OK, “Watchmen” is still wagging on the tongues of the film blogosphere this week, the embargoes have apparently been lifted (cause they were broken and there was nothing WB could do to contain the stimulated in-heat nerd herd) and geeks are letting their reviews rip like a fart in second period gym class.
The usual suspect partisan geeks, Hitflix (we love McWeeny, but 4,000 word review??) , CHUD and (shocker) Harry Knowles at Ain’t It Cool news are doing backflips. Is this any major surprise? Every review begins with a long-winded personal recollection about how “Watchmen” was the first comic book they ever beat off to had a true human, love-story like human connection to and blah, blah. Go figure (and Knowles hilariously plays the martyr for so-thoughtfully not breaking the embargo — AICN posts fan reviews of anything and everything months before release. You could email in a fake written by a four year old and they’d probably post it. Harry Knowles you sir, are a true American hero.).
Anywho, no surprise. What is eye-opening and worth looking at is this review over at Sci-Fi wire, another seemingly zealous comic-book publication. They write what is a pretty honest and seemingly sad review: they wanted to love it (duh, obviously), but their main problem? Like we’ve suggested, the film cripples itself by being painfully too faithful an adaptation.
“Watchmen‘s strength and chief weakness is its fidelity to its source material. The thing that makes Watchmen something short of a fully successful movie experience is probably the thing that makes it work as a graphic novel: Its multilayered, ironic, episodic, time-jumping narrative.”
Is Sci-Fi Wire’s Patrick Lee getting excommunicated from the geekosphere? It’s entirely possible he’s already laying dead in his apartment.
Meanwhile, The Hollywood Reporter is noting how “Watchmen” producer Larry Gordon — the guy responsible for not properly securing the rights in the first place which led to the whole WB Vs. Fox lawsuit imbroglio — is nervous about the baby he birthed. As already suggested, his fuck-ups could lead Warner Bros. to sue him for all the money he cost them. “A clear idea of what Gordon might be liable for won’t emerge until the film has largely played out, which could be a month or two, but if the pic is a mega-grosser, it could be tens of millions,” they write.
He’s probably the one pro “Watchmen” guy hoping only comic-book geeks connect with this thing and it doesn’t turn into “300” or “The Dark Knight.” Now that 20th Century Fox basically won that trial, you probably won’t be reading any impassioned letters from him asking fans to go see a second or third time. [None of this via Vulture per se, everyone saw all the same stuff last night, but kudos to them for being on top of all this first this morning. Heart those dudes]
At the rate these reviews are emerging, we’re never going to have a consensus on this movie. Which will be a problem if it sucks, because it will give diehards false hope that something worthless is worth discussing.
Let’s all hope it’s the antithesis of Snyder’s other work- as in, watchable.
I had NO idea that Harry Knowles was even capable of doing a backflip.
well, technically he can’t… i also can’t make a joke about that. it’s too karmically evil.