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It's been waaaaay to long since my last journal entry. So I'll just skip everything that's past, and go back to "normal" journal posts. The topic for this week: Watchmen.
Let me start by looking at Watchmen's biggest effect on Gaia's economy: the price of the Black Inked Mask shot up, as can be seen in the marketplace graph:
I guess there are one or two rich Gaians out there who saw this coming and made some profits from that. These would be true investors, and if you're one of those people, I salute you. It's pretty similar to the achievements of the few people who anticipated the price jump of the spartan sandals on the opening day of the 2008 olympics:
Trust me, you can skip checking the date, that huge jump in price in the middle is, in fact, the opening ceremony.
The lesson here? if you really want to do well in investments in Gaia and unlike "professional" vendors you can't sit around refreshing the maketplace page all day, you can still do it. Do your homework, read the newspapers, eat your greens, and learn to anticipate those things, because when they come they are very very valuable investment opportunities.
Here ends the part about Gaia. From now on, it's only about the movie. I saw watchmen, and really liked it but only because I liked the book. I think as a stand-alone movie it's ok, not great, and that as a movie that was adapted from a book, the adaptation was really bad.
Big Warning This journal entry includes spoilers, but I'm too lazy to white them out selectively. Just read it after you've seen the movie and thought about it yourself for a bit, the journal will still be here.
A movie is not a book. They are different types of media, and therefore should be different. Some things can be told in a book and not in a movie, and some can be done in a movie but not in a book. As a graphical novel, it was very tempting to just translate the book literally to the movie, even with skipping lots of work on making the storyboard. Which was a huge mistake - this is where some adaptation should have taken place, but didn't.
Out of the things that were "adapted" I found quite a few that were pure fail:
1. In the book, there are no superheroes. These are ordinary people wearing masks. It's actually a big deal in the book, and explains quite well the state of mind of those masked heroes, and the darkness and solitude they live in. In the movie, however, they do smash through concrete and stop bullets with their hands and s**t like that. Cool, it's ok to make a superheroes movie, just ADAPT THE SCRIPT ACCORDINGLY. For example, drop the whole "older generation" storyline. It's a well developed line in the book, but the movie is too long as it is, and does no justice to this plot. None of my friends who have not read the book got the part that there was an old and a new night owl, for example. If it's not essential and the movie is too long as it is, so just dropping it would be better. Also, a man who's head smashes a toilet bowl when hitting it without dying can not tear through a cape? THEY ARE NOT REAL SUPERHEROES, so the stories about how the old superheroes died and got into trouble are irrelevant, because they wouldn't really suit real superheroes.
2. What happened to the cigarettes? They smoke in the book. A lot. And it makes sense, given the genre and the era. It's even tied nicely into some cool small events like whatshername pressing the red button with fire on it in look for a cigarette lighter. But these days it's suddenly not ok to show people smoking on the screen? what kind of idiocy is that? especially in a movie that has so much blood splatter, bone crushing, kids being molested, killed and eaten by dogs, cities destroyed by nuclear explosions, and lots of sex. Out of that list, is smoking the single worst thing? Pure huge failure. Not to mention that he turns whatshername from a lighter seeking girl to a stupid bimbo who sees a red button with fire on it and presses it "yay! a red button with fire on it! I should press it because I'm a woman!".
3. Too much gore. The movie is violent, and so is the book. But why was it necessary to show close-ups of the open fractures in the street fight scene? Why was it necessary to saw of the fat guy's hands? these things weren't even in the book. Stupid additions.
There may be more thingsI should add, but you see where it's going.
I think the book should have been ADAPTED to the screen: the storylines chosen carefully, and when needed, even changed slightly to actually fit a 2 hour movie. You can't have it all - it if takes longer than 2 hours to read a book, than a movie will not have every single element in it. This is why the academy awards have a category for adapted screenplays - because adapting them is a non-trivial feat. One in which watchmen fails miserably.
I still enjoyed it, but people who have not read the book did not enjoy it as much as I did, and I totally understand why.
Anyway, I'll try to post more frequently, maybe even on Gaia related issues xp
Sagger-AT3 · Sun Mar 15, 2009 @ 08:54pm · 14 Comments |
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