Most of us aren’t comic book geeks anymore (a few contributors not withstanding), but we were well, well-versed in the genre in our formative years and “Watchmen” is something we know quite well (it’s around that era when some of us basically said goodbye to comics and only came back here and there).
So we were just reading Rolling Stone recently and noticed that our old buddy and old co-worker, writer Brian Hiatt had been to the sneak preview of “Watchmen” that many geeks were invited to months ago. You read so much about movies, sneak previews, albums, etc. it sometimes becomes hard who to trust. We point this out, because we know Hiatt’s taste and we know he a) understand comics well and b) is a great journo who will report on things fairly, even if he’s a huge fan of them. This is why his opening graph describing the “Watchmen” preview makes us sure of something, we surely already knew: Zack Snyder has got the tone of this graphic novel all wrong.
“In the first five minutes of next March’s movie adaptation of the 1980s graphic novel Watchmen, a Matrix-style fight sequence breaks out, complete with two superdudes punching through walls with their bare hands. Bam! Pow! Awesome! Except that it feels off-key, as if Michael Bay had directed Moby Dick and kicked it off with a slow-mo man-on-whale duel.”
Jesus christ, if that isn’t as far off the mark of what “Watchmen” should be, we don’t know what is. Yes, we should have assumed this already having seen the trailers which are pretty much what Hiatt describes, but we wanted to give the film the benefit of the doubt and tried not to judge it from that minute and a half we’ve all been privy too. But Michael Bay? “The Matrix” We’re sure if Alan Moore read that paragraph, he’d probably freeze up in some kind of apoplectic seizure. None of those tones and ideas are fitting or describe “Watchmen” the graphic novel at all. Notice the, “but if feels off-key,” line. Hiatt is trying to tell us all something here.
He goes deeper and hints that the visual are amazing, but the story is crap.
“It looks like the best parts of the movie come straight from the book, like a visually stunning sequence starring naked, blue-skinned, atomic-powered Dr. Manhattan. And the worst parts may well be everything else… even if [Snyder’s] botched it, he’s given Moore’s masterpiece a new life.”
You can try and say we’re trying to spin that the way we want to spin it, but you’d be naive. Hiatt knows his “Watchmen” and knows his comic books. But don’t worry Warners, we all know geeks, outside the initial bitching, aren’t the most discerning bunch.