Is Zack Snyder's Watchmen a Failure?
I’m becoming increasingly worried. I’d always had worries about Snyder, who managed to make the should’ve-been-awesome 300 and turn it into something ridiculous at best, and more often than not, unbearable. But everything I’d seen and heard until recently had me tentatively excited. Now, the first clips have started popping up online, and they’re dull, flat, and unengaging. The one action scene we see appears to be a student film by a some raver who just saw The Matrix for the first time. And this review at Hollywood Elsewhere pretty much confirms everything I’d worried about, calling the film a “staggering failure.”
I haven’t seen it yet, so I’m still rooting for it to succeed, of course, if only because Alan Moore’s original graphic novel is legitimately one of the best graphic novels ever, and one of the more ambitious and rewarding pieces of pop art in the last thirty years — and it deserves better.
I’m not too familiar with comic book subculture, but Snyder’s first effort was the excellent “Dawn of the Dead” remake. A pretty promising start for such an uninteresting career.
— Will · Feb 23, 08:34 PM · #
There have been several reviews that paint the film as anything BUT a failure, including reviews from The Huffington Post, Wil Wheaton on his blog, and CHUD’s Devin Faraci.
These good reviews, of course, don’t meant the film will be great, any more than bad reviews mean the film will be horrible. These are opinions after all. There are more and more good reviews coming out however, so the trend seems to be positive.
300 WAS as good a movie as the source material “deserved”, meaning I enjoyed it. A lot.
— JDsgirlBev · Feb 23, 09:03 PM · #
After watching those clips, yes, yes, and yes. That movie looks like a miserable failure, and I’ve only read Watchmen over the shoulder of another kid in class. 300 was a POS compared to what it could have been. Visually stunning, but nearly unintelligible drivel in terms of content (action was fantastic, but they eviscerated one of the greatest stories ever told).
— Bill Goodwin · Feb 24, 07:32 AM · #
Do you understand that 300 was based not on history but on a comic book?
— Chet · Feb 25, 06:33 PM · #