Who Won’t Be Watching the Watchmen, by Arthur Tebbel & Chris Toia – Pop Art… and Chris #13

February 24, 2009 Arthur Tebbel & Chris Toia 0 Comments

Dear Art & Chris,
I am king of comics movies.  Here we are less than two weeks away from the release of my film adaptation of the most celebrated graphic novel of all time.  I think that means this is going to better than Casablanca and Citizen Kane combined.  It should be noted I have seen neither of those movies.  Also my copy of Watchmen had no words.  You guys are really into geek cinema.  How excited are you to see this movie?

-Zack Snyder

Zack,
We won’t lie we’ve seen an awful lot of movies that probably fit into this genre.  We saw both of The Matrix sequels at midnight showings.  We even both saw Batman and Robin in theaters.  We think you should understand the depth of our commitment to movies like this before telling you that we could not possibly be any less excited to see your take on Watchmen.

Remember when Gus Van Sant remade Psycho?  It was slavishly faithful to the original; a shot-by-shot remake.  It was also absolutely terrible.  It’s clear you’ve read the book and are trying to recreate the iconic visuals but there’s so much depth in the book that your movie seems entirely devoid of.  Just because you can translate something visually to the screen doesn’t mean you’ve adapted it.  No one here will argue against the merits of pornography but it’s fucking on film.  It in no way approximates the sensuality of lovemaking.  I imagine in your Watchmen there are a lot of bleached anuses.

For all it’s faults Van Sant’s Psycho didn’t have close to as much slow-motion that you seem to have packed into this thing.  We’ve seen three trailers for this film and I think run at a normal speed they’re about 30 seconds.  Your use of slow motion was more understandable with 300, a book that was 88 pages long.  This is almost 5 times as much source material sir.  If we could measure plot density Watchmen would be lead and 300 would be cotton candy.  You don’t need nearly as much filler.  I assume the slow motion approach was encouraged because it highlights all the neat gadgets present on the toy line.

We understand why they put you in the position to make this movie.  They couldn’t make toys out of the comic without Alan Moore’s approval, and that wasn’t going to happen.  They needed this movie so it would carry it’s own licensing rights.  I think this puts your artistic credibility for this project somewhere around the makers of the G.I. Joe cartoon.  Just to be clear, this does not make you a real American hero.

Perhaps the thing we understand least is what the point is.  Watchmen was an excellent deconstruction of the traditional comic book story.  The problem is that every story since then has been touched by it.  This also includes every decent comic book film.  From Burton’s Batman to Singer’s X-Men to Raimi’s Spider-Man to Nolan’s Batman.  They were all made in the context of a post-Watchmen view of superheroes.  This makes this film almost singularly useless.  It won’t free us from the existing conventions; the revolutionary has become the establishment.