2000 AD Online Forum

Link: Rorschachs Journal

nice teaser!!!! but I bloody hope the film would be great!!

But is that site an official Watchmen site? It seems not, if I'm reading this article correctly, it's a fan site, but with the studio's official blessing.....?

http://www.chud.com/index.php?type=news&id=10889

Source code for the page suggests it's run by the same people that brought you www.theonering.net:


FRAMESET ROWS="*,0" FRAMEBORDER=0 BORDER=0 FRAMESPACING=0
FRAME SRC="http://staff.theonering.net/xoanon/rorschach/index.html" NORESIZE
/FRAMESET

Bump.

Another theonering-Watchmen site has popped up. Not much there yet, but I'm liking the way they're doing this....

http://www.theveidtmethod.com/

Well, they've confirmed the Watchmen cast. Personally I think they sound alright, the ones I've heard of anyway.

http://www.empireonline.com/news/story.asp?NID=20895

Crudup as Manhattan seems spot on, and Wilson as Nite Owl seems a good choice. I haven't seen Jackie Earl Haley in anything, but he has the look of a dangerous bastard, so I'll trust them. As for Matthew Goode as Ozymandias, he seems a bit young, but he does have the good looks of a smarmy bastard. I don't know if he can pull of the "smartest man in the world" gig, but we'll see.....

All in all, this is all starting to shape up pretty well I'd say.

Jackie Earl Haley is great! Check out The Bad News Bears, one of the best kids films ever made. He's a total badass in it!

Stop it!  Stop it NOW!  What is wrong with people that they want to watch a film version of a story the genius of which resides SOLELY in the fact that it IS TOLD IN COMIC FORM.  Does anyone want to smell my Mona Lisa fart?  It's as faithful an adaptation of La Giaconda as any bottom burp ever could be.  What do you mean you aren't interested?  I'll have you know I'm a highly accomplished petomane.  

Anyway, my next project is a version of Teenage Kicks painted entirely in oils - it'll bring the Undertones to a whole new audience!  

It's a fucking bad idea and I wish it would just stop. That is, of course, just one man's opinion.

Well, after owning the graphic novel for several years - I have only today finished it for the first time (after a previous false start).

It is indeed a fantastic piece of work - Moore and Gibbons are brillian on every page.
Perhaps John Higgins was a bit too technicolor but you can't have anything.

I can't think that a film could ever do this justice - I wouldn't even bother and echo Mr Tordelback's sentiments.

Now to finish 'From Hell' - two thirds in and I just felt too grubby and depressed to continue! Another top notch piece of writing though.

my Mona Lisa Fart...

Ahhhh...thank you....

:-)

Watchmen is totally fimable, just use the comic as the story boards.

Now, it would need to be a 12 hour movie done that way, but it is do-able.

Condensing it to a 2 - 2 1/2 hour movie might water it down too much.

I don't get the whole 'it's a comic and should only be a comic' deal.

It's a story, told in visuals. And hey, guess what... movies are stories told in visuals.

It can be a movie, easily. Will it be a good movie, of that I'm not so sure.

Best comic ever?

I prefer The Dark Knight Returns.

***It's a story, told in visuals. And hey, guess what... movies are stories told in visuals.

It can be a movie, easily. Will it be a good movie, of that I'm not so sure. ***

That's one of the biggest mistakes producers make with comics and films.

Unfortunately, it's not that simple as many have found, scenes that work in comics generally don't work on screen and Watchmen, especially, was created for comics specifially. With somehing like 300. there's more leeway as it's a rather more supeficial tale done purely through visuals. But when something as dialogue heavy as Watchmen is filmed, a lot needs to be altered to make it work for pacing as a direct translation from page to screen would, suprisingly be clunky and boring.

A lot of Watchmen is built on the idea of the same words held against multiple images to produce new ideas of irony and insight. It's something that really only works in print, harder in movies cos' there's too much dialogue to.

Also, Watchmen is strutured in a way that it needs to be reread, almost continually as you go, in order to get the gist. You can't do this with film as it kills the pacing.

So the relationship between film and comics is quite superficial, being similar in image only, they are worlds apart when it comes to storytelling and that's were most fall down.

I agree that there's a very fine line that has to be walked when converting a comic book like this to the screen. For instance, with V for Vendetta, (which I would call a successful book to screen conversion) the makers left out a lot of the book's details, and made other changes, but kept the overall spirit and storyline of the book, and it made for a pretty damn good film in my opinion.

Now Watchmen on the other hand, while I want to see the film, is going to be a lot harder. It's almost a "multimedia" comic, with all the background happenings, and inter-chapter snippets from other books and police files, The Black Freighter, etc. I don't know how they're going to convey all that in a film, but I'm curious to find out.

And on a purely superficial movie fan level, the thought of seeing Rorschach kicking some punk's ass in an alleyway, or a 50-foot tall Dr.Manhattan saying "I am VERY disappointed...." on the screen is all the incentive I need.

Like I said, It'll be a watered down version.

WTF?!?!?!?

No thanks.

I agree with the posters saying Watchmen is filmable. Films use storyboards at pre-production stage and storyboards are comic strip type panels without dialogue. It should be relatively easy to shoot a Watchmen film and reproduce every panel from the comic book.

Moore claims you won't appreciate the subtlety of Watchmen when done as a film because you can't linger over a film scene in the same way one can linger over a comic panel. He may have a point but if you could linger over every scene in a film it would never end. It would bore you to tears. Sort of Citizen Kane without an end.:P

I don't recall much action in Watchmen. Garageman could be right about a faithful version of Watchmen  boring some people. I think it would need to have a few more fights/action scenes. Something like the police or one of the Watchmen trying to apprehand Rorschach through the streets of the city (possibly a car chase or rooftop chase) - Doctor Manhattan stopping a plane crash, things like that. Watchmen seems a bit too cerebral and introspective for the Spider-man/Fantastic Four type movie audience. A bit more action is needed. Superman Returns didn't have much action and was criticised.

I've never heard of any of the cast, seems a bit 'tv movie' to me.


For me Robert DeNero is the Comedian, not given much thought to the other characters.

Should have been animated.

The end of Watchmen is a bit 9/11. Lots of people die. I guess enough years have passed for it not to be seen as inappropriate. I wonder if the story will be set in New York?

The new film version of the book I Am Legend, starring Will Smith as the only man alive, is set in New York even though the book's location was Los Angeles. Locations seem to change in films. When they made the Dredd film they set Dredd's city in a futuristic Brighton. Smart move, I thought.:)

Dave Gibbons has drawn a new Watchmen cover promoting the film:

official watchmen film site is up:

Link: http://watchmenmovie.warnerbros.com/

03.06.09

They have a website up for a film which wont be out for two years?! Lunacy.

I feel the same way about video games. They preview them two to three bloody years before they're even released!!!!

Something like the police or one of the Watchmen trying to apprehand Rorschach

See, other then the pointlessness of the exercise, this is the other bloody problem.  "The Watchmen".  Who the fuck are "The Watchmen"?  

Scott (I know, I know) refers to them as if they were some kind of superteam, when in fact one of the key points of the story is that the Minutemen (and worse-yet Nelson's attempts to reform them) never worked at all.  About the only successful crime-fighting 'team' in the book were Dan and the pre-Rorschach Kovacs.  

In the book, the term "Watchmen" exists only as graffitti and anti-hero slogans during the police strike, the JFK speech, and in the Warren Commission quotation at the end - the characters refer to themselves as 'masks' or 'heroes', not 'Watchmen'.  And I don't think this perception of Watchmen as a term interchangeable with X-Men or Fantastic Four is limited to Scott.  The marketting problems are even explicitly addressed in the Veidt Corporation dummy-brochure, and Adrian's comments.  

Irony of ironies, I'm presuming that making dolls of film characters will sidestep Moore's opposition to the mooted dolls for the comic.    

***See, other then the pointlessness of the exercise, this is the other bloody problem. "The Watchmen". Who the fuck are "The Watchmen"? ***

It's always been an intentionally ambiguous term for anyone with power in the world of the book. I don't really see it as a problem, people will either get it or they won't, that's the purpose of ambiguities. As long as they don't all wear matching uniforms with a big W on the front. The term Watchmen was a background motif and will probably stay that way. Plenty of comic book readers never came to terms with who the Watchmen were.

I can't wait to buy a Richard Nixon doll to place beside the Comedian.

It should have been Omar Sharif as The Comedian. He was in the Steve Coogan film, The Parole Officer as "Victor" but of course, he`s too old now. I`ve only heard of Billy Crudup and I couldn`t even pick him out in a police lineup. Gary Oldman as Rorschach and no-one else! He was in Batman Begins so he`ll obviously appear in any old load of Sh*te!