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Watchmen: the pre-backlash begins
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LA Times film critic Kenneth Turan did not care for "Watchmen," calling it "next to impossible to recreate [the book] on-screen."
Alan Moore was right. There isn't a movie in his landmark graphic novel "Watchmen" -- at least not a really good one. What we get instead is something acceptable but pedestrian, an adaptation that is more a prisoner of its story than the master of it.
(It's worth noting that while Turan, like other critics, complains about the over-the-top violence of "Watchmen," he fell all over himself to praise "Gomorrah," an overlong, dull and exceptionally bloody pseudo-documentary about Italian crime families. To be fair, however, he did love "The Dark Knight.")
This is all starting to sound like pre-backlash to me; people staking their right to say they predicted the movie was bad before it was cool to do so, the kind of contrarian, double-reverse-psychology the media loves in itself these days.
But the critical reception is secondary to the big guessing game: how much cash will "Watchmen" make? The Times wonders if "Watchmen" will make enough money -- whatever amount that is -- to count as a success after all the hype:
Taken together, the data suggest that the film's opening weekend grosses could trail "300's" opening mark, with "Watchmen" perhaps debuting with sales of about $60 million, executives at rival studios estimated. And if the 2-hour, 43-minute film is going to benefit from word of mouth, "Watchmen" will need to generate better moviegoer recommendations than it has been getting from trade newspaper reviewers and magazine critics.
Whatever else can be said about "Watchmen" -- and believe me, there's still way too much that will be said -- it's a massive, risky film that was never supposed to make it to the screen. When the book first hit stands, the only superhero in theaters was Superman in "Superman IV: Quest for Peace." If you had said someone would make a movie out of Alan Moore's and Dave Gibbon's work, they would have laughed you out of the room.
Now people are arguing mainly about how true the movie is to the comic, and how many millions of dollars it will make. So yeah, that's progress.
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