The creators of the forthcoming Watchmen movie have been emphasizing that it’s faithful, faithful, faithful to the graphic novel, even going to the trouble of releasing teaser posters recreating the comic book’s teaser ads from decades ago.
Judging from those posters — and from the trailer — the movie seems, in a missing-forest-for-trees way, faithful to Watchmen’s surface elements and story, although I think the comic’s strengths are fundamentally unadaptable. ((From Wikipedia: Moore and Gibbons designed Watchmen to showcase the unique qualities of the comics medium and to highlight its particular strengths. In a 1986 interview, Moore said, “What I’d like to explore is the areas that comics succeed in where no other media is capable of operating”, and emphasized this by stressing the differences between comics and film. Moore said that Watchmen was designed to be read “four or five times,” with some links and allusions only becoming apparent to the reader after several readings. Gibbons described the series as “a comic about comics”.)) But I couldn’t help but notice one glaring change: Dan — aka Nite Owl’s — waistline. In the original comic, Dan (pictured above) was fat.
The actor who plays Dan — Patrick Wilson — is claiming that Dan wasn’t at all fat, just soft. Uh-huh.
I don’t want to make too big a deal of this; it’s just a movie based on a superhero comic. It’s just…. irritating, another straw on a (not yet broken) back. Pudgy Dan is an un-person. Pudgy Dan will do for an experimental comic, but for a movie with millions on the line, we can’t have it — not even when the director is spending months publicity patting himself on the back for being so darned faithful.
Might I advance an interesting counter-example? Alicia Silverstone’s Batgirl in Batman and Robin was noticeably heftier than her comic-book equivalent. I suppose one could argue that this was a reason for the film’s mediocre box-office performance (hard to tell with a product that had virtually every cinematic defect known to mankind) but it doesn’t suggest an unspoken Hollywood imperative towards skininess in superhero flicks.
Nah, this is different; the character in watchmen was so great partially because he was old, middle aged, out of shape, and a bit fat. It’s a fairly important part of his character, I think; I’m with Amp on this one.
Though I agree with the general point of Hollywood’s lack of faithfulness to literature across the board (even when insisting upon how faithful they are), I’m more concerned that Nite Owl’s pudginess will be the LEAST of our faithfulness issues once the movie is released. If that’s the ONLY lack, I’ll happily discount it as simply a nasty lookist truth about film production in general.
The problem is whether it will at all resemble the central plot of the masterpiece that it’s based upon, or come close enough that one is willing to discount the discrepancies.
According to some things said in Entertainment Weekly a few months back, though, I’m betting more on “visually stunning, but (yet again) not particularly faithful to Moore’s vision.”
Mister Mephisto, it so far appears that the film is fairly faithful, plotwise; they haven’t modernized it, and they’ve promised that the downbeat ending is kept. However, I do think that no matter how faithful they are, it’s unadaptable, and there are notable ways I can already see that they’re not being faithful — more on that in a later post.
Apropos of nothing, how much does Joe Biden’s head look like Voldemort’s in this McCain ad?
Having just read Watchmen a couple of weeks ago, I have to disagree that Dan was “fat.” He was out of shape, described as “flabby,” but still pretty thin. It’s disappointing that the movie makers couldn’t even go that far.
Amp,
I wasn’t suggesting that Silverstone was fat, only that she was heftier than the comic-book version, which I think is undeniable. The photograph you post, though, has been altered to make her seem a good deal thinner than she actually appears in the film (there is a very funny compendium of all the worst moments of that execrable film on YouTube. Check it out and you’ll see that Silverstone has a healthy enbonpoint – and all the better for it, in my opinion).
Other characters noticeably tubbier on the screen than in the comics are: Martian Manhunter in that Justice League television pilot, and, of course, dear old Adam West in the Batman t.v. series.
My memory of Watchmen was that Nite Owl, in the “present” action, was fat and that was important to the character. I thought of this when I first saw the Watchmen trailer – I was at first taken aback by how “fit” he seemed, then I assumed that it must have been part of a flashback sequence to when Nite Owl had been a “sanctioned” hero. Then I realized I was basically just HOPING that was a flashback sequence. Now I have been disillusioned.
There’s a nude scene where Dreiberg’s not inconsiderable potbelly is shown. He has the sloping beginnings of a double chin. The dude is supposed to have packed on a solid forty from his fighting weight. He’s like the aging jocks in middle management. Not too far gone – you’d still pick them for your softball team at the company picnic as they still have good power even and can still run a bit.
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I read Dreiberg as looking like a “normal person” (yeah, I know that’s a loaded term, but that’s what I thought) as opposed to the idealized, extreme “perfectly fit classic superhero” Veidt – if the movie has Dreiberg looking all super-athletic, it does rather seem that they’re missing the point.
But then, the Whiteout movie is apparently taking a perfectly good story about two women (who fight crime!) and rewriting one of them as a man, because a comic book adaptation that passes the Bechdel test is just unthinkable, or something. I plan on just giving up and accepting that I am Not The Audience They’re Looking For, once I get over my initial fury.
If Tom Nolan isn’t suggesting that Silverstone was fat, perhaps he would like to stop using the word “hefty” to describe her.
I saw the film when it was released. I recall that the media was conducting an anti-Alicia blacklash, as they do with any young actress they’ve built up and become tired of. Attacking her by attacking her weight was simply another element of that backlash. At the time she was a bigger star than George Clooney. I remember some entertainment reporter literally shoving Clooney out of the way to get to Silverstone.
Actually, Bette, I decided to describer her as “hefty” because the adjective “fat” is usually reserved for people (Oliver Hardy, for example) who have considerably more adipose tissue than Silverstone displayed in the film. My point was not that this should have disqualified her for a role in “Batman and Robin”, far from it, it was merely to point out that Hollywood doesn’t necessarily go for the slimmest possible candidate when choosing an actor/actress to portray a super-hero.
However, I’m intrigued by your reply. If I had called her “fat”, would that necessarily have been an insult? And was I being insulting when I referred to Adam West and David Ogden Stiers as “tubbier” than their graphic counterparts?
this is completely off-topic, but how weird is the perspective in that poster? the shot of night-owl and his ship is from above, but the railing is shot from below, as in the illustration by dave gibbons. it’s a strange world when a comic book illustration feels more real than a photo.
Amp said:
This may need a SPOILER ALERT!!! warning. But since I haven’t actually seen the movie, I’m not sure.
I may be misremembering, but an interview with the director in EW basically seemed to say:
1) No Nixon. And “modernized” in other ways that leads me to think more “War on Terror” backdrop than “Cold War.”
2) No pirate/comic side-story (which makes some sense… It was cool, but I’m not sure the movie needs the comic-within-a-comic story arc that is only tangentially related to a side character that may not even appear in the movie).
3) No side plot of “the people in New York” (which I think SHOULD have been kept, for good reason given all that happens)
4) Downer ending: “yes”. Same downer ending: “no”.
That last part is the one that I’m hoping was a misread or mis-memory on my part… But if I’m not misreading/misremembering, that last one’s a doozy and blows all other “non-faithful” complaints out of the water. The only way to top that level of “non-faithfulness” would be to make the ending all happy-joy and upbeat.
Did you see the new extended trailer? There’s a scene (a little short one) where Nite Owl (whitout costume) it’s having some action whit silk specter… and he looks fat!! Maybe its just the costume what makes him look fit, and whitout it it’s the chuby guy we love.
MisterMephisto –
1) there is a Nixon – if you look on the film’s website, you can see still images that have Nixon election posters in the backdrop. (Click Menu, Photo Gallery to find them). The idea of having a modern setting came up at one point in the production process, and I think that one of Hayter’s two scripts was aimed at that, but Snyder vetoed it. It’s 1980s all the way.
2) they’ve talked about making an animated Black Freighter short-film and releasing it on DVD; I’ve also read of the possibility of splicing that animated film with the main film in the (inevitable) extended edition DVD.
3) there’s stills of that on the site, too. I don’t see how they could’ve cut it, seeing as it’s part of Rorschach’s story.
4) leakage from the Portland screening says that that is, sadly, true, but the studio have claimed that they’ve filmed several different endings and are going to test them on audiences to see what works best, and then throw them all into the DVD. *le sigh* Even if that is true, I don’t trust focus groups to do anything to a film except fuck it up.
I don’t actually see the problem with changing the ending per se, because keeping the ending would be equally unfaithful to the original – for reasons that I hope are obvious, it doesn’t mean what it meant when the book was written, especially not to an American audience. So doing something different but which was messed up in all the same ways would have satisfied me. The leaked Portland ending is not so pleasing, however.
In my opinion pudgy Dan looks like a super hero that you can relate to. Where skinny Dan looks kind of creepy, like some top from an S&M club.