I guess you could call me a late adopter of “Watchmen” graphic novel. I only just read it in the Summer of 2008 at the strong suggestion of my brother and several friends. I’d like to take this time to thank them all for what they did.
To be completely honest, I read “Watchmen” cover to cover over the course of about a week while I waiting for videos to render at work. What I read was less of what more people would perceive as a “comic book” but instead a more synthesized version of what many refer to as a “graphic novel.” It’s not about super heroes. It’s not about super powers. It’s not even about good versus evil. It takes many of these classic comic book virtues and throws them out the window. “Watchmen” is, at it’s core, a story about the breakdown in honor and trust due to threatening advancements in technology, capitalism, and patriotism.
So when I hear that there was going to be a movie, I was excited. The trailers have been awesome and I have grown more and more anxious as the release date approaches. Many of us who have read the book are extremely skeptical. The book itself clocks in at 416 pages. The story is extremely complex at times and includes a lot of history and exposition. Personally, I can’t see many people who haven’t read the graphic novel being able to really get into it on the film alone. That being said, here are my predictions for how the cinematic interpretation of “Watchmen” is going to play out:
–The film will run around 3 hours long – Like I said before, 416 pages is a lot to cover. And even if they leave out a lot of the ancilliary exposition, we still need histories and backstories, as well as the progression of events that take place in modern times.
– “Tales of the Black Freighter” will not be included – This part of the book takes up a fair amount of pages in the book. The story is parallel to a lot of what is going on in the present time period, but really there isn’t any need for it to be seen in the movie. I’m sure there will be reference to it somehow, but it’s entire or even breif inclusion will only confuse many who exposure to the story has been non-existant to this point.
– The history of the original masked vigilantes is going to be abbreviated
– The Dr. Manhattan storyline from start to finish is going to go over many people’s heads.
SPOILERS FROM HERE ON – DON’T READ IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN AT THE END OF THE STORY.
– The whole colossal catastrophe, Adrian Veidt in the arctic, Dr. Manhattan return to vaporize Rorschach from spreading the truth sequence is going to either be super brief or way over a lot of heads.
I’m probably wrong about a lot of these since I read the book a while back and haven’t picked it up to review but I remember making a lot of these predictions as I read through it. These are just my personal predicitions and they could be totally different from yours. I’ll be seeing the film on Saturday so I’ll post a full review on Sunday.
Muxed Media 