See also:
Waiting for Watchmen at WonderCon
Filming the Unfilmable: Behind the Scenes of the Watchmen Movie
Legendary Comics Writer Alan Moore on Superheroes, The League and Making Magic
It's been nearly 25 years since Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' comic book series Watchmen detonated like a nuke, generating generations of fanboy fallout. Movie adaptations by filmmakers like Terry Gilliam and Darren Aronofsky have withered on the vine, but director Zack Snyder's long-awaited cinematic version finally hits theaters Friday.
There are some early warnings that Snyder's film, however engorged with fealty and faith, is still too skinny to stick the landing. With mixed reviews coming in, the prognosis isn't good for a prolonged sales box office blitz similar to 2008's superhero movie champ, The Dark Knight.
Not that Watchmen won't generate some serious scratch: It's arguably the best comic ever committed to paper, and its film adaptation is being released in the dead zone of March. It is sure to kill at the box office for a few weeks at least.
Wired.com will review the film later this week, but for now it seems that Watchmen's slow-mo leap to the screen has lived up to Moore's belief that some comics, especially his, just aren't meant for adaptation. Something inevitably gets lost in translation.
Mainstream publications like The New Yorker calls Watchmen "incoherent, overblown and grimy with misogyny," while the AP's Christy Lemire, a fan of the comic, calls Snyder not a visionary but instead "a skilled mimic." Ouch.
Meanwhile, fan-oriented outlets like Ain't It Cool News ("I watched the fucking Watchmen and fucking loved it!) and Chud ("Watchmen demands praise as an awe-inspiring achievement") gush about Snyder's film.
Dark Knight's billion-dollar box office haul rested squarely on the caped shoulders of one of the world's most well-known superheroes, and was boosted by the tragic early death of Heath Ledger> and, later, by word-of-mouth buzz about his stellar performance as the Joker. In contrast, Watchmen is built around characters that are more obscure, and the movie has had no such extracurricular drama to propel it into the history books (aside from a nasty studio lawsuit). Both movies benefited from massive marketing pushes at the hands of Warner Bros. Pictures, a studio intent on spinning DC Comics' pulp treasures into Hollywood gold.
According to the early reviews, Snyder's Watchmen movie suffers from too much homage and too little on-screen talent. But what's your plan? Will you see Watchmen during its opening weekend? Is it history enough that the film got made at all? Drop us a comment below and school us on the comics-cinema merge.
Photo courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
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