NOLAN SPEAKS ABOUT BATMAN/SUPERMAN/INCEPTION, WE READ IT - Page 2

Sex scenes ARE action scenes! Oh yea... oh yea...

I was just about to say, even if he didn't turn non-action scenes into action scenes, he still shoots them like slick action scenes.

One of the moments I definitely remember Snyder's vision of Watchmen disconnecting with me is when he had Dan and Laurie kicking the ever-loving shit out of the goons in the alley. Everything about it felt wrong.

I say this as someone who still enjoyed the film a great deal.

To be fair to Snyder, and speaking as someone who thinks he missed the point of Watchmen, he had a good reason for turning up the action-quotient on the Comedian's murder. He was about to ask a general audience to commit to a superhero movie without a lot of action and without any recognizable characters. Throwing them a bone was probably his way of getting them on his side.

In the book, I remember that scene cast in shadow, hard to see, their breath barely visible in the night and inter-cut with something else happening in the story. Theyre out of shape and this gets them turned back on, both to what they used to do and each other.

In the movie, it feels like they're action stars in the peak of physical condition and there's no character beat because it doesn't seem like anything has changed for these two. And to top it off, Snyder makes you feel every broken bone as if it's happening to you. It's not as if these characters are discovering something about themselves or each other. It feels like they're fucking you.

Maybe. I'm always big on "let me see YOUR take and win me over with it; don't make the movie I'm expecting." I just worry Snyder's not got any kind of surprise version of Superman in him. I don't care whose "vision" of Superman I get, I just want it to surprise me in a good way.

One way he'll surprise me is if he drops the desaturated look he usually goes for on this one.

For now...Watchmen, remains my favorite Superhero film. Once...The Avengers Assemble on the silver screen in, 2012, that could change! No director could have made a better film out of, Watchmen than Zack Snyder! I love the Rorschach prison break, but I loved seeing Silk Spectre II rescuing the people in the burning building. Nite Owl 2 and Silk Spectre 2, getting it on, while listening to...Hallelujah, was priceless.

Wow serious Watchmen and Snyder hate here. I can understand some beefs with his style but damn it could have been a worse choice. I'm not excited for Snyder's take but I am curious. That's more than I can say for a few Marvel properties out there.

Love Nolan's comments on Inception love it.

On of my more pointless rants, and that's saying something:

Sometimes a spinning top is just a spinning top. Obviously the point is that Cobb doesn't care anymore, and since he's our lead, the movie stops caring as well. Even Nolan isn't all that interested in it. The shit about the kids' clothes or whether they face him is a real forest-for-the-trees bit of stuff to obsess about.

We geeks sure are addicted to having our questions answered and all our details filled in. Did we learn nothing from our Boba Fett obsession? The baddest asshole in the galaxy turned out to be some whiny test-tube baby. Oh yeah, and he's a Kiwi now.

By the way, if Nolan had directed Watchmen, it may have been better (I actually liked most of what Snyder did) but it also would have cost about 400 million bucks. Part of the reason Snyder got the job was his frugality on 300 and Dawn of the Dead.

Put me in the "I would have loved to have seen Aranofsky's Watchmen" category. He used a lot of Watchmen visual tricks in The Fountain, which I also expect to catch a mountain of shit for loving.

WATCHMEN the comic was a deconstruction of the comic book genre, but who really, beyond those knowledgeable in the genre (AKA comic/lit nerds), is really going to get that? WATCHMEN the movie was a multi-million dollar investment. They're different animals, with different demographics, and different goals. Of course superheroes are going to be required to be in action scenes in a film that cost that much. It's not an indie flick like Gunn's THE SPECIALS.

Now should the movie have had that high of a budget? Or have been adapted at all? Those are different questions entirely.

Yeah, I had no idea Watchmen had become so hated in these parts. Even the credits sequence is getting shit now?

Yes, probably.

Probably not.

See how much of a hypocrite I am!? I liked it but could have lived without it. It was interesting, though, to get feedback from non-comic fans who snatched up and read the book because it was being "legitimized" by a movie version.

Credit sequence is fine, the movie is bad, polished and professional, but bad.

The interesting thing to me is the quote about not having any obligation to the studio. I suppose he means monetarily since their gamble with Inception paid off (and will likely continue to do so this award season) but I wonder if it means creatively as well. I don't think creative control was much of an issue on TDK as it likely was (to a point) on BB, but he's got the big stick now, and he knows it. That's exciting to me, the WB is basically going to let him do whatever the fuck he wants with The Dark Knight Rises and I hope he takes the opportunity to pull out all the stops and end his tenure on the franchise in a huge way.

Also, and this is the last I'll say about it because I really don't care to discuss a hypothetical film that does not and will never exist, but yeah, Nolan would have made a better Watchmen film I think, and I'm sure he'd have been mindful of the budget. That said, Nolan is clearly uncomfortable with sex on screen, and considering the source material, I see that as sort of a big problem when trying to envision a Nolan directed adaptation.

Duke, it's like we share one mind.

I often feel like an outsider, cast out by my peers for loving Watchmen unreservedly. I honestly think for it's faults (and there are certainly faults) Snyder managed to successfully adapt an incredibly dense and complex novel.
It is at times utterly beautiful and haunting, it was immaculately cast (as good as Morgan Haley were Patrick Wilson stole it for me) and for the most part translated what the book was trying to say.

Snyder sexed it up of course. There's no point trying to justify the heightened action, it was just that, an excuse to sell it as an action film, but I never thought it took away from the characters. It has problems but I thought what worked completely over shadowed what didn't.

Also, if you haven't already, I invite you to read Sam Hamm's original script, then tell me Snyder doesn't deserve a medal.

Snyder's WATCHMEN is functional and just there. It was a director doing as little as possible to fuck up plus a handful of trademark action sequences shoehorned in for the box office. I can't say it thrills me as an adaptation, not when a guy as sharp and intelligent as Paul Greengrass was so close to getting his own, fresh take on the material to the big screen.

A fair and, IMNSHO, accurate summary. WATCHMEN looked great but wasn't great.

I find this really exciting, too. Thanks to the success of his last two (three? Does WB consider PRESTIGE a success?) films, Nolan can go fucking nuts with the third film. And INCEPTION wasn't just a critical and financial success - he seemed to have crossed some important artistic bridges with it, too.

Mike's Pants, "Can you read my mind?" Margot Kidder as Lois Lane (Superman The Movie)
I did not read much of that draft. It would have been a...WINO. Watchmen In Name Only. I wasn't even going to see the film and I ended up loving it.

I didn't read Watchmen, until...2008. I loved the comic, and to me, the film is an...Epic. It was also...Perfectly cast. Jackie Earle Haylie as Rorschach was great, but I preferred...Patrick Wilson as Nite Owl 2, and Malin Akerman as Silk Spectre 2. I also love the music. I have both the song and score soundtracks. Sure, there was a limited amount of action scenes, but the ones that are there are...Glorious!

I don't think Snyder was "doing as little as possible" in any context. I do think that, overall, Snyder mistook faithfulness to the printed story as substance and stylized violence (departing from the printed story) as depth or additional character moments. In some ways, I think it could be argued that Snyder tried too hard and in the wrong ways. From all the BTS material, it was evident he loved the story and went to great lengths to recreate it as film. "Trying too little," in any respect, just doesn't seem to fit his filmmaking or his version of WATCHMEN.

Exactly. When I saw it, I told people that the movie reminded me of a kid in the 80's that could play every single note in every Eddie Van Halen song, but forgot to work on what made the songs cool in the first place.

Shoehorning a story like Watchmen into a three hour movie is a fool's errand, but it could be done if the underlying themes and concepts were adapted properly. It would be tough, and Sam "It's the Goddamn Watchmen!" Hamm's draft doesn't even come close. Synder created a visually faithful adaption but got all the important stuff -- characters, motivations, conclusion -- wrong.

Should have been clearer - the little as possible" refers strictly to the adapting of the story for the screen. His slavishness and/or fear of backlash ended up screwing the film's pacing and producing a bulky, ungainly xerox of the book rather than a film in its own right.