What does Sup Forums think of the original Watchmen story and its film adaptation?

What does Sup Forums think of the original Watchmen story and its film adaptation?

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=6lR35MhVMss&list=PL_AYqxzHii9hPFHWM2gC5pTknX2abkiAG
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

Ozy is the world's greatest retard for assuming his plan would work. At best it would delay the inevitable, but when that shit comes back it would be ten times worse due to them arguing over who gets the alien defenses and who wins what

I'd be happy to discuss this with you OP but I must be sure you have had the COMPLETE Watchmen experience first and fully considered it. To that end I will post:

--- OBJECTIVELY CORRECT WATCHMEN FRANCHISE READING ORDER ---

Before Watchmen: Dollar Bill #1
Before Watchmen: Comedian #1-2
Before Watchmen: Rorschach #1-2
Watchmen #1
Before Watchmen: Ozymandias #1-6
Before Watchmen: Dr. Manhattan #1
>At this point watch the first 30 minutes of Zack Snyder's Watchmen movie
Before Watchmen: Minutemen #1
Before Watchmen: Comedian #3-4
Watchmen #2
Before Watchmen: Silk Spectre #1
Before Watchmen: Moloch #1-2
>Watch another 15 minutes of the Watchmen movie
Before Watchmen: Nite Owl #4
Before Watchmen: Rorschach #3-4
Watchmen #3-6
Doomsday Clock #1
Before Watchmen: Silk Spectre #3
Before Watchmen: Minutemen #2-6
Before Watchmen: Comedian #5-6
Before Watchmen: Nite Owl #3
Before Watchmen: Dr. Manhattan #2-3
Watchmen #7
>Watch another 30 seconds of the Snyder Watchmen movie
Before Watchmen: Nite Owl #1-2
Before Watchmen: Silk Spectre #2 & #4
>Read everything up to this point again but only the pirate bits
Watchmen #9
>Watch the rest of the Watchmen movie
Watchmen #8, then #10-11
>Read Neonomicon and Jerusalem
Watchmen #12
Before Watchmen: Dr. Manhattan #4
>Watch the Watchmen movie on rewind

Is Before Watchmen even worth reading? It isnt written by Alan Moore and just seems like an attempt to milk the franchise.

Ozy wasn't the sharpest tool

I think the movie is an admirable try to adapt something as dense as watchmen into a movie.
The longest cut is like 4.5 hours and still leaves stuff out.

Not really. Honestly, just read Watchmen by itself, and if you enjoy it, watch the film and read Before Watchmen at your own discretion.

I think Alan was hinting that Adrian likely suffered from early sociopathy, and later psychosis from a number of possible influences.
This didn't go off splendid last time, but I'll post it all again all the same.

The squid was dumb, the movie ending tied up loose ends better and closed the plotholes better.
Come at me bro, you know I'm right. Not even trolling, I genuinely found the squid ending in the book to be so outlandish and dumb given how otherwise grounded the setting is that it literally feels like a deus ex machina rather than an actual plot point worth considering.

I feel like Moore wrote himself into a corner and didnt have the time before deadline to completely write himself out of that corner, so along comes the squid to magically stitch up those plotholes. Yes, I know Moore was supposedly foreshadowing it. He foreshadowed it poorly, and that still isnt proof that the squid wasnt a last minute idea that he slipped murky foreshadowing for in the previous comics before final edition.

...

...

Agreed. He's a high functioning psycho. He has a grasp of logic and a grasp of reality, but this whole cold war problem finally put a big crack in his grasp on logic and reality.

...

>blood spatter on Veidt's face mirrors the button
Why do I always see new shit when I look at any fucking page from this God damned book?

...

Yes and no, the problem with the squid was how fast it comes, the idea was to remind us that it was just a comic, and that even a deconstruction can't escape the tropes of the genre (that's why the movie doing the same with the tropes of movies is actually pretty acurrate), the squid didnt made the comic better, it was pretty good and the color in those pages was great, but neither gibbons nor moore loved the squid, it was a good concept, but the squid ends up being less important that any of the annexes. It was a great idea, but i would had loved 4 more pages of the squid and world reacting to it.


The movie is fine, both the politics and the philosophy are intact and well represented, Ozy was terrible casting, Dan was perfect.

>Ozy was terrible casting

It was extremely obvious he was the shady one and the killer just by looks and voice

Snyder should have gotten Fassbender who he already worked with in 300

Watchmen is great. Every time I go back to it I find more things to appreciate.
The film is a really mixed bag.
I'm inclined to forgive removing the squid. Yes something is lost, but the film is already extremely long without the extremely involved subplot which sets the squid up, and the ending mostly comes out alright.
Other changes are more difficult to understand. Snyder's action scenes clash violently with the rest of the film. They are a completely inexplicable creative direction considering how slavishly faithful most of the film is. Even though they only take up a couple of minutes of the total run time I genuinely believe that they detract from the film more than the decision to remove the squid.

>Ozy was terrible casting
How so? He maintained that same detatched and just a touch condescending personality that you would expect from someone who is as smart as he is claimed to be.
That and he barely appeared in the movie, I cant even recall many of the scenes outside of that final confrontation with him. huh.....maybe thats evidence in and of itself that the actor was kind of mediocre?

>admirable
more like "misguided" and "ill-advised."

On my most recent reading, I noticed the fatherhood / parental motif for the first time. And I felt so fucking dense, because it's so in your face the whole way through. Practically every main character has daddy issues.

absolutely this. also, humans have an innate tendency toward selective memory. inexplicable mass events do not linger outside of living memory. veidt obviously doesn't understand people. there is no way something that absurd, unprecedented, and nonsensical would stay in the mind of the public consciousness for long, unless veidt planned somehow to wage an underground war against the earth with his own personal army of space-squids until he could find a permanent fix. he was dumb, and he was wrong.

>It was extremely obvious he was the shady one and the killer just by looks and voice

Really? I thought the killer looked much, MUCH bigger than the actor playing Ozzy. Then again, it's been years since I watched it.

>He maintained that same detatched and just a touch condescending personality that you would expect from someone who is as smart as he is claimed to be.
I dunno about that, Adrian is often supposed to come off as a conflicting personality and difficult to read, especially since he's implied to have learned early in his childhood to bury his real person.

because it's a masterpiece.

Checked and agreed.

>reading before watchmen period
LOL

both overrated

Why the fuck is DClock after issue 6 of Watchmen?

>Maybe he tripped against it
Jesu Christ, I just noticed how retarded these cops were. It's almost bad writing

elaborate.

Not retarded, willfully affecting ignorance.

They make it pretty obvious they neglect things over their pay grade, but when it's more personal to them, like the cops' distaste for Rorschach in particular, they're very gung-ho.

Literally just a pretentious episode of Scooby Doo with capes.

Dave Gibbons is really underrated, man. Shame Watchmen is considered "Alan Moore's Masterpiece" even though the man himself would deny it

For contrast Detective Fine figures out Dan is Nite Owl II and subtly threatens him to keep out of their way in only a few pages.
So, yeah, selective preference where they apply themselves.

I mean this guy does his homework on Dan's apartment like it's due tomorrow.

Didn't part of the squid subplot explain that the squid had like psychic Cthulhu powers that would make it inherently disturbing to anyone who sees it? Also, I thought the squid attacks effect would be along the lines of a larger scale 9/11 but with the world as a target. And you see how many people both outside and inside US still talk about it

Yeah, keep in mind in blake's apartment they knew he could be CIA and wanted to stay out of it.

The movie is to me, the best example to show how shitty Snyder is a director while also holding the explanation to why he has so many fans.

With the exception of the intro who is just plain cool and I'll give all the props in the world for, every single authoral touch and change done by Snyder seems to miss the point of washed up street level super heroes in over their heads about a Global crisis involving a literal god being and the smartest man in the world.

Moore's original is just a plain great story that uses the superhero mythos and colors to help it's themes and concepts. Some say it deconstructs the genre, I say it expanded it even further and the absolute corporate sludge and just plain shitty artists like Liefield in the 90's where the actual deconstruction by limiting and rebelling against the genre of cape comics.

A hero is just a thug with a gun, but not in Watchman. In fact, the 'thug with a gun' is interesting for doing heroic deeds while being a terrible person who also did a long list of shit things, but I digress.

I love Watchmen, tolerate the movie (Part of me dig the idea of the Watchmen movie telling it's story and themes through the lens of movie costuming, the other part thinks the designs are too cool, not enough silly. If we saw Owlman's owl nipples the contrast would work so much better and so on and so forth.)

>Reading before watchmen
>Watching the movie

Read the comic and call it a day.

I recently read Gibbons' book, How Comics Work. The man changed the way I read comics and how I think when I write a comic script.

The contrast of the squid is perfect for the story user. Tying it up with Dr. Manhattan eliminates all the magic of the equation.
The Squid represents the "higher enemy" of Alexander the Great perfectly, mankind must unite itself as a race to face the unknown, the absurd - Yet this whole creature was conjured up by a man. This also ties with Dr. Manhattan character arc, he must pursue his desires of leaving mankind behind because this lies that unites them has no place for super heroes.

To blame it on Dr. Manhattan is not a way to fix a plothole, is a way to make the ending less interesting and make Dr. Manhattan's arc have less impact. Now he leaves because he wants to, but also because Ozzy needs him to do so otherwise his masterful plan wouldn't work.

speaking sensibly, if that was an isolated incident which nothing ever came of, humans would try to forget about it, weird psychic powers or no. the effects of 9/11 were pervasive and have been persistent because it was an attack carried out from an actual threat we are aware of and can fight.

Blaming on Dr. Manhattan has, in essence, the same problem you bring forward.

It was a kind of psychic bomb that sent a great deal of Manhattan's population into a fit of insanity.

Exactly. All this shit with the recurring motifs, the easter eggs and all the shit going on in the background, was majority by Dave. The color motifs by John Higgins are good too, most obviously in Fearful Symmetry

While a controversial statement, I think it'd be at least okay to say that maybe the plot is the weakest part of the whole book.

i know snyder gets a lot of praise for his visuals, but one of the main reasons that i've avoided watching the film is that all the stills/clips i've seen are so ugly. it looks so needlessly dark and desaturated.

Every fucking time this is posted, idiots respond to it seriously. It's amazing.

the movie was not good.

At least the comics acknowledge that there was a time that Rorschach took care of himself and talked normally unlike the move scene.

Are you retarded for not seeing the foreshadowing?

great piece of work but had a terrible influence on comics

>rorschach's flashback bubbles were normal-shaped
i can't believe i didn't notice that until now. am i disabled?

Why do people assume they would figure out he did it?

Did you even read the post you responded to? It falls under the assumption that they don't find out he did it.

Ozimandias did literally-not figuratively-literally everything wrong. His entire plan is stupid and he’s too blinded by his arrogance as “the smartest man on earth” to see how dumb it is. Even the book itself does pretty much everything short of directly stating that Adrian’s plan is wrong.

The scene where Ozzy explains his plans is repeatedly interrupted by cutting to New York, where two side characters get into a fight about their deteriorating relationship. Gradually all the other minor characters we’ve encountered through the book get drawn into the fight, each one separately deciding to resolve the fight and stop people from getting hurt. The last thing we’re shown of New York is a bunch of normal, average people intervening in a fight they have no reason to get involved with all because they think it’s the right thing to do.

Then Veidt kills them all because he thinks the people can’t solve their problems without his help.

The same chapter also contains the end of the Black Freighter story, where the protagonist realizes that all his efforts to protect and avenge his village were pointless, his village was never in any danger, he has done more damage than the thing he was trying to protect them from, and he essentially became a monster for no real reason. The whole chapter ends with a quote from the poem Ozymamdias
>My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works ye mighty, and despair
Said chapter is LITERALLY TITLED “Look on my Works ye Mighty...” It’s essentially an entire chapter showing off how wrong Veidt is and why, and how his whole plan is doomed to failure.

Smartest man on the planet my ass.

...

>Read Neonomicon and Jerusalem
Fucking brilliant.

>Neonomicon and Jerusalem
I don't get it, was it because they were both written by Alan Moore?

Well, A: They have nothing to do with Watchmen and B: Jerusalem has about 1300 pages and is one of the longest novels in the English language. It would take far longer to read Jerusalem than it would to read all the comics he listed including Watchmen.

Also the pic is from Neonomicon

>They have nothing to do with Watchmen
>being this much of a pleb

Don't bother with the motion comic. The voice acting is atrocious.

youtube.com/watch?v=6lR35MhVMss&list=PL_AYqxzHii9hPFHWM2gC5pTknX2abkiAG

actually i prefer the motion comic's rorschach over the movie's. otherwise it's pretty bad.

>great piece of work but had a terrible influence on comics

I hate casuals like you so much, seriously fuck off and go back to brainlet crap, fucking johnsfags believing PR stunts,

how did he ever get that "smartest man on the planet" title anyway? it precedes his PR guys, right?

I loved the motion comic. Best way to read slowly and not miss anything imo.

I really liked Watchmen as a comic.It was a bit slow at times, but overall great. The movie was not so good, but the intro was probably the best intro to a movie ever. And while not a good movie, it is probably the best adaptation of a Moore comic

The movie was far from perfect, but it was as good as it could be. I did enjoy it.

Except Ozy was gonna convince the world it was an Alien Menace

It’s pretty damn subtle. I think he only speaks once in the flashbacks.

Now that you say it, the plot is structured in a weird way.
>Comedian dies
>Rorschach stumbles around trying to find a mask killer that doesn’t exist until Nite Owl tells him it’s Veidt
>along the way, the plot basically stops 3 or 4 times and turns into a character study
>really good character studies, mind you, but they’re basically well-done origin stories

i loved the movie and i am currently reading the graphic novel my favourite part was the minutemen stuff

There was no film adaptation.

--- OBJECTIVELY CORRECT WATCHMEN FRANCHISE READING ORDER ---
Watchmen 1-12
That's all.

You forgot at least two rereadings.

The art is so fucking good and well thought out, I feel like people ignore this a lot.