumes I know more than any given person, which simply isn’t true) but if *I* were in your shoes, I might also ease back on the self-imposed restrictions… To disregard Watchmen because it contains costumes is (to my mind) the same as rejecting the Palomar stories because they DON’T. I had a horrible experience with the “Lord of the Rings” books in junior high school, and decided they were junk, but I find in my dotage that I may have tarred an entire genre with one brush, and blindly ignored some entertaining stories…