The book is almost always better than the movie. You could have no better case in point than FROM HELL, Alan Moore’s best graphic novel to date, brilliantly illustrated by Eddie Campbell. It’s hard to describe just how much better the book is. It’s like, “If the movie was an episode of Battlestar Galactica with a guest appearance by the Smurfs and everyone spoke Dutch, the graphic novel is Citizen Kane with added sex scenes and music by your favourite ten bands and everyone in the world you ever hated dies at the end.” That’s how much better it is.
-Warren Ellis
So, two full weeks and I still had nothing to say about Watchmen. (Not that my not-having a say on it would ruin the comic, the movie or any moviegoer’s would-be opinions of it.
What else is there to say, other than you apparently can’t have a conversation about Watchmen without mentioning Dr. Manhattan?
To be honest, a few years earlier, trolling several comicbook forum threads debating what the best-ever work of comicbook genius is out there, Watchmen came pretty high on the list. Not that I would have read it already back then — it did come out when I was just over a year old. It’s supposed to be part of the mid-80s movement of adult comicbook fiction. Rich in social commentary, having real-world events tie-up into the comicbook and containing visual/heavily-implied adult situations/decisions within the panels.
And it is. Layers upon layers of rich background, motivations and political-philosophical ideas and discussions, living — if not breathing within the pages. So how exactly could the director of 300 pull it off?
He can’t. But really, who can? Watchmen, as a comic is just loaded. It just wouldn’t be the same if you took out a backstory, a story parallel — those conversations by the newsstand? It just cannot be done without making someone depressed/disappointed.
While Snyder was given the license for the film adaptation, even going so far as recreating panels (in painstaking detail!) as they appeared in the comicbooks, he, ultimately, did not exercise his creative license — the resolution leaving many of the fans cold. The effects, the scenes are a sight to behold — they are exactly what the comicbook would look like in the real world, no doubt about it, but without those layers, and the confusing cuts between scenes — the ones where one issue would end and the next issue would start focused somewhere else? It just makes for a really pretty movie without a soul.
Did I like it? Yes, it’s a blast seeing Rorschach in celluloid form — which is ironic — “no compromise in the face of armageddon”? That’s what this movie was — a compromised ideal.
[Also, here in the Philippines, we get no IMAX lovin'.]
[Update!]
Turns out there’s going to be a DVD release for the pirate story from the book, Tales of the Black Freighter. Not sure how exactly it would stand as a solo story, not running parallel to several story threads from the book. Refer to Warren Ellis quote above.
Related posts:
- Planetary #27 Review
- X-Men Origins: Wolverine Review
- dudity!
- Transformers ROTF Review
- kick-ass movie preview images!
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
anyway, how's ur job...
