The Rabbit Hole

*...unless you're me.

Entries like this one Wikipedia exist solely to test the boundaries of what I can get away with reading at work. I swear, the only thing more likely to get me in trouble that I've actually looked at at work are the Horrors of Porn and Hentai Game reviews at SomethingAwful.

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But back to more ogling of the stills recently released from The Watchmen movie coming out next year....

For serious, y'all, the Comedian is perfect. I hadn't seen Jeffrey Dean Morgan in anything before hearing he was cast, and yet? I know his vague shape and appearance (surprise, surprise, IMDB-brain!), and I was like, "Yes, okay, that works." NOW I SEE THE PICTURE AND I KNOW IT DOES. Holy shit. Something that came out of reading The Watchmen again recently was a newfound respect for the Comedian. His is the story that catapults us into the novel, and yet? Never really cared for him. I still don't like him, but he makes sense now. I get it. And that's what you get from the still. Someone on that shoot (very probably the actor) GETS IT. Let's just hope that translates and is brought across in a dynamite script. ::IhopeIhopeIhopeIhopeIhope::

Alas Rorschach is, appropriately, hidden in shadow, or I could say more about him. He's my favorite (he and Nite Owl, I think) in the graphic novel, and it's really, really, OH-SO-INCREDIBLY REALLY important that the film gets him right. Because if the Comedian is why the story begins, why the story moves is Rorschach. (And Nite Owl, I suppose, but mostly Rorschach.)

As for the others? I was a little pissed that Nite Owl is so Batman-like (though he is supposed to be, a tad) and not quite as ridiculous looking as he is in the graphic novel. But what I dislike most? Is that he's too fit-looking. Dan Drieberg has an adorable, middle-aged paunch in the comics, and I loved that. I love how very atypically middle-aged he was. He wasn't old, he wasn't 30-something. He's that missing half of life that people spend being neither old nor young. That part of life that Hollywood (hello!) tends to ignore. The costume is too much of an attempt to make him look badass where he should, story-wise, look a little silly. Sigh.

Ozymandias is growing on me though. feiran thinks he looks like a twerp when Ozymandias is, Comedian aside, the most physically fit and largely muscled guy in the novel. I can't help but agree. And yet? It's working for me. There's a definite attitude about the man's face, his stature, his whole image that very forcibly evokes classical mythology. He is a Greco-Roman godling or champion. You can see that. And I love the interweaving of that look with the Egyptian symbolism of the pseudo-shift tied about his waist. Ozymandias' hero is Alexander the Great, and you understand why, just from the picture.

The only entirely unsatisfactory picture is that of the Silk Spectre. For starters, she looks like a less-well-done version of Elastigirl from The Incredibles. It must be the texture of her costume and the pose, I guess. But the hair? Ugh, can we talk about that? How much MORE like a wig could they have made that look? I think you'd sooner believe that Rorschach's mask is his face than that that hair is growing off that head. I can't work out what her shot is supposed to tell us. The Silk Spectre has a seriously problematic history in the graphic novel. It's hard to pinpoint in a shot what her philosophy is (as you could with the Comedian, Rorschach, and Ozymandias). So instead you make her generic superheroine in a scandalously impractical costume. But that's just it. Part of the Silk Spectre's story is how ridiculous her outfit is and how little, originally, she wanted to fill it out. You don't get that by a) hiding how scandalous the outfit is (if it is--I dunno what it says about the movie that the 1980s drawn version was more risque than this bumblebee wetsuit look), or b) by showing her possessed and determined to fight. Sigh some more.