Watchmen

[mr_bad_example]

I saw Watchmen this afternoon. It was better than I was expecting—I think it was as good as it could possibly be, given the complexity of the source material.

I'm worried, though, about the influence it's going to have on future comics adaptations, it and The Dark Knight. See, around 1985-86, DC published the one-two punch of the Watchmen comic and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. It kicked off what some people call the "Dark Age" of comics. Suddenly, everybody was competing to see who could put out the most DARKNGRITTY comics, each one more godawful than the last. They tried to emulate the style, and the concept of superheroes as damaged people, but they failed to capture the qualities that made Watchmen and DKR great. Every mainstream comic looked like this.

I'm afraid of the same thing that happened to superhero comics happening to superhero films. It's been an awesome couple of years for good, fun films that are simultaneously faithful to the comics and yet also deliver what Tom DeFalco called "hoo-hah." I'm thinking of the first two X-Men films, the first two Spider-Man films, Batman Begins, Iron Man, and hell, I even liked The Incredible Hulk. We don't need the filmic equivalent of Rob Liefeld coming in and wrecking the whole thing. (Some would argue that this has already happened, but that's just uncharitable.)

So if superhero movies could skip the whole "superheroes as sociopathic douchebags" era that the comics industry fell into after Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, I'd be a happy man. That's why I think they need to make a Nextwave film. Less of the derivative brooding anti-hero nonsense, more of THE EXPLODO, please.

Comments

[cursethedark.livejournal.com]

That Mark Steven Johnson guy was attached to the proposed Preacher series on HBO that never went anywhere.

In retrospect, I'm kinda glad it fizzled out.

[mr-bad-example.livejournal.com]

Y'know what annoys me most about Mark Steven Johnson? Neither Daredevil nor Ghost Rider were good films (although Ghost Rider, while not a good film, was an awesome film), but each of them had one element that was just absolutely PERFECT. In Daredevil, it was Michael Clark Duncan as the Kingpin. I'm not just talking about the fact the he's a giant; his performance just NAILED the character. In Ghost Rider, it was Johnny Blaze and Carter Slade blastin' across the desert to "Ghost Riders In the Sky." The fact that he can get one element just right but still make a bad movie tells me that he COULD have made those movies good, but he CHOSE not to.

I agree that it's just as well that Preacher never happened. James Marsden was attached to play Jesse Custer, and that guy's just a complete non-entity. He was fine as Cyclops, because Cyclops has always been a bit of a dullard, but he's so bland I'm surprised he even shows up on film.

[cursethedark.livejournal.com]

Yeah...MCD was pretty cool as Kingpin, although I still hate the way he got punked out at the end. Seemed a little ridiculous.