Thank you! This movie has been bothering me ever since I saw it last week, and I've been nattering on to anyone I can get about the bits and pieces that I felt were off. This kind of brought a lot of those things together and gave me a clearer picture of why I didn't quite like it, and why other reviews have seemed off the mark when they just talked about it being 'too faithful.'
You pegged what bugged me! I went to this with my girlfriend who is not a comics fan and had not read the comic book. She asked me why, if all but one of the heroes didn't have superpowers, did they do superheroic things, ie. smash through walls, etcetera, without really getting hurt? I automatically thought of the movie Death Sentence which was supposed to be about a regular guy getting revenge on the death of his family. Even in the bonus features the director was talking about how he was trying to convey the realism of a guy who isn't in action hero shape. Yet for a such a regular guy he had some rather lightning fast reflexes! This trend in cinema looks poor. Everything is amped up with glossy editing tricks that takes away from what the filmmaker is trying to say. The action scenes in The Watchmen were kept thankfully brief , unlike the relentless scenes in the Dark Knight that left me hopelessly praying for brevity- it left me hopeless altogether actually, The Watchmen with its dystopic alternate past is a more hopeful movie! I even semi-enjoyed it. Shame that they cast a Spitting Image puppet as Nixon and made some appalling soundtrack choices though.
I'll never understand why Comixology picks the worst possible people to right columns. Yeah, the movie was bad, but this review is worse.
You talk about Snyder picking and choosing moments from the comic. Sure, if picking and choosing about 90% of the story to put on screen is being choosy, I agree. But you pick and choose the moments that deviate ever so slightly to prove some nonexistant point. "That guy got his arms sawed off instead of getting his throat slashed...garbage!" Oh please. You criticize the critics for talking about "suffocating adherence" but you want....even more suffocating adherence! "No, no, Snyder didn't do what I wanted! I wanted everything!"
Stop whining.
And your critique, if that's what you want to call it, of the ending makes me wonder if we both saw the same movie. Really? The bombing of Manhattan was a metaphor for energy independence? Of course! I should have known. (And as for all that talk earlier in the movie with Iacocca...what, don't remember the 70s? Fuel shortages? Ring a bell? Not exactly a new issue.)
Actually, if you ask me, the change to the ending made a whole lot more sense. First of all, the space squid was !@#$ing stupid. Secondly, space squid as mind bomb? Even !@#$ing stupider. Cause we all gotta be scared of the !@#$ing MIND BOMB! Moore was critiquing the cold war notion of MAD. Snyder's solution was to use Dr. Manhattan as something worse, a bomb just as powerful without the nasty fallout (and a potential enemy that everyone is aware of that no one can find...Same ending, with the bull**** left out.)
Aside from the opening, the opening credits and the ending, Snyder showed a lack of daring and originality. It has nothing to do with the fact that some characters punched harder, some characters died ever so slightly differently, cause this scene or that was truncated...if that's what your stuck on, what good are you as a reviewer? As an elitist fraud, you're fantastic and I say keep up the good work, but don't expect anyone to respect your opinions.
"First of all, the space squid was !@#$ing stupid. Secondly, space squid as mind bomb? Even !@#$ing stupider. Cause we all gotta be scared of the !@#$ing MIND BOMB!"
I've seen criticism of the 'giant squid' before, and it always puzzles me. The 'giant squid' is obviously a reference to HP Lovecraft, whose main trope in most of his stories is that the human mind, when confronted with something otherwordly and inexplicable, will react by retreating into insanity. That's obviously what Ozymandias is basing his plan on, and why he sequestered so many of the world's most talented artists to create the 'squid'; he needed people capable of imagining something truly horrific to create the most unfathomable thing they could come up with.
From a storytelling perspective, it makes perfect sense that Moore and Gibbons made the creature look like a 'giant squid,' since that is the most common interpretation of Lovecraft's (usually vague) descriptions of Cthulhu. What could Moore possibly have come up with that readers would think was really horrifying? Well, nothing. There's nothing that an artist can draw that is going to be frightening to more than a handful of readers. Obviously Moore knew that Gibbons couldn't draw something that would affect most readers, so he took the obvious route of making the creature a tribute to the writer who came up with the idea that Ozymandias uses as the basis of his attack - that some things are too horrifying to look upon.
This was superhero porn / slasher flick in the degree to which in fixated in slow motion on breaking objects and bodies. I totally agree with the review and respect the opinions of the reviewer.
