I thought Snyder said the Black Freighter stuff was in. Personally I hope they get rid of it. Those bits always detract from Watchmen for me.

I’m sorry you didn’t enjoy it, but it still has an 84% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and received many, many awards so I think you’re more in the minority than I am.

Quite a good film that one.

As for Watchmen... The trailer has sent tingles down my spine... hopeful ones... I hope that slow-mo i just for the trailer... I can live with the costume update... The atmosphere suits a world slipping into decay, on the brink of nuclear holocaust... the characters look right... Sure, we won't have (CAN'T have) the more detailed insights via the lengthy textual chunks that add so much depth... BUT if Snyder can get the FEEL across, the atmosphere, etc.. then cool...

We already know the Black Freighter bit won't be in it, but will we really lose that much from the main plot??

Let's all wait and see... I'm sure it will polarise everyone (just as the English Patient above!) but as long as people talk about it, has it actually therefore met Moore's original objective? Assuming that it's the story that gets talked about and not the fact that Ozy doesn't look pretty enough...

The toughest thing for this film is that (just like Lord of the Rings) everyone has their own idea of how a character should sound, who should play them, etc... we need to rememebr taht Snyder is allowed to have his own opinion too...

Yikes - so YOU’RE the person who liked The English Patient? Man, that movie was three hours of my life I’m never getting back, and there is a Southern expression which I think does it justice: “it’s a four-finger stinker.”

I'm sorry you didn't enjoy it, but it still has an 84% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and received many, many awards so I think you're more in the minority than I am.

I think he feels League was marred because they settled - by settling they give off the impression that he did steal it from someone else.

Massive reductions the case may be, but most really good adaptations take the core of the source and change it for the medium it is being adapted to.
This looks like it's taken the window dressing and carried it over - it's a Stepford Wife adaptation.

That's kind of a rigid either/or view.
I've pretty much resigned myself to the fact that the subtleties and nuance you mention are pretty unlikely to be in evidence in the film, but I'm not getting too upset about it. I can always go back to the book for what I find wanting in the film. Even the "successful" adaptations mentioned in previous comments underwent massive reductions from their sources.
Also, Moore's experiences may have been horrific, but that doesn't make the old "the book isn't ruined, there it is on the shelf" line we've been bouncing around any less valid. He should just cite his shitty time getting mixed up in showbiz crap for his disinterest in being involved and not claim the original works were marred.

Certainly, Alan Moore attributed it to Chandler. It was his attitude toward his film adaptations, at least until League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, anyway.

LXG saw Moore get dragged into court to swear that he didn't steal the concept from a screenplay, and then the studio settled with those suing.
After that he lost faith in the idea that people could tell the difference between the two.
(Follow that up with his name being used to advertise movies, and he decided to have nothing to do with them)

If Watchmen had been made twenty, even ten years ago we would never have even had something that used the comic panels themselves as storyboards for the film. It’s huge.

So?
I don't go to the movies to see shot for shot comic panels.
It was interesting with Sin City, but it didn't really work all that well - was very stiff, and the shots weren't fluid with each other at all.
Gibbons laid out his panels to work on a page, not as a storyboard.
I know in both film and comics there is a trend to try and blur the mediums as one, but that defeats the purpose of having two different mediums.

Yikes - so YOU'RE the person who liked The English Patient? Man, that movie was three hours of my life I'm never getting back, and there is a Southern expression which I think does it justice: "it's a four-finger stinker."

However, I'm eager to see the Watchmen movie, and while there are going to be significant differences with the book, that's required by the translation between media. Anyone who is fluent in multiple languages knows that every translation IS commentary - there are concepts which simply do not translate between languages.

But Joe and Greg have hit it on the head - it won’t be anywhere near as good because it is so of the medium.

As I say above, I think that attitude sets it up for complete failure in the first place. Print and film are separate media and there are loads of successful adaptations of novels to film: Jules and Jim, The English Patient, No Country for Old Men, The Accidental Tourist, Kramer vs. Kramer, even Casino Royale (the 2006 movie). They all made deletions, ellisions, excisions of characters and plotlines, changes, updatings, restructurings and additions-- but they also reflect well on the original literary source material as well.

I think if you go in saying "It will never be able to countenance the subtlety and scope of the graphic novel in a two hour film" then you might as well not bother to go see it. I think it's a much more reasonable question, and a better attitude to go in saying "Given the differences in media, will they capture what I loved about the original source material?" You might be more pleasantly surprised.

“they haven’t ruined the book, there it is on the shelf” - I can’t find the source, but I’ve usually seen this attributed to Raymond Chandler.

Certainly, Alan Moore attributed it to Chandler. It was his attitude toward his film adaptations, at least until League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, anyway.

Will they be able to wrest *all* the thematic nuances from the graphic novel? I don't know... but I also think it's unfair to put the burden of achieving that on the film as well, given the limitations of the medium. I would be happy--and would consider it a complete and total victory-- if they manage to pull off what the film adaptations of The English Patient, Jules and Jim and No Country for Old Men did (all three highly regarded films of highly regarded novels): they captured the 'voice' of the source material, the core essence. It can't capture everything, it can't hope to, but I think if we look to successful literary adaptations we can see it's possible to capture a lot. I'll consider it even a partial win if they just at least use Moore's actual dialogue-- it would be a step up from From Hell and V For Vendetta.

I honestly don't know about the Zack Snyder version. I've only seen the trailer and I can't time travel. I haven't even read Alex Tse's script. I did, however, read David Hayter's version and I thought it was pretty damn good and as close to a good adaptation of the source material as you can get: it excised what won't work in film, kept the most essential plot elements, made the hard choices on what had to go or be changed (which is necessary: there's a lot in Watchmen that won't work in a film. Just as there were things in the novel Jules and Jim that wouldn't work in the film version), and kept the key thematic elements. More importantly kept so much of Moore's actual dialogue. I don't know how much of Hayter's script they used, but I have to give Zack Snyder credit because one of the key changes he made was bringing it back to the 1985 setting, and (at least left it open to) put back in the Pirate sequences-- excisions Hayter made that I thought were fine, but I'm happy that when stuff gets changed it's in the actual direction of the source material.

So in summary: it looks great. Will it do everything else? I don't know. Let's talk on March 7, 2008.

But, hey, if I’m wrong and it ends up being a beautiful, masterful adaptation, I’ll come back here and apologize to anyone offended by what I said and maybe even post pictures of me eating something unpleasant.

Me too - I'll be ecstatic to be proven wrong.

But Joe and Greg have hit it on the head - it won't be anywhere near as good because it is so of the medium.
I explained it to a friend as it'll be like reading a novelisation of Apocalypse Now. Even if it's by the best damn writer, and the best damn novelisation ever, it's not going to capture what made the film so great.

If you only like Watchmen for the overall plot and the 'cool' moments - of which there are many - then the film will probably rock.
But if you enjoyed it not only for that, but the subtleties and nuance, you probably won't like the film at all.

The fact they are releasing the pirate story as a separate straight to DVD release leaves me very worried, almost as much as the time someone posted on CBR that they skipped the pirate bits, it wasn't two separate stories just put together, they totally relied on each other to have effect.

I think it was a good trailer. The only character that looks significantly different is Nite Owl. I can see why they did it, as the Watchmen weren't really supposed to look any sillier than your average superhero, but the average superhero in movies wears armor. I can only hope that Dan Dreiberg's melancholy and insecurity translates to the movie. We've only seeing the big action moments here.

I also think its pretty neat and appropriate that this is debuting with the "Dark Knight" film, given that that movie's title is inspired by Frank Millr's Dark Knight Returns, which is Watchmen's contemporary in so many ways.

By the way, I was really glad to see the DC logo front and center at the beginning of the trailer. Hopefully this'll get more DC movies coming out down the line as they establish their screen presence the same way Marvel has.

Have a good day.
John Cage

True enough, but it doesn't work for me. My mom, who has never read a comic book and never will, pretty much always thought I was a little nuts for loving Spider-man. Of course, her only exposure was to the awful newspaper strip version. So, when the first couple of Spider-man movies came out, she was able to see at least some of what I loved about the early Spidey stories.

If the Watchmen movie is terrible, that will be the only exposure many people have to this story, and that would be a shame. No, the book won't be worse, but the reputation of the book might be damaged unfairly.

As I said, I enjoyed the trailer. Personally, I don't expect much from the movie - no matter how hard they try, I tend to think that this work is too closely tied to the medium in which it was executed to make it a good candidate for adaptation. (That was one of Moore's goals for the piece, after all.) I do hope I'm wrong, though - I'd really rather have this be a great movie than be a bad movie.