Trailer Park … Sort Of

Rorschach is just about my favorite nutball ever.

Watchmen was amazing for its time. I still think it holds up pretty well, but I fear that Heroes and the like will make it look a lot more pedestrian.

Also Watchmen is a pretty long story. I wonder what they’ll have to jettison to make it a cohesive, single film.

~Sean

If nothing else, the length of the book vs. the length a movie can be is going to be severely debilitating to the story. What gets cut? I imagine most of Rorschach’s story must be trimmed to fit, as it’s not actually necessary to the plot. Which is depressing, because it’s so great. But then, if it’s left in, the plot has to be tightened up… and you see the problem. The same goes for the fantastic issue with Dr. Manhattan on Mars. I don’t even know if film can accurately portray the non-linear flow of time at the various points of the issue, without it just coming across as confusing or weird.

But as a story itself, it’s a wild deconstruction of the superhero concept. I love Brian K. Vaughan’s quote about it. He said “It’s not a love letter to comics. It’s a death threat.” I only really agree if by “comics”, he means mainstream comics, because it shows how much more can be done with the genre than what actually is done with it – it was dark, deconstructive, and realistic because comics were not at the time, thus showing what they could do. Instead of a demonstration of potential, people just use it as a template – they write characters to be like them, rather than noting Moore was showing that there are many ways to portray characters. Rorschac, Dr. Manhattan, and Ozymandias were fantastically different in their personalities. And they use the gritty mood and setting as a template too, rather than noting that that’s merely one alternative of many to what was common in comics at the time. I can only imagine a movie about it as dark and disturbed, spotlighting the superhero element, instead of showing the road to potential. Not that cinema even needs that – it’s just that comics did, and still do.

And lastly, it’s an exceptionally well crafted piece of sequential art. Ignoring the story itself altogether, Dave Gibbons brilliantly showed how the medium can be used to portray events sequentially within the same scene, to portray movement in set images, and to use many effective film techniques on page. All of that will be lost in a translation to film, by simple fact that the mediums are inherently different in how they must portray movement and the passage of time.

Watchmen will likely be an enjoyable movie. But it can never have the richness of character, meaninfulness of potential, and brilliant art design of the book. Other than The Spirit (also a movie coming soon – why, God, why), I can think of no other comic property more poorly suited to film.

Oh hell, that’s long. To sum up that retarded long post –

Watchmen is important in comics, but NOT as a template – as an example of the fact that different avenues can be explored, and as an example of page layout and design.

A Watchmen movie will never be an important movie, and it will only reinforce it as a template for gritty characters in a gritty world.

Now you can skip my previous post if you want.

Too late! I already got through the whole thing.

I would be interested in seeing the Dr. Manhattan concept transferred to film. The serial nature of comics makes a proper transition near-impossible, I think, because each issue can be complete in and of itself, and can be told in different way from each other. A film tends to have the same mechanism throughout.

That being said, this could be a great chance to explore the flexibility of motion pictures. Not many films tell stories in distinct “chapters”, but that would be a cool (and necessary, if the feel of the comic is to be maintained at all) approach to the problem. I thought Sin City did a fantastic job with this — several vignettes within the same setting, same immediate story, but distinct moods and approaches for the characters it focused on.

~Sean