What does one write about the Watchmen movie after everyone else has already weighed in and said it’s too faithful to the original comic? How about that the original comic wasn’t that great to begin with? That’s what Slate and the Washington Post did today!
“Watchmen wasn’t unfilmable,†writes the Washington Post’s Philip Kennicott, “it was unreadable.†Kennicott takes issue, mostly, with Alan Moore’s dialogue:
Despite the intellectual name-dropping, the quotes from Nietzsche, Blake and Juvenal (“Who watches the watchmen?â€), the level of Moore’s writing rarely rises above B-movie fare. It is silly and dated, the faded gibberish of an old-fashioned noire stylist (the kind who now works for newspapers). And it is filled with clichés.
Kennicott credits the movie’s actors (even Malin Ackerman!) for doing “what they can†with their “cardboard characters,†but finds Moore’s “incoherent story line†too much to bear: “The only watch that matters in Watchmen,†he says, “is the one on your wrist. It’s telling you life is too short for this movie.â€
Slate’s Grady Hendrix, meanwhile, brands the Moore’s book “a failure†because it inspired not a flood of complicated, layered graphic novels with “decentralized narratives†about the lives of ordinary people, but a bunch of comics in which superheroes are killed off, seemingly for little more than a sales boost.
Watchmen’s failure wasn’t that it failed to influence other comics but that the book’s most meaningless and shallow aspects were mistakenly hailed as its virtues and then widely imitated. […]
Watchmen’s failure wasn’t that it failed to influence other comics but that the book’s most meaningless and shallow aspects were mistakenly hailed as its virtues and then widely imitated. […]
Who could possibly have expected that Zack Snyder’s movie would spark such a hatefest against a book that’s still nearly universally considered a masterpiece? We just thought the slow-motion fight scenes were shitty!
Blight ‘Watchmen’ [WP]
Watchmen Failed [Slate]