Word: film
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...From the start of the Watchmen cult, film people knew two things about the comic book: (1) that it simply had to be made into a movie and (2) that it couldn't. An epic superhero saga, spanning 45 years, with six major characters who all sport double identities and crucial, intertwined back-stories, does not lend itself to the narrative turbo-thrust of a standard action film. Indeed, the superest hero of the bunch - Dr. Manhattan, once known as Jon Osterman - is not an action hero; he's a passive one, a contemplative godhead, a sinewy blue nude Buddha...
...movie last fall to an audience of rapt but wary votaries, one portly fellow told him, "On behalf of the obese-obsessive demographic, I want your assurance that the ending does not puss out." Such is the snakebite of hype, especially for a project with such outsize expectations. The film, budgeted at $100 million and the object of a rights wrangle between Warner Bros. and 20th Century Fox, has received less than rapturous early reviews. In his Hollywood Reporter critique, Kirk Honeycutt predicted that the film would be "the first real flop of 2009." (See the top 10 graphic novels...
...years ago fell out - went with the fan base. He worked from a script written in 2001 by David Hayter, and filigreed by Alex Tse, that was as close to the original as a movie could be. The best and worst thing to say about the Watchmen film is that, if you read the book, the movie you made in your head probably looked a lot like this...
...When Snyder showed this four-minute sequence in New York last fall, Gibbons was in the audience and rose to say, cheerfully, "Didn't suck too bad." I'd go further, and say it's among the zippiest, most thrilling assemblages in modern movies, and the film's single great burst of creation and concision. Three times I've seen the credits sequence, and repeated viewings help harvest new goodies - like the few second showing Silhouette in bed, with another woman, murdered, and WHORES scrawled in blood on the walls in her bed (which is different, by the way, from...
...Maybe there's no way the rest of the film could match this opening, and for sure it doesn't. Snyder spends much of the movie's 2 hours and 40 minutes on the splatter of crushed limbs, the chatter of Strangelovean science fiction and the nattering of the obligatory romance. He also encourages a little festival of tone-deaf acting. Yet Watchmen has moments of greatness. It proves again that the action movie is where the best young Hollywood brains have gone to bring flesh to their fantasies...