Kargath wrote:
[SPOILER]
Not the removal of the squid. The removal of the squid was necessary for a lot of cuts elsewhere. Without that Watchmen could not have been done as a film, as much of the story in the comic relies on the scrapbook sections between chapters.
He changed things like the order of the final sequence in the newspaper office (making the sauce drop the opening of that scene, instead of the chilling final shot). Adding brutality to characters that didn't really have it before (Nite Owl and Silk Spectre II).
Slow motion everywhere.
[/SPOILER]
[spoiler]People that complain about the Squid are basically nitpicking something to death. I didn't really mind that it was gone, and thought essential nuclear annihilation against a known threat was a little better than uniting against space-squids or what have you.
I agree to the final shot, thought that was totally borked.
Slow-motion overuse was kind of annoying, but that's in everything nowadays.
Brutality though, I tend to disagree with. Martial arts are designed to incapacitate someone. Its always bothered me that, for example, Batman can hit the crap out of people in armor and he never really does more than bruise people. I think the kill-blows were out of place, but shattering/breaking bones was a better choice, especially going with the real-world style Watchmen has (where Dr. Manhatten is the only "super" superhero). [/spoiler]
He made it more of a traditional 'comic book movie' than it should have been or could have been.
I disagree on this point. It didn't really feel like a "comic book movie" as much as 300 and Sin City did. It was closer to V for Vendetta, where it WAS based on one yet didn't really feel like it was hammering the point over your head.
The problem with just using the comic as a storyboard is that the comics often do not deal with the consideration of motion and sustained shots, because they are comics and they do not have to do such things. The addition of motion means the shots must be reconsidered.
Traditional storyboards really don't either. If you're dealing with a direct adaptation of a book (ie: not majorly deviating from the main storyarc), why WOULDN'T you use the existing panels as a storyboard. It gives you a jumping point.
PS:
I don't like people abusing the term "graphic novel" either. There's only ever been one graphic novel (that I know of), and that's V for Vendetta.
The term is pure marketing-speak for trade paperbacks, sure, but it also basically encompasses enclosed story-arcs (miniseries, oneshots, stand-alones etc) and suggests a higher quality of writing, art, etc. I think the term Manga is retarded (especially in English-speaking countries), but I don't really care enough to lecture why for simplicity's sake because I understand and everyone else understands what the term means.
Bomby wrote:This deals more with public performance and financial success of the film than the quality of the film itself. Next.
Welcome to real life. Film is an industry, and as such has to deal with budgetary concerns and recapture concerns for the studio, ESPECIALLY when dealing with a majorly financed work. If a guy like, for example, Robert Rodriguez wants to fund something out of pocket and guerrilla shoot in Mexico/Southwest with the money he made selling himself for medical experiments, that's different. When the major studio wants to sink $$$ in the eventual big budget sequel (Desperado), he has to deal with other considerations.
It would be great to view ____ in a vacuum, but you don't. If I'm looking at art, I'm also considering time period, artist's condition (ie: insane, imprisoned, rich from sponsorship, whatever), country, etc. I'm also looking at films from budgetary concerns, and with moves made by large budget adaptations to "sell" the film to both audiences. Considering how much marketing the film to the core audience (Comic nerds) and everyone else has to do with cuts and additions to films, I'm not really seeing how you can discount this in any way shape or form.
This is a good point. If a filmmaker wants to take an established story and make severe changes to it, he should also make severe changes to the character's names and the title of the film. What I'm talking about is minor changes, like changing a character's background from English to Irish, or making a film with a few historical inaccuracies, or leaving out a few mundane scenes of a 600 page novel that would just appear boring on screen. People who go ape**** over things like this get on my nerves.
I agree with you here. I thought it was pretty much bat**** when people were whining about some cuts made to, for example, Lord of the Rings. I was glad Tom Bombadil was gashed out. It didn't add pretty much anything to the novel, and was a great way to waste my time reading the book. I've seen some great "modernizations" of Shakespearean works (ironically, several of which are teenybopper flicks where the idiots watching it have no idea they're watching a modern version of Othello or Taming of the Shrew).
For example, I don't really have a problem with the recent adaptation of Beowulf. I *LIKED* the way they took the story (making Beowulf a completely unreliable narrator) and actually made the source material filmable, watchable and interesting (Beowulf's source, as a whole, always reminded me of a mindnumbingly boring boastful ranting of a burnt out jock remembering the "glory years" about how he scored a touchdown once in high school). But that's also because the source material borders on unbearable, wasn't really fleshed out, and half of it is someone listing who somoene else's particular father was.
I never said it didn't work in most situations. It can also fail in certain situations too, i.e. 300. The painstaking lengths they went through in order to replicate the look of the source created a film with tacky CGI backgrounds and a piss-poor lighting scheme that ranks as one of the worst ever committed to a high budget film. (Also, the overuse of slow motion managed to make violence boring, but that's beside the point.)
I agree on the overuse of slow motion. For every scene it worked, there were at least five where it was pointless. I think the problem was that they looked at Sin City's translation of the black/white with maybe one thing of color in a scene and thought they could make it work with 300. Noir styled shots (which Sin City books essentially are) have been done for about 80 years. There's a better eye for it. 300 really needed to tweak the color balance to where it didn't look like there was a sepia filter on the entire movie.
Even that being said, I think the faults 300 had weren't so much from following the source too closely (I liked the art translation, I liked the angle for most of the shots, etc), but more from director/editing issues. The slow-mo made it feel far longer than it should have, and it was overused. I get what he was going for (ie: slow it down to actually show the frame from the book), but it was something that was ultimately not what you're going for. In order to make panel-story boards work, you want them to play out like those harry potter photos, where the people are moving around. You don't want it to arbitrarily do a freeze-frame to say "Hey look we copied panel 5 on page 37 exactly."
Sean P Kelly wrote:That whole talk about originality made me think about how Zack Snyder has yet to direct an original story. Though I believe that is going to change with his next film.
Snyder:
Dawn of the Dead
300
Watchmen
Guardians of Ga'Hoole (filming; book adaptation; 2010 eta)
untilted 300 sequel pending Frank Miller publishing the 300 sequel book (What. The. ****.)
Sucker Punch (preproduction; Snyder described as "Alice in Wonderland with guns).
