Watchmen tv series

[Cen]

teaser is here.

I'm seriously confused.

[Talakeal]

If that was a sequel I could kind of see what it was going for. But apparently its a total reboot, so I have no idea.

[OutOfThyme]

If that was a sequel I could kind of see what it was going for. But apparently its a total reboot, so I have no idea.

IIRC, it's supposed to be a sequel, but it follows the comic ending instead of the movie's. So the giant squid thing is real.

[Talakeal]

IIRC, it's supposed to be a sequel, but it follows the comic ending instead of the movie's. So the giant squid thing is real.

Oh that's cool, although it might be somewhat confusing to casual viewers.

Then I imagine it is about a growing movement of people who believe Rorschach's version of events and are willing to tear down the entire system rather than continue to live a lie.

[Magic_Hat]

As much as I am against a sequel to Watchmen, I am very much in favor of a Watchmen adaption that's 100% Zack Snyder free. Hey they should put that as the tagline to this and literally every piece of media not connected to Zack Snyder.

[BeerMug Paladin]

IIRC, it's supposed to be a sequel, but it follows the comic ending instead of the movie's. So the giant squid thing is real.

That's rather silly. We won't get the psychiatrist. Clearly the best character.

Though I guess we'll learn whether or not Ozymandias's plan was the right one. And get to see what Doctor Manhattan did after leaving Earth. It's not like leaving those things unanswered was a deliberate theming choice or anything.

[Rodin]

I find doing a sequel kind of bizarre, because it requires such a high degree of knowledge about the original comic to actually understand what's going on. I suppose there's the movie, but that too was rather divisive and I wouldn't expect a TV audience to have it as required watching. Especially 10 years after the fact.

I just dunno. I would happily never see a sequel to Watchmen, as the open ending is kind of the point. "Nothing ever ends", indeed. At the same time, I would be lying if I said I wasn't curious about what they could come up with for a new story in that universe. The idea of a mass Rorschach movement growing out of the notes being printed in a tabloid is kinda cool and reflects modern day politics.

I guess it's one to keep a wary eye on, expecting it to fail but hoping it succeeds.

[Dienekes]

Eh. A sequel about Watchmen kind of misses the point of Watchmen. The ending is specifically left ambiguous so the reader can choose how they wish to interpret the events and analyze which side they’re on and what that means to them as a reader. We don’t know if Rorschach’s journal ruined Veidt’s perfect world. We don’t know if Veidt was right or wrong. We don’t know if it was all worth it, or not. And that’s the point. Continuing after Watchmen means they will have to answer those questions directly.

That said. I still hope it’s good television and those who watch enjoy it. But this doesn’t really sit well with me.

[Lord Raziere]

Yeah, I'm not watching it.

Watchmen is a closed design. sure the ending is "open-ended". but only for the sake of reader interpretation. Everything else about Watchmen's world is pretty closed off and little different from our own. thus not a lot of elements to introduce to tell stories with, because Watchmen's world is entirely constructed to support and focus on a small group of vigilantes, only one of whom even has powers., who has left. all other vigilantes have been of course locked away. so all in all, its a pretty sparse world that doesn't lend itself to tell a lot of things with it, because its so clearly made to support one story and one story only.

its like trying to make a third Portal game, the setting is so limited and so bare bones that you can't really go anywhere with it that isn't retreading old ground. and this trailer has retread written all over it, the tick-tock, the rorshach movement, the end of the world mention, its basically going to be a bunch of crazy conspiracy people in rorshach masks trying to rebel or something while normal people deal with it and some bull about how this will cause WWIII even though Dr. Manhattan is gone and no longer upping the stakes. and it just won't work, not unless they take a big risk and introduce something new to mix things up, which can easily be botched.

in all probability, it won't go well. you need setting material, a world built for producing more than one story to make this work, and Watchmen for all its literary quality, is a closed world designed to cut off possibilities so that one story limited to a few people would happen. it simply doesn't have enough things to expand upon, or build around. there is only so much one can build with the small amount of parts given to them, and I don't think it'll be enough unless they really try to stretch it.

[ellenate]

As much as I am against a sequel to Watchmen, I am very much in favor of a Watchmen adaption that's 100% Zack Snyder free. Hey they should put that as the tagline to this and literally every piece of media not connected to Zack Snyder.

With the movie being my only experience to the franchise, i never got why the readers hated it so much.. It seemed pretty good to me.

Don't have hbo, don't plan on having it for the coming future either, but the trailer looked promising.

[BeerMug Paladin]

...only one of whom even has powers...

I know, right? I can't tell you how many times I've had to catch bullets with my bare hands. Such a mundane, everyday thing.

With the movie being my only experience to the franchise, i never got why the readers hated it so much.. It seemed pretty good to me.

Well, I can't speak for others, but to my eye, they cut out the parts of the story that show unpowered, normal people doing heroic things. Having them absent from the story kind of changes things theme-wise, but I believe most of the things cut or changed were done for mostly sensible reasons. Running time being one of them.

Also, the original story's genesis for Rorshach is much better. They made him into a movie-brand psycho instead of the existentialist hardcore moralist crusader he was originally. Personally, I think that particular story beat was done to make the movie more palatable to a general audience, so I understand the change. However, I just think it's unambiguously worse from an artistic perspective.

Also, Veidt's casting making him the standard villain appearance rather than the CHA 18, Clark Kent type was rather disappointing. It changes things a bit that the villainous behavior is actually coming from the villainous looking character, rather than the big heroic looking character. (Appearances can be deceiving.)

I still think it's a pretty good work overall. I know plenty of people that would never read a book, but would watch a movie, so I see it as a viable thing to get people to experience a similar enough story.

I vote for Watchmen Babies or Saturday Morning Watchmen, by the way.

[Anonymouswizard]

With the movie being my only experience to the franchise, i never got why the readers hated it so much.. It seemed pretty good to me.

Having only read the comic, what I know about the movie makes me wonder what people like about it. Adding onto the last post, I also find some of the visual choices baffling (Nite Owl, what happened to you), don't like the need to action up scene(s) that were intentionally rather calm in the comic, and find that the ending makes less sense. I've seen worse adaptations (a friend still can't get why I hate Altered Carbon), but the changes to Watchmen just made me uninterested.

So yeah, if Veidt is back in his robes I'm happy for that, otherwise I don't care at all. As has been said Watchmen is intentionally open ended, and you can't go further than the existing epilogue without undermining the point of the work and answering the questions.

[Florian]

With the movie being my only experience to the franchise, i never got why the readers hated it so much.. It seemed pretty good to me.

The movie is good, no question. One of my favorites, to be honest.

The comic is just.. so much more ... and puts matters in an entirely different perspective. Rorschach is depicted as a very complex character and not the hollywood-hero-psycho we get in the movie, regular folks are shown with their height of heroics and their depth of villainy, the ending is at once totally bizarre and fully logical - and left open ended for the vale judgement of the reader.

All in all, I don't look forward to a tv series, the way I don't look forward to a series based after V.

[Cen]

Only thing that get's me a liittle hypes is Jeremy Irons as Ozymandias.

[Psyren]

Eh. A sequel about Watchmen kind of misses the point of Watchmen. The ending is specifically left ambiguous so the reader can choose how they wish to interpret the events and analyze which side they’re on and what that means to them as a reader. We don’t know if Rorschach’s journal ruined Veidt’s perfect world. We don’t know if Veidt was right or wrong. We don’t know if it was all worth it, or not. And that’s the point. Continuing after Watchmen means they will have to answer those questions directly.

That said. I still hope it’s good television and those who watch enjoy it. But this doesn’t really sit well with me.

Agreed. And also there's more than a bit of spite in me due to them setting Game of Thrones on fire. I doubt we'll stay subscribed after next week anyway, making this show moot.

[Magic_Hat]

With the movie being my only experience to the franchise, i never got why the readers hated it so much.. It seemed pretty good to me.

Pick up the comic. You'll thank me later.

[JoshL]

I love the comics, and I love the movie (particularly the excessive fanboy version that puts Black Freighter back in place). I have no interest in this, or any of the spin-off comics they've been putting out, for pretty much all the reasons everyone has already stated.

But I saw the trailer before GOT last night. The original used the doomsday clock as a framing metaphor, but with all the "tick tock" nonsense and conspicuous shots of pocket watches in the trailer....are they interpreting the title LITERALLY? Really? This is what you decided to go with? I had no interest, but now I have no hope.

[ellenate]

The movie is good, no question. One of my favorites, to be honest.

The comic is just.. so much more ... and puts matters in an entirely different perspective.

Ok, that's kind of what i thought the main beef was about. Just making sure there's not some critical flaw i'm not aware of.

Pick up the comic. You'll thank me later.

time/money isn't really a friend of mines atm, but the dooms day clock storyline looks interesting. If i did read a watchmen's comic it'd be that one.

[Rodin]

Ok, that's kind of what i thought the main beef was about. Just making sure there's not some critical flaw i'm not aware of.




time/money isn't really a friend of mines atm, but the dooms day clock storyline looks interesting. If i did read a watchmen's comic it'd be that one.

There isn't really a "doom's day clock storyline". Watchmen is less a series of comic books and more of a graphic novel. Apart from a couple of spinoffs made decades later to cash in on the movie, there is nothing outside of the story the movie tells. The comic just does it better, and I say that as a fan of the movie. For as much crap Snyder gets, he did a creditable job adapting a graphic novel that many thought was unfilmable. It's not perfect, as others here have noted. But it's still good.

The best comparison I can give would be if you watched a remake of Casablanca. It doesn't matter how good the remake is, you aren't beating Bogart and you'll never get the same emotional impact as actors performing a WWII movie in 1942.

[Eldan]

There's a lot of small changes that just kinda add up? I mean, I don't even hate the movie's ending, which is entirely different. My main complaint is that they cast this guy:

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To play this guy:

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He was just so entirely unfit for the role. The entire point was that he was charismatic enough to fool everyone.

[Lacuna Caster]

He was just so entirely unfit for the role. The entire point was that he was charismatic enough to fool everyone.

Charismatic, and gave the superficial impression of being too harmless to contemplate such a thing.

To be fair, I thought replacing the giant squid-monster was actually a reasonable call.

[Dienekes]

With the movie being my only experience to the franchise, i never got why the readers hated it so much.. It seemed pretty good to me.

Don't have hbo, don't plan on having it for the coming future either, but the trailer looked promising.

Well I'm a reader and I don't hate it, but I do think it's flawed in ways the original wasn't.

Because this is only somewhat relevant to the thread, I'm going to spoiler my reasons.

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In my mind the critical flaw if there is one, is Snyder and what he brought to the adaptation. Now this is not a criticism of Snyder as a film makers as I actually think he's pretty competent. But he is entirely the wrong person to have do Watchmen in a lot of the same ways he was the wrong person to do Superman. His views on morality and opinions on the world are in many ways opposite what the comic espoused.

I get the feeling that Snyder read Watchmen and came out of the experience going "Wow, Rorschach is a really cool character and clearly the hero we're supposed to be rooting for." Instead of seeing him as the sexually repressed murderous victim of abuse that the narrative takes great pains to subtly (and occasionally not so subtly) point out. We are meant to be intrigued by Rorschach, even understand Rorschach. But agree with him? No. He's a critique on what these loner vigilantes would be in the real world. Despicable and hateful to his core.

This is further enforced by his portrayal of Veidt. Throughout the movie, the camera, lighting, and casting to make Veidt look just a little bit off. Just a little bit sinister. When the point of the reveal at the end is that Veidt is supposed to look noble. He's supposed to look like the perfect man, and act like the perfect man. We're supposed to like the guy as soon as he shows up. He's friendly, humble, trying to make the world a better place. He's great. And when he's revealed to be the villain it is all the more shocking because he in some strange way is still just as noble. Only that nobility has been twisted around into something we the audience are supposed to question if it was truly noble or just the ravings of a charismatic narcissist that got us wrapped up in his own rhetoric.

Then we get to the action scenes. In general, I like how Snyder frames action scenes. When 300 and Watchmen came out there was fast edits and shaky cam everywhere. And here comes Snyder to show these slow deliberate shots that allow the viewer to see everything and he just makes the action look beautiful.

But here's the thing. While that worked for 300, because that movie is a love letter to violence. Watchmen is a critique of violence. These heroes were specifically drawn as grounded. The fights were short, choppy, brutal, and focused on the emotional turmoil this fighting causes in the heroes rather than the big flashy splash pages of a hero punching someone that you get in comics that are more focused on the action itself.

And finally we get to the ending. In the ending, after a bunch of hints sprinkled throughout the narrative that scientists, artists, and a bunch of other people were going missing. We finally see what they were working on. They designed their own space alien and teleported it into New York to create a massive death. Now, perfectly honest, the change that it is a Dr Manhattan going rogue as opposed to an alien is a change that could have worked. There are some minor reasons why I liked the alien more. But what's more important than that is the framing of the scene.

In the comics we get a look at a bunch of pretty normal people. A comicbook reader, a psychiatrist, and a street corner shop owner. Throughout the narrative we see these people get close to each other, comment on what's going on around them, and most importantly make progress to become better people. And while originally these character seem like an odd inclusion, by the end we see them as representatives of the beauty of normal life. These people with their regular problems all struggling together and getting so close to being actually good helpful people. Then the destruction of New York happens and we see the shop keeper grab the young comicbook reader and pushes the boy in front of him making one final futile attempt to save someone's life. But it doesn't matter. Because the beauty and complexity of normal life got wiped away to make room for the super heroes playing their games and feeding their egos, solving problems that we in the real world know would have resolved without them.

It’s telling that the comic kid and and salesman are in the movie. But their last shot before oblivion isn’t the image of a man trying to save a kids life at their own expense. It’s just two random people holding each other, passive agents that fall before the super villain. No altruism. No beauty of the mundane.

That's why, to me, the comic stands up so much better than the movie.

[Lacuna Caster]

In my mind the critical flaw if there is one, is Snyder and what he brought to the adaptation. Now this is not a criticism of Snyder as a film makers as I actually think he's pretty competent. But he is entirely the wrong person to have do Watchmen in a lot of the same ways he was the wrong person to do Superman. His views on morality and opinions on the world are in many ways opposite what the comic espoused.

That's a pretty good summary. I think the problem is Snyder's philosophy is bundled up with the Cult of Rand and Atlas Shrugged, which requires that (A) selfishness is a virtue and (B) gifted individuals should be allowed to direct their own actions. Alan Moore's Watchmen and Miracleman disagree mainly with the latter idea, while the Superman mythos disagrees mainly with the former, but in both cases he's caught in this yoyo position of wanting to glorify superheroic action while trying to have any intended altruism attached to said actions go awry.

I think that Superman is intrinsically difficult to adapt to any real attempt at a 'grounded' universe, so some of the blame there lies with the studio (I'm worried that the Nolanverse batman films will historically wind up as fine individual movies that had a terrible effect on the industry.)

[Magic_Hat]

time/money isn't really a friend of mines atm, but the dooms day clock storyline looks interesting. If i did read a watchmen's comic it'd be that one.

A Watchmen's comic? There's only one unless you mean the 12 chapters that make up the complete graphic novel. Also in terms of money I'm sure your local library has a graphic novel section, and I'm sure there's a copy in there.

[ellenate]

A Watchmen's comic? There's only one unless you mean the 12 chapters that make up the complete graphic novel. Also in terms of money I'm sure your local library has a graphic novel section, and I'm sure there's a copy in there.

I didn't know it was just one book, i'm thinking it's like a bunch of 15 page comics that i'd have to hunt down.

So one book covers the whole story? If so, reading it has become a lot more realistic for me. Still don't have the time but the fact one book could cover so much ground piques my interest.

[Magic_Hat]

I didn't know it was just one book, i'm thinking it's like a bunch of 15 page comics that i'd have to hunt down.

It's twelve comics each a little over 20 pages long that came out in the 80s but have seen been packaged into one convenient volume where each of the twelve comics is a chapter. I think retail it's somewhere around $25.

[Rodin]

It's twelve comics each a little over 20 pages long that came out in the 80s but have seen been packaged into one convenient volume where each of the twelve comics is a chapter. I think retail it's somewhere around $25.

A quick check on Amazon shows it for $18, with the Kindle/e-reader version going for considerably cheaper. I worry about how it would translate to electronic format (particularly on older, black-and-white Kindles), so I would definitely advise the paperback copy in this case. I still have my paperback from when I was 12 or so.

[Anonymouswizard]

A quick check on Amazon shows it for $18, with the Kindle/e-reader version going for considerably cheaper. I worry about how it would translate to electronic format (particularly on older, black-and-white Kindles), so I would definitely advise the paperback copy in this case. I still have my paperback from when I was 12 or so.

I was lucky enough to read my dad's first edition copy of the compilation (he once remarked that the fact it's cover was damaged lowered it's worth as a collector's item. He didn't care because it was due to so many people reading that copy). And comparing the paperback to how comics on a kindle work, the paperback is a signficantly better choice.

I wonder where that copy of Watchmen went, my sister might still have it, or it might have gone alongside the BECM boxes.

[tomandtish]

Ok, that's kind of what i thought the main beef was about. Just making sure there's not some critical flaw i'm not aware of.




time/money isn't really a friend of mines atm, but the dooms day clock storyline looks interesting. If i did read a watchmen's comic it'd be that one.

A quick check on Amazon shows it for $18, with the Kindle/e-reader version going for considerably cheaper. I worry about how it would translate to electronic format (particularly on older, black-and-white Kindles), so I would definitely advise the paperback copy in this case. I still have my paperback from when I was 12 or so.

But as long as you don't have a black and white kindle, but some other reader (I use the kindle app on my ipad) it comes across just fine. Ellenate, if you have a kindle account I'll happily loan it to you.

[ellenate]

But as long as you don't have a black and white kindle, but some other reader (I use the kindle app on my ipad) it comes across just fine. Ellenate, if you have a kindle account I'll happily loan it to you.

Thanks but i don't have a kindle. I'll get around to reading it one of these days.

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I've said that lots of times... I got books that i brought years ago that i have yet to touched... all my free time goes to drawing.