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[FARTRON]

Those who didn't read the comic really should. I'm worried about this movie as I just don't think it can live up to the original. Alan Moore isn't letting them use his name.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

I also heard that he refused royalties from this, even though he could have made quite a bit of money if he had accepted them.

[Zaphos]

As I recall, Alan Moore doesn't want movies of any of his comics made, because he thinks they can't be translated across media.  It sucks that he doesn't have control over his own work, but he's kind of taking himself too seriously with that view ...


It'll be funny to see people accuse the movie of stealing its ending from "Heroes," though  :D

[team_q]

well Alan Moore is probably a little pissed at DC about The Watchmen, as he doesn't own it. But he would if DC didn't print it for one year, but they have, just to keep the licence, for the last like 20 years.

[FARTRON]

After League of Extraordinary he told them to never use his name in a movie again, or he would make them pull his name from the comics too.

And that was a book that I think could have made an awesome movie. Watchmen would need to be about four hours long to do justice to the story.

[Nitro Crate]

They are going to ruin the story I can feel it. 
It would of been better as a 12 episode mini-series.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

Look on the positive side: the movie may cause more people to go read the comic due to increased exposure. Even if it's a horrible movie and just accomplishes that aim, I'd call it a success.

[Alex May]

I'm cautiously optimistic about this, from the trailer they at least seem to have faithfully recreated the book down to individual panels - One thing they will find extremely difficult is marrying a lot of the imagery used in the comic sections to the written narrative used in those sections - metaphors of hands, dropping, things like that that are given to the reader in excerpts from written media like comics-within-comics or Rorschach's diary entries. These could be read out of course, which might work. Still, apparently TLOEG was shitty, so one never knows.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

They did recreate the panels, but they got the feeling of a lot of them wrong. For instance, the silver spectre was supposed to be sexually repressed, and they made her look very sexually open, almost sluttish. As another example, the nite owl was supposed to be a potbellied aging nerd, and they made him look as cool as batman.

[FARTRON]

As another example, the nite owl was supposed to be a potbellied aging nerd, and they made him look like a batman ripoff instead of the subtle tribute he was meant to be

Fixed that for you.

Also, Veidt looks 12, and Comedian looks like a goofball in a fake mustache instead of the multi-war veteran, woman-killing sociopath he should be.

[team_q]

I always read him as a batman wanna be, I thought that was the point.

[FARTRON]

All the watchmen are caricatures of existing comic book archetypes. Nite Owl was meant to be batman-esque certainly, but they made it far less subtle and seem to be bordering on derivative.

[Valter]

The style is certainly similar, but you have to consider the motivation for "heroes". Flying birds like hawks and owls have an appeal to vigilantes for their control over the air. Should he have tried the name "mole man" or "Kangaroo man" instead?

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

In Nite-Owl's personal case, he chose that name because someone else had already chosen it and he wanted to continue on after that guy retired.

As for Ozymandias and The Comedian and Rorschach and Dr. Manhattan, I think they got their appearances and personalities fairly accurately (although it's very hard to judge from only a few seconds of footage each), it's only the Silk Spectre and the Nite-Owl that bother me (although the same caveat applies, perhaps they aren't that weird in the movie as they are in the few seconds in the trailer).

The costume of Nite Owl itself seemed intentionally designed to look like Batman's though. In the comic it was brown and looked like an owl, not black and looking like a bat. And although all of the heroes were meant to be derivative of superhero stereotypes, the Nite Owl was actually based more on the Blue Beetle than on Batman.

But anyway,

The best parts in the comic for me were when Dr. Manhattan changes his mind about whether or not humanity was worth saving based on understanding the statistical improbability of each person, and the revelation of the ending (I actually think of Ozymandias as the hero of the story).

[team_q]

Two things:
Its a trailer, its designed to boost hype, so it shows the heroes in their ideal light.

Second:
Public perception of what a 'super hero' should look like has evolved 20 years as well, in that time we have had a couple dozen super hero movies redefining what a hero looks like on the silver screen. I mean, even the first of the last set of modern batman movies wasn't out when the miniseries was finished. If they were to take the art direction to pre 'Batman: the movie' style, it wouldn't be hot for the mainstream.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

I think it's a bad idea to try to work within public perceptions of what things should be like. That's why the original comic was so admired, exactly because it went outside of what public perception of superheroes was.

[team_q]

I think Alan Moore and I agree with you, I think DC says fuck that noise, pack the house.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

Nonetheless, a lot of their audience will be people who liked the comic, so to some degree they will have to satisfy those people as well if they want it to be a success. Although if they only had those people, it wouldn't be a blockbuster -- it'd make some money, but not as much as the newest batman movie or anything.

[Shadro]

I thought the trailer was most excellent.  If anything at all, it is gonna be one shinny movie, though my friend had been following it for awhile and there were times where it looked like it was gonna fail, but now it seems to be pretty solid.  If anything its another reason I need to stop being lazy and finish the graphic novel.

[Zaphos]

This seemed relevant:

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Don't you have the slightest curiosity about what Watchmen director Zack Snyder is doing with your work?
ALAN MOORE: I would rather not know.

He's supposed to be a very nice guy.
He may very well be, but the thing is that he's also the person who made 300. I've not seen any recent comic book films, but I didn't particularly like the book 300. I had a lot of problems with it, and everything I heard or saw about the film tended to increase [those problems] rather than reduce them: [that] it was racist, it was homophobic, and above all it was sublimely stupid. I know that that's not what people going in to see a film like 300 are thinking about but...I wasn't impressed with that.... I talked to [director] Terry Gilliam in the '80s, and he asked me how I would make Watchmen into a film. I said, ''Well actually, Terry, if anybody asked me, I would have said, 'I wouldn't.''' And I think that Terry [who aborted his attempted adaptation of the book] eventually came to agree with me. There are things that we did with Watchmen that could only work in a comic, and were indeed designed to show off things that other media can't.

Do you think that any good can come of comics movies?
I increasingly fear that nothing good can come of almost any adaptation, and obviously that's sweeping. There are a couple of adaptations that are perhaps as good or better than the original work. But the vast majority of them are pointless.

- http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20213004,00.html