Not filling me with confidence...

[jducoeur]

Within half-an-hour, I see:

* An ad in Previews for the action figures based on the Watchmen movie. Nite-Owl is buff. Doctor Manhattan is wearing a suit.
* A TV ad for the Wanted movie. The voice-over? "Kill one, to save a thousand."

I confess, I am getting worried that we are about to see some extended exercises in Missing The Point...

Comments

[tangerinpenguin.livejournal.com]

I hadn't seen the Watchmen stuff yet, but I had the same reaction to the Wanted ads. Sounds like we might be able to toss them together with V and make a triple bill that could be more efficiently avoided by fans of the original material.

[jducoeur]

Truth to tell, I liked about 80% of V. What surprised me was that they got so many of the details right, while managing to totally foul up the underlying message...

[bkdelong.livejournal.com]

Ugh. 3 certainly don't expect full frontal for Dr. M in Watchmen but maybe some sort of androgeny ala Cmdr. Data in TNG.

Is Wanted the movie/ graphic novel with "curving bullets" ? If so, that first teaser was TOTALLY camp. Come on Hollywood. Take a lesson from Marvel and Iron Man.

[new-man.livejournal.com]

The "curving" bullets are a detail that is straight out of the comic. Unfortunately, while they preserved that detail, they seem to have abandoned everything else.

[bkdelong.livejournal.com]

Hrm. I think I need to read the comic prior to seeing this potential travesty so as to truly appreciate it. In my mind, the trailers made the "curving" bullets almost as cheesy as the teleport special effect in "Jumper", which became the only cool thing about that movie I hear.

[jducoeur]

Just keep in mind that, whereas the movie appears to be about anti-heroes, the comic isn't -- it's about the Villains, Dammit. It is *wicked* fun, but just about the exact opposite of spiritually uplifting.

(As for cheesy special effects, keep in mind that these are explicitly super-villains. Suspension of disbelief is a must, as in any supers universe.)

[new-man.livejournal.com]

They could not do Wanted the comic. I'm not sure why they made this movie. It's kind of a neat concept, but, besides some names, I don't think it shares much with the comic book.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

Have you seen pictures from the film itself? Both Nite-Owl and Ozymandias have costumes featuring latex sculpted muscles. I would say your fears are justified.

[jducoeur]

To be fair, I don't so much mind that in the case of Ozymandias. It's inaccurate to the comic, but somewhat in keeping with the narcissistic personality.

But if Nite-Owl doesn't have a noticeable pot belly under that latex, then they really don't understand the character...

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

"I don't so much mind that in the case of Ozymandias. It's inaccurate to the comic, but somewhat in keeping with the narcissistic personality."

Now I think you're missing the point. Ozy wears spandex to show off the actual muscles that he spent large amounts of effort honing to perfection. False musculature would be pointless for him.

Totally with you on Nite-Owl.

[serakit.livejournal.com]

I kind of want to see Wanted... having never actually read whatever original material it's based off of, I won't be angered about whatever it is they might have ruined.

What did V for Vendetta miss the point of?

[jducoeur]

I'm going to assume that you've seen the movie, and give a few of the key examples from that.

The most minor was the semi-romance between V and Evey. That's quite different from the book, where V is intentionally -- well, not quite human. He's a force of nature, he is *broken* at the core of his being, and he knows it. V in the book is really not quite capable of love -- that's why he knows that he *has* to die and hand the rebuilding over to Evey. He is a creature of destruction, pure and simple.

The speech to the nation -- arguably the most central moment of both movie and book -- is crucially wrong. In the movie, he tells the people that their leaders misled them, and that those leaders were evil and at fault. The wording was changed slightly from the book, where V quite explicitly blames the *people*: it's their fault for choosing bad leaders. And he gives them one year to fix the problem, or he will force a fix on them.

And that bit at the end, with everybody coming together in one homogeneous mass, is *utterly* wrong: a complete invention, totally different from the book. The book ends with things falling into a necessary period of chaos and anarchy, before things can be rebuilt.

Less singly but very conspicuously, the Leader is totally different. In the movie, he's basically greedy cackling evil, out for his own power. In the book, he's a slightly pathetic figure, who believes himself to be utterly selfless. As far as he is concerned, he has given the nation what it wanted and needed, and sacrificed everything he was in order to do so. He's almost sympathetic: evil, but evil at its most banal. (And realistic.)

Basically, the movie is all about a nation that gets misled by evil leaders: when they stand together as one and throw off those particular leaders (and, implicitly, accept Evey as the new leader) everything will be fine. The book is about how easily society itself can become broken and evil, and that *society* must be destroyed before anything new and better can be born. In the movie, the people are manipulated into choosing evil leaders; in the book, they do so quite consciously, selling their own hearts for a little comfort.

To be fair, it would be hard to make the movie faithfully into a blockbuster: the ending is fairly bleak, and Hollywood does not like bleak endings. But in making it more palatable to the masses, they missed the point, which was specifically to *yell* at the masses, and tell them that they have no one to blame but themselves for the evil that their leaders do. The movie is a rather two-dimensional indictment of the Bush administration; the book was an indictment of the British people for *allowing* the Thatcher administration...