The Short And Long Of “Marvel’s The Avengers”

As part of the Ultimate Marvel Marathon – about which, more later – in fact, the ultimate part of the marathon, Scott and I caught the midnight premiere of Marvel’s The Avengers.
At a little after 2:30 AM, when the movie let out, and I was thinking about how I would just be getting home at a time when, on a normal Friday, I’d be getting up to start my day, I posted a quick, two word review of the movie to Facebook:

Holy. Shit.

Here I will expand on that with my mostly spoiler-free thoughts on the movie.
I will admit that, going into the movie, I had rather high expectations, based on the general quality and entertainment value of the Marvel movies that preceded and informed it, and the fact that the movie was helmed by Joss Whedon.
In recent years, few people have contributed more to geek culture than Whedon.  His body of work includes such notable efforts as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, Dollhouse, and work in the actual comic book medium in which the Avengers were first assembled, and seemed to me to be reason enough to expect him to do well with the task of bring the Avengers to the big screen.
Having read much of his work in comics, and knowing that he is, himself a comic book geek didn’t hurt my expectations either.
Additionally, the notion of Robert Downey, Jr. as Tony Stark delivering the snappy and snarky dialogue that is a Whedon trademark seemed to be very much a Peanut Butter plus Chocolate situation.
Despite my already high expectations, however, Avengers managed to completely exceed what I was expecting by a very wide margin.
Which isn’t to say I had no complaints at all – I did, and will list them shortly – but the generally fantastic execution more than made up for them.
As an aside, the movie has sparked a lot of controversy within the comic fan community due to the mistreatment of the legendary Jack Kirby, co-creator of the Avengers comic and of most of the characters appearing in the movie, at the hands of Marvel – and, more largely, the mistreatment of creators by the comic book industry as a whole – and I certainly understand those fans and pros who find the movie troubling at best.  However, personally, and you can make your own decisions as to what this says about me as a fan and a human being, while I agree wholeheartedly that the behavior of Marvel (and DC) in this regard (and with far too many examples to count) has been nothing less than execrable, it just wasn’t enough to keep me away or to sully my enjoyment of the movie.
In any case, among the key elements that made the movie such a success, aside from the phenomenal effects, fight choreography, and strong performances, was the fact that it tied together elements from the five standalone movies that preceded it – with Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury, and Clark Gregg as Agent Phil Coulson as the unifying threads – so capably and that, relatedly, despite the many divergences from the multitude of source material in the comics themselves, it actually felt like an Avengers comic that was translated directly from comic to screen in a way that even X-Men and X2, despite their own strengths as comic book movies, just never managed.
Watching the movie unfold, I could imagine this story being told in individual four-color panels over the course of several issues of an Avengers comic.
This is where Whedon’s own history as a comic geek paid off.  He knows the medium.  He knows the storytelling flow.  He knows the tropes, and while he often subverted them and put his own twist on them – as any talented comic book writer would do – he demonstrated the utmost respect for them, and in many cases delivered them just exactly as they are, with neither spin nor commentary, and demonstrated why they have become tropes.
The most notable example of this was the standard, “When super heroes meet for the first time, they always end up fighting each other.”
Did that happen?  Of course.  Was it everything that any fanboy or fangirl could ever hope for?  Oh yes.  Holy shit, yes.
Beyond that, however, what really sold it as a comic book story – and, more specifically, a super hero team comic book story – were the scenes in which the individual members were pulled into the larger narrative.
As much as I’ve been known to rail against Chris Claremont on this space, mocking his stilted, unnaturally idiosyncratic dialogue and his continual trips back to the same dried-up well, I freely admit that the man is a master of comic book storytelling and would never deny that he’s earned his status as a legendary figure in comics (Hello?  The Dark Phoenix Saga, anyone?), and one of his greatest strengths over the years has been to seamlessly tie in events from other parts of whatever comic book universe he’s working in and present nice little scenes that could easily appear in another writer’s book as a means of pulling the required characters into the story at hand.
So it was in that context, as I watched the little scene of domestic bliss between Tony Stark and Pepper Potts – which could have easily been part of an Iron Man sequel – early in the movie, I thought, in the best way possible, “My god, this is positively Claremontian.”
It was that approach to telling the story that helped to keep the movie from becoming a confused mess the way that some movies featuring a large cast so often do.
The other obvious comic book influence, of course, was the King himself, as the story burst forth with all of the dynamism and cosmic scale of a Kirby story.  Interestingly enough, it had more than a little of the flavor of Kirby’s Fourth World work for Marvel’s Dynamic Competition.
I was also pleased to see that while Whedon clearly cribbed from Marvel’s Ultimate line – a line of comics featuring alternate reality versions of Marvel characters – as have all of the movies that are components of Avengers, he avoided some of the more over-the-top and extreme scenes favored by Mark Millar, because I have to say that I’m just as glad that we didn’t have to see the Hulk eating people* as I was that we weren’t treated to the original Avengers story that featured the Hulk hiding out in a circus disguised as an elephant-juggling robot clown.
I really want to avoid spoilers, so I’ll start wrapping things up here and say that one of the things that has made the post-X-Men comic movies that have been part of what I call the Comic Geek’s Cinematic Golden Age so satisfying to the fans has been the fact that despite frequently straying very far from the source material, the most successful and well-received movies have managed to keep a certain level of respect for the material – and for the fans – at the forefront.  With Avengers, Whedon takes it to another level, with respect not only for the stories and the characters, but also for the techniques used in telling those stories and developing those characters.

Complaints:
I have no particular feelings** about Hank Pym, who was one of the founding members of the Avengers in the comics, and I recognize that a character whose primary ability, in his Ant-Man persona, is to shrink to the size of an ant and communicate with ants would make him an easy target for ridicule, and someone who wouldn’t fit in well in the Marvel Movieverse, but as a founding member, I would have liked to have seen him included.  Honestly, if they had focused on one of his other costumed identities, Giant-Man, whose name speaks to his abilities, he would have fit in just fine. (Hank changed things up a lot.  Sometimes he’d go the Ant-Man route, sometimes the Giant-Man route.  And he was also Yellowjacket.  And Goliath.  And…well, just read this.)
Similarly, Janet Van Dyne, the winsome Wasp, a woman who can shrink down to the size of an insect, grow wings, and zap people with a bioelectric sting, would seem kind of silly in the movies, but she, too, was a founding member, and is a character who has, in my estimation, been treated rather shabbily in the comics.  (See footnote on Hank Pym as just one example, and the linked article above for more.)  It was a shame to see that shabby treatment continue; one of my favorite eras of the Avengers comics was when Wasp was in charge.
Just as comic books have their tropes and clichés, so too do comic book movies.  Most notably the fact that no comic book movie super hero can keep his or her mask on for more than five minutes.  Avengers was no exception.
Speaking of masks, and, more generally, costumes, I really did not like the redesign of Captain America’s costume in this movie.  At all.  I was less bothered by the changes to Thor’s costume, but I didn’t care for those changes, either.

Stray Thoughts:
I don’t know if I should pleased with Whedon or angry with him, but he actually made me kind of like Hawkeye.
It’s a shame that DC will never be able to get its movie strategy lined up well enough to give us a Justice League movie.  Even if they started developing a strategy right now, it would still be years before we saw the end result.
Biggest surprise for me?  I actually liked Mark Ruffalo as Brue Banner.
I think I can safely say that Scarlett Johannson is somewhat attractive.
There were a lot of Easter Eggs for the fans, which is always appreciated.
I tend to hate “comic relief,” but one of the strengths of the Marvel movies (setting aside Kat Dennings in Thor, who didn’t bother me as much as I thought she would) has been that they find a way to insert the right amount of humor without making it seem inorganic or restricting one two character to merely filling the role of comic relief, and not only does it not detract from the emotional resonance of the story, it adds to it.  Whedon, of course, is a master of this.

Profanity-Laden Stray Thoughts:
Fucking Quinjets!
The motherfucking Helicarrier! (Fortunately/unfortunately, Nick Fury didn’t say, “I have had it with these motherfucking super villains on this motherfucking helicarrier!”)
Holy shitballs, the motherfucking post-credits scene!

*I will admit that within the context of The Ultimates, the idea was kind of entertaining.  Betty Ross being turned on by it, however, was disturbing in any context.

**Except for the part about beating his wife.  That I do have strong feelings about, or more specifically, against.  Not that I’m opposed to it being a topic for exploration in a storyline, but if one considers it a defining characteristic of the character – and I do – it naturally leads to strong negative feelings about the character.  Even before the first presentation of physical abuse in the comics, Hank was a sexist, controlling, patriarchal jerkwad, which is, surprisingly, pretty much the only super hero name he never went by.  In any case, my point is that, conceptually, I don’t have a problem with the idea of Hank Pym as a character (that is, a character who has the power to change his size).

In Which Jon Writes Way More Than He Intended And Says Much Less

I wasn’t expecting it to be great or anything, but that movie Jennifer’s Body looked pretty entertaining, so when I got up yesterday morning I decided that I’d take in a matinee showing of it.
Because The Universe is an old pro when it comes to messing with me, it naturally made sure that as soon as i tried to make use of the movie listings widget on my Google page the widget wasn’t actually working properly.
After multiple attempts I finally got it to display a list of showtimes, but found that the movie wasn’t actually playing at my preferred theater. I was annoyed, as I didn’t feel like driving out to Regal Countryside, as that’s just too far to travel on Route7 on a Saturday.
However, I thought it odd that such a major release wouldn’t be playing at the theater in Brambleton, and got even more suspicious when I clicked on the link to show all movies playing at that theater and saw that there were only two movies listed as currently playing. It seemed even more unlikely that there were only two movies playing at a theater that has sixteen screens.
Still, every site I checked showed that to be the case, and while I figured it was probably just some sort of glitch or something I also figured that it wasn’t worth driving out to the theater just to find out, so I decided that I’d just check the listings again on Sunday and maybe do the matinee then.
At one point while still mindlessly bagging and boarding comics I went upstairs and noticed that I had a missed call and voicemail on my cell.
It was Stacy calling to see if I was still going to their house for dinner on Sunday and wondering if it would be okay if we had dinner relatively early in the afternoon. So that changed my plans to see the movie on Sunday. I checked the Web again to see if the presumed listings glitch had been worked out and to find out of if there was a late show I could take in.
The glitch hadn’t been fixed on most sites, but eventually I found a site that had a full listing of movies at Brambleton and found that the movie was playing at 10:25.
So I decided to go.
While I was sitting there thinking about how funny it is that there are signs all over the theater proclaiming it a “Cell Phone and Pager-Free Zone,” yet before the movie starts you’re inundated with pretty much nothing but ads for cell phones, someone tapped me on the shoulder.
This struck me as odd, given that I don’t know anyone – it’s probably a testament to my anti-social nature that I’ve lived in Virginia for nearly seven years and have worked for two very large companies, but really am acquainted with only a very small number of people – or at least I couldn’t imagine that any of the people I know would be at that particular movie on a Saturday night.
The question of who it could possibly be was answered before I could even turn around to look, as I heard a familiar voice say “Hey, JonMaki!”
It was a guy who used to be one of the Trainers at work, whom I worked with under my first boss.
(And yes, he always very distinctively says my first and last name together as though they were one name.)
We chatted for a bit before he returned to the group he was with.
So that was random.
During the previews two guys came in and sat down and it was clear from the start that they were going to be loud – and frequent – talkers.
But anyway, on to the movie.
As I said, I wasn’t expecting much, beyond some black humor, Megan Fox looking hot, and based on the previews and a clip I’d seen online, a brief kiss shared between the female leads. (More on that in a bit.)
For those who don’t know – and there are major spoilers ahead – the movie was written by Diablo Cody, who won an Oscar for her screenplay for the movie Juno, and is about a high school student named Jennifer who dies and comes back to life possessed by a demon, which turns her into a literal maneater.
The movie’s point-of-view character is Jennifer’s unlikely best friend, Anita “Needy” Lesnicky, played by Amanday Seyfried, who some of you may know from her role as Sarah on Big Love, and some of you will know as the girl from Mama Mia!
(I never saw that movie, and never will – and no, I’m not protesting too much – but the ads for it were largely inescapable, and when I saw them I thought, “Hey, that’s Sarah from Big Love.”)
The movie starts in the midst of things, where we find Needy locked up in some sort of asylum, where she’s known as “Kicker,” for her tendency to kick people. Her voiceover narration moves us back in time two months to a period in which her life was considerably more normal. Hot, popular Jennifer (Megan Fox) and dorky, plain (keep in mind that this is “movie plain/ugly,” which means that she wears glasses) Needy head to a local bar to check out a band whose lead singer Jennifer wants to hook up with.
That’s when things start to go awry. After thrusting herself at the lead singer, Jennifer heads to the bar to get them some drinks (planning to play a game of “Hello Titty” with the bartender to circumvent the fact that she’s underage), and Needy overhears the band having a rather ominous conversation about Jennifer. Needy confronts them, but they ignore her, and Jennifer isn’t dissuaded by Needy’s attempts to convince her that they aren’t as “salty” as she thinks they are.
(More on the “salty” thing in a bit as well.)
A fire breaks out during the band’s performance, and while people are being trampled to death and burning alive, Needy drags an apparently mesmerized Jennifer to safety, only to watch helplessly as the band’s lead singer takes Jennifer to a safe place. Said “safe place” being the band’s van.
Needy goes home and calls her boyfriend to tell him about the fire and Jennifer’s situation and to ask for his help in rescuing her. At that point she hears the doorbell – and at that point one of the loud talkers starts adding his commentary.
(“You ain’t going to answer that door!”)
No one is there, but once Needy goes back inside she’s confronted by Jennifer. A disheveled, bloody Jennifer, (the image of Jennifer’s bloody smile is probably going to haunt my dreams for a while) who’s behaving very strangely (growling like an animal, hungrily devouring an entire chicken that she pulls out of the fridge, vomiting up something that looks like liquefied needles, which writhes around on the floor after being vomited up), and eventually leaves after tossing Needy around, slamming her against a wall, asking her “Are you scared?” and kissing her neck, and then tossing her to the floor.
(Commentary from the jackass: “Why ain’t she go to the bathroom?” “Why ain’t she go to the hospital?”)
The next day finds Needy at school, where the mood is somber, as several students and a teacher had died in the fire at the bar. Then Jennifer shows up, looking none the worse for wear (in fact, she looks hotter than ever), totally unconcerned about the fire, and downplaying her bizarre appearance and behavior at Needy’s house the night before.
The band that had been performing at the bar has been thrust into the media spotlight, as it’s reported that they helped lead survivors to safety, and their star is rising.
(This is a point that’s brought up several times throughout the movie, much to Needy’s annoyance.)
We next find ourselves on the football field where a linebacker whose best friend died in the fire is standing in silence. He’s approached by Jennifer, who expresses her sympathy for his loss and claims that his best friend told her that he always thought the two of them would make a “bangin’ couple.” She leads the linebacker into the woods, begins to seduce him, then goes all monstery and rips him apart.
The next significant scene features Jennifer burning her tongue with a cigarette lighter only to have it instantly heal.
We also learn that as she begins to hunger for boyflesh, Jennifer’s looks degrade and she becomes, as Needy puts it, “Ugly. Well...ugly for her,” and her vitality dips.
We also learn that Needy has something of a hit-or-miss psychic connection to Jennifer. This was hinted at early on in the movie, when Needy announces “Jennifer’s here” to her boyfriend, even though she has no way of knowing that Jennifer had arrived.
(As an aside, whenever we would be walking somewhere my friend Joel had a tendency to walk a bit behind me and to the side, and to mess with me he would move from side to side so that when I would turn to say something to him he wouldn’t be there. In response to this I developed what I called a “Joel Sense” that allowed me to know where he was in relation to me at all times.)
Jennifer makes her next meal out of a boy who was something of a would-be rival to Needy’s boyfriend while Needy is getting busy with said boyfriend. While having sex she has visions of a demonic Jennifer and the dead linebacker. She freaks out (some humor is found in her boyfriend reacting to her behavior by asking, with concern, “Did I do something wrong? Am I hurting you?” Then, with kind of a hopeful smile, asking, “Am I too big?”)
Needy drives home and narrowly avoids hitting a blood-soaked Jennifer, only to have Jennifer proceed to jump onto her windshield shortly after the near-miss. Needy shakes her loose from the car and drives off.
Once she’s home, Needy curls up in the fetal position on the couch for a while before getting up and heading to bed...and finding Jennifer lying next to her.
Jennifer assures Needy that she’s not going to bite her, and then she leans in and kisses her lightly. The lead-up to the kiss can be seen in the TV ads, and, as mentioned, a clip of the kiss itself can be found online.
Now, that kiss alone would have been okay. A little disappointing, but okay.
However, there’s more to it. After Jennifer pulls away, Needy pretty much jumps her, and there is a LOT more action.
Commentary from the jackass: “What, she think she her boyfriend?” Commentary from some random loud chick: “What! Oh my god! What! What! Oh my god! What!”
At that point I wanted to shout, “It’s two hot chicks making out! So shut the fuck up, that’s ‘what!’ This is a wonderful thing! Why are you trying to ruin this for me?”
Jennifer then proceeds to explain what happened to her on that fateful night. The band was failing to make it big and had decided that Satan was their only option, so they decided to sacrifice a virgin in exchange for fame and fortune.
Somehow, Jennifer managed to come back to life after being butchered, made her way to Needy, couldn’t bring herself to hurt her, despite her hunger, took off, found another male student who most people had believed was killed in the fire walking dazedly along, and ate him.
That’s when she learned that as long as she’s “full” she heals from any wound, looks amazing, and generally feels great.
Needy does some research into the paranormal and discovers that if a virgin sacrifice is offered to the Devil, and the sacrifice, like Jennifer, is not actually a virgin (as she said to Needy at the bar, Jennifer wasn’t “even a backdoor virgin anymore”), the deal goes through, but a demon will take possession of the sacrifice’s body.
Naturally a rift develops between Jennifer and Needy, which builds up to a scene in which Jennifer decides to eat Needy’s boyfriend (loud-talking chick, during the scenes in which Jennifer is seducing the boyfriend: “What! Oh my god! What! What!”), with Needy ultimately showing up too late to save him, and Jennifer fleeing the scene with a serious injury.
Next we find a now-healed Jennifer lying in bed watching a Tony Little infomercial, which is where the movie actually started (before moving on to the scenes of Needy locked up in the asylum).
The loud-talking jackass had found the Tony Little stuff hilarious the first time, and seemed to think it was even funnier the second time.
Jennifer turns off the TV and starts to fall asleep...at which point Needy comes crashing in through her bedroom window brandishing a box cutter.
The two girls struggle, but while Jennifer is hovering in mid-air with Needy straddling her, Needy – who during the climactic scene with Jennifer eating her boyfriend had realized that Jennifer had never been a good friend, and that insecurity was at the heart of everything Jennifer had done in life – spots the “BFF” locket – a twin to the one Needy herself is wearing – on Jennifer and rips it free. This symbolic gesture seems to weaken Jennifer, who begins falling towards the bed. Needy plunges the box cutter into Jennifer’s heart. Jennifer says, “My tit.” Needy says, “No, your heart.”
(Needy had learned in her research that a blade through the heart would do the trick in killing the demon.)
As Jennifer dies, in walks her mother, (jackass commentary: “You goin’ to prison!”) and we find ourselves back at the beginning, where Needy is locked up in some sort of solitary confinement inside the asylum, having been put there for kicking an orderly in the teeth.
Thanks to her voiceover, we learn that if you’re bitten by a demon and manage to survive the encounter you actually gain some of the demon’s power, at which point we see the injuries from where Jennifer bit her, Needy’s eyes take on the same demonic aspect that Jennifer’s often did, and see that Needy is actually hovering in the air, well above the floor, at the level of what would otherwise be an unreachable window.
A window which Needy proceeds to kick out. Needy purposefully strides across the grounds, rips a hole in the chain-link fence surrounding the asylum, and walks on to freedom.
One plot point in the movie that I hadn’t mentioned is that the name of the town is Devil’s Kettle, named for a waterfall that flows directly into a whirlpool that leads down into a hole from which the water – and anything thrown into it – never appears to return to the surface. After killing Jennifer, the band had thrown the knife into the whirlpool. As Needy is walking along after escaping, she finds a small stream on side of the road littered with items that had been tossed down the whirlpool by scientists studying the Kettle.
And, more importantly, she finds the Bowie knife used in the ritual.
Needy hitches a ride from an old guy (whom I think was played by Lance Henrickesn) who asks her where she’s headed. Needy tells him she’s going to Madison. “I’m following a rock band,” she adds. “Must be some band if you’re going all that way to see them.”
“It’s their last show.”
We then see the band enjoying its demonically-attained success in a hotel room, and the lead singer answers a knock at the door that he assumes means the groupies have arrived.
Throughout the end credits we see grisly scenes of the murdered band members, and most notably the Bowie knife plunged into the heart of the lead singer, and then hotel security footage of Needy leaving the hotel, making her way past a gaggle of unsuspecting groupies who are on their way to the shock of their lives.
Wow, I didn’t expect to write that much about this movie, especially considering how unimpressed I was by it.
Still, I’m not done yet.
The movie was designed to be a comedy/horror, and there is a way to successfully combine the two seemingly disparate parts into a cohesive whole.
This wasn’t it.
The movie couldn’t seem to make up its mind what it wanted to be. Was it a horror movie that used the milieu of high school politics and teen angst as its setting and theme? Was it a comedy parodying the horrors of high school and the insecurities of the beautiful, popular people via a conceit that transforms figurative monsters (“Not high school evil”) into literal ones (“Actual evil”)?
An examination of the nature of uneven and often abusive relationships? A metaphorical journey in which a mousy girl is transformed through trials and tribulations into a powerful, self-assured woman?
Something else entirely?
It tried to be all of these things, but ultimately ended up being none of them, and really it was treading ground that was already covered – and covered more thoughtfully and skillfully – by Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Another parallel to Buffy lies with the dialogue. Great Muppety Odin – to use a Buffyism – the dialogue.
If you hated Juno because of the unlikely dialogue filled with “clever” turns of phrases and hipster portmanteaus, you will definitely hate Jennifer’s Body.
In having Jennifer use expressions like “salty” to describe cute boys, along with the literally hundreds of other bits of idiosyncratic slang that poured out of Jennifer’s mouth, it seemed as though Diablo Cody was hurling as much linguistic shit at the wall of popular culture as possible in the hopes that something would stick. I was reminded of that episode of NewsRadio in which Beth starts using weird bits of slang like “bitchcakes” as an experiment to see how long it would take for them to become part of the everyday lexicon.
The one thing that the movie got right, oddly enough, is something that worked against it. In real life, despite the unearthly hotness of the friend in whose shadow she stands, no girl as hot as Amanda Seyfried, glasses and frumpy clothes or not, would ever be ignored. Especially not in a small town. Not completely, anyway. And Needy did have a boyfriend, and other boys who were interested in her, so there was that bit of verisimilitude.
However, it was clear that the intention was for Needy to be the cliché of the hot girl whose hotness no one recognize given that she wore glasses and frumpy clothes, which is movie shorthand for “ugly.”
So yes, it was nice to see them avoid some of the clichés at times, but in the times when they fell back on the clichés it created something of a disconnect, especially when they gave up on symbolism, metaphor, and subtlety entirely by actually naming her fucking Needy.
Having her be a bit more of the stock character of the ugly, unpopular friend would have actually helped them to more adequately explore some of the themes the movie was attempting to present.
In any case, Megan Fox was very nice to look at, so the movie at least had that going for it, but I don’t think that counts for quite enough.
Still, on that note, I will close this already way too long entry with a quote from What Would Tyler Durden Do? discussing an article in which Megan Fox admits to being at least slightly crazy and inclined towards violence:

Megan Fox tells Rolling Stone this month that she’s prone to violent outburts,
used to cut herself and might be slightly crazy, a revelation that doesn’t
matter in any way whatsoever.
[....]
Whatever. Just look at her. Getting
sexily stabbed by Megan Fox every now and then in exchange for seeing her naked
all the time seems like a good deal. She could dip the knife in cobra venom,
lemon juice and syphilis, then jam it in my leg and wiggle it back and forth and
I’d still probably cum in my pants.

Compromising In The Face Of Armaggeddon Or I Watched The Watchmen

Yesterday I finally went to the Chiropractor’s, got adjusted, and pre-paid for a bunch of visits, with standing appointments on Monday, Tuesday, and Friday for the foreseeable future.
Oh, and I also went to see a little movie that you may recall me occasionally referring to here: Watchmen.
Despite the fact that I went decades believing that a Watchmen movie couldn’t – and shouldn’t – be made, there was never really any question that, if it happened, I would see it, if for no other reason than to torture myself.
Even in the days when they were talking about painting Arnold Schwarzenegger blue and shaving his head in order for him to play Dr. Manhattan – think about how terrible it was when they did exactly that in Batman and Robin for his role as Mr. Freeze – I probably would have gone to see it.
And I would have bitched. If this had happened back in the late 80s/early 90s as planned, I’d probably still be bitching now.
However, up until I saw the first trailer for this movie last summer, I never thought there would come a day when I’d actually want to see a Watchmen movie.
I could go on for months writing daily essays about how much I love the Watchmen comic book.
As an aside, let me say this: yes, it’s a comic book. People who don’t want to admit that they read or enjoy comic books throw around the term “graphic novel” because it sounds better. But within the world of comics, “graphic novel” has a specific meaning; it’s not a generic, “safe” term for comic book. It’s a specific kind of comic book.
And Watchmen? Before it was ever collected into a single volume that could arguably fit that specific definition, it was sold in the form of twelve individual saddle-stitched, four-color publications known as comic books.
Get over your prejudices and pre-conceived notions, and drop the pretentiousness. The Hugo award-winning story that was also one of Time Magazine’s 100 Greatest Novels is a comic book. In your face, snobs!
But in any case, I won’t go on about my love for this particular comic. Just understand that I do love it, revere it, cherish it, and hold it as close to my heart – maybe even closer – as anything you might love, revere, cherish, and hold close to your hearts. I read it – for the first of dozens of times – when I was 15, and it had a transformative effect on my life.
There were many reasons over the years that I was opposed to seeing it adapted to film – Hello? Did you see the part where I mentioned that they considered painting Arnold Schwarzenegger blue and shaving his head to have him play Dr. Manhattan? – and even now that I’ve seen the movie and actually enjoyed it, I still hold many of those reservations.
Let’s get that out of the way first. I did actually enjoy the movie. It ranks up there as one of the best comic to film adaptations I’ve ever seen. It was visually stunning, mostly well-paced, and there was a clear reverence for the source material. Most of the performances were solid – Jackie Earl Haley in particular did an excellent job – and even the ones that were only so-so were still decent.
There’s so much that I have to say about the movie, but like the movie itself in attempting to tell the story, there are far too many constraints in terms of time, format, and audience to engage in too deep of an exploration.
So, regrettably, I’ll just have to hit some of the high – and low – points and then just get on with the business of my usual pointless blathering.
Seriously, I could easily pull a Slacktivist and devote years to examining the movie and the comic on which it was based in order to present a complete comparison and evaluation.
Anyway, I’ll start off with some of the minor nitpicks that are specific to the movie.
The thing that bothered me the most was the terrible job done in terms of casting people to play real-life people. The movie’s Nixon was absolutely terrible. Ted Koppel? Atrocious. Lee Iacocca…what the hell was he doing in there anyway? I will say that the person playing Kissinger was decent, though.
The costume design was also bothersome. It was, in many cases, far too generically “super hero movie” costume design. I have no complaints whatsoever about seeing hot women in skintight latex, but Malin Akerman was playing the Silk Specter.
Rorschach’s costume was mostly spot-on, and the changing inkblots on his mask were great – and generally used to great effect - but that was an instance in which the material actually should have been latex. I’m not really sure what the material in the movie was supposed to be. It looked like cotton.
I did like the re-design of the original Silk Specter’s costume, though.
And let me just say that the lovely and talented Carla Gugino was, as always, lovely and talented, filled out her costume nicely, still looked great even when made up to look like she was 67, and was just generally painfully hot.
(As an aside, my birthday is coming up. Number one gift on my wish list? Carla Gugino. As Dave Campbell would say, “Give to me: Carla Gugino.”)
Anyway, at this point I should say that my primary feeling about the movie is one of relief, given just how bad it could have been. I’m thankful to Zack Snyder for staying firmly committed to providing a largely uncompromised vision of the original story.
That being said, some of the compromises that were made did rankle me more than a little, but that’s just me, and for those who have either not read the comic, or who don’t revere it in the same way that I do, they’re unlikely to diminish your enjoyment of the movie.
Still, every time I did see some element of compromise designed to appease studio executives and to appeal to mass movie-going audiences, in my mind I kept hearing the words, “Not even in the face of Armageddon. Never compromise.”
While what was left out of the movie could actually serve as sufficient material for several movies – one of the many reasons I always viewed the comic as unfilmable – the essential elements were included, but there were some cuts that I found rather baffling. Mostly bits of dialogue that would not have added anything to the runtime, given the many scenes in which people were standing around silent – when they should have been speaking the missing dialogue – but which would have added much to the narrative.
The other thing that was lacking – and again, I understand that this was done for the benefit of movie-going audiences – was some of the subtlety of the comic. There were scenes of expository dialogue –much of it shifted around from the sequence in which it appeared in the comics – that positively screamed “Pay attention to this! It’s important!”
There were also scenes that might as well have had a big sign appear on screen saying “Foreshadowing.”
To get rather spoilery, one particular scene lost a lot of its power and significance due to the lack of subtlety. In the comic there is a sequence in which Rorschach recalls a kidnapping case he’d worked on years earlier. His inquiries – which mostly involved going around to dive bars and breaking limbs and other extremities until he got the information he needed – yielded a name and an address.
Rorschach goes to the house – the owner/kidnapper is not home when Rorschach arrives – and in a mostly “silent” series of panels, Rorschach puts together the pieces of a horrifying puzzle, and the reader, at the same time as Rorschach, realizes what has happened.
The same sequence in the movie does not provide the slowly unfolding horror, but instead hits you over the head with it. It couldn’t have been any less subtle if Zack Snyder had walked onscreen and yelled “The kidnapper chopped the girl up and fed her to his dogs!”
(The condensed nature of the part of the story in which we are presented with this scene is another drawback of the running time constraints. Also, I was annoyed by the blatant pandering to pet lovers in the form of removing the scenes of Rorschach going out and slaughtering said dogs. Sure, we see them dead after the fact, but apparently it would have been too horrible to actually see him go out and split open the heads of the fuzzy little kid-eating darlings. Of course, this wasn’t a problem with the human who fed the kid to the fuzzy-wuzzy widdle doggies, who were just soooo cute while they fought over the girl’s leg bone.)
Okay, there’s so much more I could say, but this is already way long, so I’ll wrap things up by saying that the movie is stunningly violent and has copious amounts of gore (and glowing blue wang), so it definitely earned its R rating.
I’ll also point out, again, that the problems with the movie were largely unavoidable. More than anything else, Watchmen the comic book is about its own structure, and what makes it such a crowning achievement of the art form is that it was designed to do things that can only be done in that specific medium. What makes Watchmen so powerful and compelling is exactly what makes it impossible to fully translate to another medium.
I’m still uncertain that there was a real need to try making the translation, but I’m ultimately relieved by and appreciative of the fact that since the attempt was being made it was done so reverently.
So, short version: go see the movie if you want to have an idea of what Watchmen is about in terms of the basic plot. But if you want to have the full experience, and to get a better understanding of what it’s about in a larger sense, read the comic.
Oh, and IMAX for the win.