Kutipan Kekecewaan pada WATCHMEN

Yang kukutip ini, mereka yang sudah membaca dan menyukai komiknya dan kecewa pada adaptasi Snyder (sutradara film 300). Walaupun begitu, biasanya, karena menyukai komiknya, mereka tidak memberi nilai jelek-jelek amat.

Steve Biodrowski di
http://cinefantastiqueonline.com/2009/03/07/watchman-film-review/

......Consequently, instead of a sophisticated deconstruction of superhero mythology, we end up with a movie about things that go splat....


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Equally unfortunately, director Zach Snyder uses the material merely as an excuse to stage extended fight scenes featuring broken bones, slow-motion bullet hits, severed limbs, split skulls, and some bloody disintegrations just for spice. His interest in the drama is perfunctory at best, resulting in a ridiculously uneven pace: long, dull stretches of nothing interesting punctuated by sudden outbursts of action that no one cares about; the slam-bang-pow may jerk your eyelids open for a minute or two, but that’s not long enough to register why we should care which particular masked neurotic is winning/losing a fight with another masked neurotic.

This approach reaches its nadir near the end, when a series of nuclear blasts take out several major cities, and the film proves itself perfectly incapable of registering these events as a massive human tragedy; the explosions are merely another excuse for special effects spectacle of the most empty-headed variety............

......Consequently, WATCHMEN is neither entertaining escapism nor moving drama, neither a successful genre piece nor a clever revisionist take. It truly is the worst of all possible worlds...

Sean Gerber di
http://www.batman-on-film.com/moviereview_watchmen_seangerber_3-5-09.html

Visually, the film is stunning to look at as it seamlessly transitions through beautiful style and desolate, gritty despair. The awkward use of slow motion is a bit of a turnoff, but the main problem from a visual perspective is an overemphasis on gory violence and sex that exceeds what the source material showed. It’s as if Snyder felt the need to appeal to the baser instincts, or rather the more stereotypical desires of the comic book film audience. Perhaps these things will generate more mainstream appeal for action movie fans, but they don’t serve the film well. Added action scenes like The Comedian’s fight for his life and the fight scene during the prison break might be “cool,” but people who haven’t read the book would have benefited much more from that time being spent elsewhere, like proper character establishment for Dr. Manhattan and Ozymandias.

Kevin Carey in
http://www.quickanded.com/2009/03/trouble-with-watchmen.html

....There are a few terrible scenes, like the, um, encounter in the Owlship after the building fire, and a lot of the gore is distractingly gratuitous...

....Sin City and 300, both originally by Frank Miller, made sense to translate because both are straightforward dramas told in an inherently cinematic visual style. Watchmen, by contrast, stretches a thin plot over nearly 400 dense and multi-layered pages, much of which is devoted to flashbacks, side stories, background material, and snippets of a pirate-themed comic-book-within-the-comic-book that serves as a thematic counterpoint. Snyder tried to include as much as of this as possible, apparently on the theory that the first duty of a director is to feed the passions of obsessive Internet message board-dwelling comics super-fans.

Brian TT in
http://www.hollywoodchicago.com/reviews/7128/zack-snyder-turns-watchmen-into-loud-disjointed-brutal-mess

Snyder’s take on “Watchmen” is like a karaoke singer who hits most of the notes but doesn’t understand the lyrics to the song. The filmmaker has recreated a majority of the panels from his source material, but he’s compiled them in such a way that makes for a brutal, disjointed, misguided experience.
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It’s deep material for a graphic novel and even deeper material for a 162-minute pop epic. Apparently, too deep.

The big problem with “Watchmen” is that Snyder and writers David Hayter and Alex Tse have to rush through the multi-chapter book, creating a disjointed film in which none of the action is given any time to sink in. “Watchmen” was originally published in single book episodes for a reason. You’re not supposed to read it all at once. You’re supposed to let parts of it sink in before moving on to the next.

Part of the failure of “Watchmen” comes down to one of the essential differences between the forms - chapters. Moore and Gibbons clearly wanted readers to step back and digest what had just happened, even going as far as to end each book with a non-illustrated chapter of a fictional work from the “Watchmen” universe.

With the breaks of the original removed, “Watchmen” feels completely different. It’s rushed, like a season of a TV series crammed into a nearly three-hour running time. If someone took all the highlights of a season of “Lost” and put them on the big screen for a 160 minutes, it wouldn’t be the same experience. It wouldn’t work. Nothing is given time to breathe in Snyder’s “Watchmen,” as each revelation, each origin story, each character introduction is hurried through to get to the next.

Stories like “Watchmen” are not the sum of their parts. They need a filmmaker who can recognize the difference between the forms and turn a great novel into a great film. By being so loyal to the source, Snyder has made a film with bizarre pacing problems, sudden transitions, and some scenes that simply don’t work on the screen like they do on the page.......

.........There are elements of film - storytelling, pacing, tone - that are different than the graphic novel and it’s almost as if those elements were never considered because everyone was so concerned with being loyal to the book. “Watchmen” is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential graphic novels ever written but none of that registers in the film version.

And that’s what’s truly tragic about “Watchmen”. It will be a footnote. Yes, it will make a killing opening weekend at the box office, but this is a movie that will be forgotten by the summer, much less the end of the year. It’s a tragic ending to the story of one of the most anticipated adaptations in years and a joke that even The Comedian wouldn’t find funny.

Joe Griffin di

http://joegriffinwrites.blogspot.com/2009/03/watchmen-review.html

But the pacing is a little off. While director Zach Snyder is struggling to tell the vast story and fill us in about the characters, he simply hasn't time to delve as deep as the graphic novel does. Author Alan Moore played with the comic medium by including pages of superhero's biographies, news articles, a parallel comic within a comic and police and psych reports. Without this flesh, there's just (to quote Homer Simpson) a whole lot of stuff that happened. I'm beginning to agree with Moore that Watchmen was inherently unfilmable.

Tom Dickinson di

http://www.tawm.net/2009/03/unfilmable-spoiler-free-thoughts-on.html

Putting aside my glib and dismissive tweet, which you see above, I really disliked Zack Snyder's Watchmen not for any of these specific issues, but because it was in general an artistic failure....



..... and so trying to "faithfully" adapt it in the way Zack Snyder has "faithfully adapted Watchmen would have been stupid. Instead Jackson made a film about the same characters, events, and themes, but he made something that was as much tied up in its film-ness as the original was in its textuality.....



..... because an adaptation isn't a matter of "filming" a book. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings was unfilmable, and so they didn't try to film the book, they tried to make a movie. And in a lot of ways it worked. Zack Snyder tried to film Watchmen, and in a way he successfully did just that, and it was awful......

Eric di
http://shouldersofgiantmidgets.blogspot.com/2009/03/watching-watchmen.html

....and there were some things that translated remarkably well and some things that really didn't work, but overall it didn't leave me sans socks the way Spider-Man 2 or The Dark Knight did, or even giddy like Iron Man or X-Men 2 or even Superman Returns. Watchmen was nifty, I look forward to the extended DVD that's supposed to come out (with the "Black Freighter" sequences folded into the main movie) and I'll buy it, but my advice to anybody who asks is: if you haven't read the book, spend the money at the bookstore instead of on a movie ticket and popcorn........


.....Furthermore, Watchmen (the movie) has to compress a twelve-chapter story spanning forty years into a two-hour-forty-minute film; things are inevitably lost and pared down. But Snyder and screenwriters David Hayter and Alex Tse made a heroic effort to get everything brought over into the film that they could: this is a remarkably faithful adaptation as such things go, and any lack of success can't really be blamed on the source material or on the adaptation itself, but rather on the loss of detail that occurs between the formats.......

Adam Tobias di
http://www.wdtimes.com/articles/2009/03/06/screen_scenes/screen1.txt

.......Just recently I read Moore and Gibbons' 12-issue comic book series and I must admit I was absolutely fascinated as I flipped through the pages. Now I wouldn't go so far as to call it one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present like Time magazine did in 2005, but Moore's dark and complex story about flawed superheroes struggling with moral dilemmas is truly groundbreaking and I can completely understand why it has such a strong cult following...........

..........Some pieces of literature just aren't as powerful on the screen as they are on the page.

Loss Adjuster di
http://thelossadjuster.blogspot.com/2009/03/i-watches-watchmen.html

.....And, like so many other people, I found Watchmen to be virtually unfilmable. Maybe if they made it into an HBO miniseries. Maybe if they let some nutjob make a 5 hour movie. Maybe if the skies parted and some genius figured out a way to make it palpable. It just didn’t seem like a reasonable expectation that anyone could make this thing into a popcorn movie........

V-Knowledge di
http://vknowledge.blogspot.com/2009/03/film-review-watchmen.html

As the film lumbers to its hotly-debated ending (it is substantially, but logically, altered from the novel), there is no emotional payoff even though the conclusion is intended to floor you. One never gets a sense of the overarching mystery that is supposed to lead up to the climax. Absolutely no clues or subtle implications hint at what is to come, so there is never any real sense of suspense to experience. What happens, just happens. Nothing more.

On its own merits as a film, Watchmen is a sad failure. Snyder does deserve a small amount of credit for finishing what other filmmakers have not, which is adapting the classic graphic novel to film at long last. It is still quite a pity that a more seasoned director could not take the reigns. Is Watchmen unfilmable as some claim? Yes, in the sense that little, if any, of the thematic depth from the text could be clearly conveyed on screen within one feature film alone.