Watchmen Casting Announced

[Velorath]

Having never read Watchmen,
seeing as it came out two years after I was born

That's no excuse.  Go read it.

[Samwise]

The wang is not in any way obvious.  I had to pause the frame to see that he wasn't wearing the dark blue speedo from the Vietnam shot.

Basically, he's naked but they aren't making a big deal out of it one way or another.  Which is pretty much how the comic handled it.

[Ironwood]

My bad.

[Moosehands]

It's a Michaelangelo weenie, which to our modern porn-conditioned eyes makes it almost non-existent.

[Cadaverine]

The wang is not in any way obvious.

You should check out the trailer on IMAX.   

[Samwise]

Should I really? 

[NiX]

That's no excuse.  Go read it.

I'm almost done. Picked up the whole bit for $20. So good.

[naum]

WTF

Over many months, and many meetings, Snyder persuaded Warner Bros. to abandon the Greengrass/Hayter script and hew as faithfully as possible to the comic. The key battles: retaining the '80s milieu, keeping Richard Nixon (Moore did consider using an era-appropriate Ronald Reagan, but worried it would alienate American readers), and preserving the villain-doesn't-pay-for-his-crimes climax.

[schild]

What's the problem?

[naum]

What's the problem?

That they wanted a whole different storyline, detail and ending from the book… …granted, it's nice that they're being "convinced" of the erroneous ways, but WTF…

[stu]

At first, I thought you were unhappy with them veering towards the source material, rather than away from it.

preserving the villain-doesn't-pay-for-his-crimes climax.

This always bothers me a bit, because the story implies that the villain will pretty much be burned at the stake after the story has ended. I knew who the villain was going in, and still ended up more than happy with the final chapter. Just look at the villain's face in that character's last frame, and you can see that person's fate is sealed.

I'm glad they stuck with the 80's theme. Using Reagan edges too far into The Dark Knight Returns territory.

I'll always be curious about Gilliam's take on the work. Odds are, some unholy disaster would have kept it from seeing the light of day anyhow.

[Ironwood]

What are you talking about ?

[UnSub]

What's the problem?

That they wanted a whole different storyline, detail and ending from the book… …granted, it's nice that they're being "convinced" of the erroneous ways, but WTF…

US audiences might not be as accepting of film with a faked terrorist attack on US soil that leaves thousands of US citizens dead as they once were.

[HaemishM]

US Audiences are mostly full of cockbiting imbeciles.

[UnSub]

US Audiences are mostly full of cockbiting imbeciles.

But they have the numbers. Only those who want a short career in show business want to be involved in critical successes that fail to attract an audience.

I'm not a fan of Snyder, but he's got guts for saying, "This is Watchmen, so it is going to follow what happened in the source, regardless of how it makes people feel". If "The Dark Knight" had bombed, I could pretty much guarantee someone would be re-editing / re-shooting the narrative of "Watchmen" right now.

[Samwise]

What's the problem?

That they wanted a whole different storyline, detail and ending from the book… …granted, it's nice that they're being "convinced" of the erroneous ways, but WTF…

It's Hollywood.  They always have a hard time believing someone outside their industry might have written a good story.

[Moosehands]

This always bothers me a bit, because the story implies that the villain will pretty much be burned at the stake after the story has ended. I knew who the villain was going in, and still ended up more than happy with the final chapter. Just look at the villain's face in that character's last frame, and you can see that person's fate is sealed.

I disagree.  The last shot we see of the villian's face is hammering home the sudden rush of uncertainty, a feeling that he's never experienced before and did not anticipate through all of his plans.  He isn't sure he'll be burned at the stake.  He's no longer sure of anything.

And this matches the final panel, with the editor's assistant reaching toward the crazy stack.  Does his hand finally come to rest on the journal, or pass it by in favor of a letter about chemtrails or fluoridization?  I don't think Moore felt any need to answer that question, or even leave it to the reader to decide.

It's actually part of what I think will be impossible to translate to the screen.  Everyone in the Watchmen is struggling to control their world, and ultimately they all fail in different ways.  The only two exceptions are the Comedian who's attempt to laugh off control leads to his death when confronted with the fact that control is an inescapable function of the human condition, and Manhattan who achieves true control only to lose his humanity in the process.

[Ironwood]

You're both nuts.  The Book is ABOUT getting away with it.

Of course he got away with it.  For the rest of his life.

That wasn't Manhattans' point.

[Tebonas]

Maybe Hollywood is right. The original story seems to be too hard for many people.

The one who would have blown the whistle is dead. Everybody else shrugs their shoulders and says "Harm done, so those sacrifices better not be for naught". The truth is buried in the ramblings of a convicted madman who may or may not be published in a third rate rag that nobody takes seriously.

They got away with it.

[Margalis]

I agree with Tebonas and Ironwood and Mooshand all to some degree. When Manhattan says that nothing ever ends I took it to refer more to that Ozymandias' work would eventually erode back to the status quo than that this particular episode was far from over.

Ozymandias probably gets away with it. There is some slight uncertainty there but the interpretation that Ozymandias' is fucked makes no sense to me, I think someone is reading in a Hollywood ending where there isn't one. Maybe twenty years down the road somebody puts together the pieces and hunts him down, sure, but that's not the foregone or even likely conclusion.

If Manhattan meant that this particular episode had yet to play out he wouldn't have done what he did in the end.

[Ironwood]

Ozymandias doesn't give a FUCK about Rorscach getting back to town and blowing the whistle.  Some say because he knows what Jon is going to do.  But that's total fucking bollocks.  Everything proved that you can't predict Jon.  He's only predictable to himself.

He got away with it.  No-one would listen to the fucking frontiersman or a diary of a fucked up vigilante except those who would believe it anyway.

Nixon is fucking president for LIFE, for Christ sakes.

He got away with it.

[HaemishM]

It wouldn't matter if Ozymandias "got away with it" or not. Not only is the damage done, but even if found out, he proved that 1) humanity is better off without the Ubermensch to keep them from eating each other in the streets and 2) the only way to get humanity to move in a positive fashion is by manipulating their fear for their own salvation. He saw himself as Alexander leading humanity forward through his benevolent dictatorship. What company do you think would lead the reconstruction? How depenedent would Nixon be on Veidt for unfucking the country?

It wasn't about "getting away with it" so much as getting it done in the first place.

[Ironwood]

That's one way to look at it.  Doesn't really fly in the face of my view tho.

[Teleku]

Yeah, not sure how anybody got the "could be burned at a stake" interpretation.  I thought the ending fully showed he got away with it.  All he wanted from Jon was just confirmation from the super being that he had done the right thing, pretty much for comfort.  Jon's response just left him upset because he didn't give him an answer and basically told him he was going live with the decision the rest of his life. 

On the Diary, I like to think it did get published, and becomes a popular conspiracy theory among crazy conspiracy people, but doesn't actually effect anything because it's god damn crazy.  Like the 9/11 government conspiracy.  Except only this time, ironically, it happens to be true!  But that's just my happy take on it in my head.

Also, as I recall, Nixon was stepping down after all this (well, not running again), so he wouldn't be involved.  Looks like President Robert Redford  .

[Mazakiel]

http://hollywoodinsider.ew.com/2008/08/watchmen-lawsui.html

Earlier this year, Twentieth Century Fox filed a lawsuit against Warner Bros. seeking to stop Watchmen’s release (scheduled for March 6, 2009), claiming that it, not Warner Bros., held the distribution rights to any motion picture made from the material. Today, a judge declined Warner Bros.’ request to dismiss the lawsuit, setting the stage for a possibly ugly legal tussle.

The judge’s ruling comes as a shock to many in Hollywood, as most assumed Fox’s claim had no merit. After all, the central figure in this complicated saga is Larry Gordon (Die Hard, Field of Dreams), a veteran producer who surely must have known what he was doing when he began trying to bring Watchmen to the screen 17 years ago—a storied struggle that took him to at least three separate studios (Paramount was close to making the film in 2005 before a regime change put it in turnaround) until finally finding a seemingly happy ending at Warner Bros. Yet according to Fox’s lawsuit, Gordon has a standing agreement dating back to the early '90s to buy out the studio’s interest in the project if he ever got it up and going at another company.

Nothing nice can ever happen without someone trying to fuck it up. 

[Ironwood]

Fuck Sake.

Throw money at the problem, Hollywood.

Quickly.

[DraconianOne]

It doesn't surprise me that Fox are involved in this.  I think they've got over 70% of the worlds lawyers working for them.  It's just a shame they don't seem to have a clue. Fox legal recently demanded that YouTube videos of a trailer for one of their films be pulled.  The videos were uploaded by someone being paid by Fox Marketing to promote the film on the internet. 

Fuckwits.

[Moosehands]

I don't think Moore felt any need to answer that question, or even leave it to the reader to decide.

Well I went digging around for things to support my assertion and wound up disproving the last bit of that sentence.

AM: I believe that with Watchmen, if we’ve achieved anything in terms of the moral aspect of it, I don’t believe that optimism is possible without looking very long and very hard at the worst possible case. I felt that after issue 6—that’s the bottom line, you can’t say much worse than that. So if we have any optimism in the series it’ll be valid optimism because it won’t simply be based on ignoring the nasty facts of life. To me, just in that last panel, in Godfrey’s last line “I leave it entirely in your hands”—that’s talking to the reader as well… I leave it entirely in your hands, how do we sort out this Gordian Knot? If the question is who makes the world? then if there’s an answer it is that everybody does. Yeah, there’s people that seem to be in more immediate power than others but really the world is an elaborate series of accidents, coincidences and unbelievable synchronicities that people appear to be in control of but… well, think about the events in your own life, the things that have made really dramatic changes in you can be traced back to deciding to pick up a ballpoint pen or not pick it up.

So, does the journal get published or not?  And if it does, does it matter or not?  Each of us gets to answer that for ourselves.  In the world of the Watchmen no single person or event is completely in control.

[stu]

I see the ketchup stain on the assistant editor's tee shirt on the last page. Once he reads the journal and knows the truth, he's like the Comedian at the begining of the story- a guy with a huge bit of information to divulge? As the story says, who do you go to with that kind of knowledge? The Comedian went to Moloch, an old villain who develops cancer- he was soon to die anyway. The assistant editor will go to the readers of the paper he works for. Moloch didn't do anything with the knowledge he had, but would the public?

I just find it hard to believe that the world peace would hold after the information is printed. Don't forget that Watchmen is our world, but with superheroes. If you lived in a world with Dr. Manhatten walking around in it, don't you think you could believe that the world's smartest man, Adrien Veidt, could hatch a plan to kill millions of people in order to stop WWlll? The people rose up against the Watchmen once before, they'd surely have the will to do it again.

I can see that many of you think I'm crazy now. Anyways, I like all the takes I've read here.

[Ironwood]

In the world we live in now, we'd read it, say 'meh' and turn over to American Gladiators.

Either that, or we'd be furiously masturbating about it in a Politics thread.

 

[DraconianOne]

In the world we live in now, we'd read it watch the movie, say 'meh' and turn over to American Gladiators.
 

Fixed

[UnSub]

Maybe Hollywood is right. The original story seems to be too hard for many people.

The one who would have blown the whistle is dead. Everybody else shrugs their shoulders and says "Harm done, so those sacrifices better not be for naught". The truth is buried in the ramblings of a convicted madman who may or may not be published in a third rate rag that nobody takes seriously.

They got away with it.

They got away with it in the short term. For the rest of his life, Veidt has to hope that no-one puts together what he did, because if they do his work is undone. With no third party threat, the USSR and USA are back in a nuclear stalemate and the world is on the brink again.

"Nothing ever ends". Veidt wanted some reassurance, but all he got was an indication he's got the rest of his life to think about what he's done and maybe be discovered. He may have done the right thing, but he's going to wear it until he dies.

Given how bananas the US went in the search for Osama bin Laden after 9/11, I can't think the US population would go "that guy killed 20 000 people - meh, let's watch Oprah".

[NowhereMan]

Eh, Veidt's plan worked just as he intended but I think the meaning of Jon's parting words were a reminder to him that this isn't the end. His plan succeeded but that doesn't mean he gets the ending cutscene, roll credits. People are going to continue to have arguments, petty disputes and their terror of aliens overhwelming their fear of their fellow humans is only going to last so long. I think Jon's very aware of the fact that even though everything went just as he wanted that Veidt's plan to create paradise doesn't ever get to the point where you can sit back satisfied that you've accomplished it. In other words Veidt either gets to spend the rest of his life slowly engineering further situations to keep everyone's minds off killing each other or he has to sit back and watch as the world slides back into MAD once more.

[Raguel]

If Manhattan meant that this particular episode had yet to play out he wouldn't have done what he did in the end.

Sure he would have. He's just a puppet who can see the strings (I only hate myself a little for remembering that line  )


I agree with the rest though.

From the article:

When the six-month shoot commenced in Vancouver last summer, some of the actors struggled with fleshing out their complex, often corrupt characters. Jeffrey Dean Morgan (TV's Supernatural), who plays the Comedian, must carry out repellent acts of violence, but still manage to make the audience care about his death — and his big secrets. ''Some of the things this guy does, you can't make excuses for, even as an actor,'' Morgan says. ''Your instinct is to just play the guy as a bastard, but you can't.''

I'm so relieved to read this. I was afraid one of his "big secrets" would be excised/watered-down. 

[Ironwood]

Are you talking about the Rape or the war crimes ?  Or the shooting of his child ?