Storytellers Unplugged for March

[truepenny]

Post here.

It's about the movie of Watchmen, which we just got back from seeing. There aren't any spoilers.

There is a spoiler here, though.


The movie made several changes, most--although not all--of them for the better (at least in terms of meeting the storytelling needs of its particular medium). But the one that just filled me with glee is that when Laurie accidentally activates Archie's flamethrower, she's not down in Dan's basement cleaning. She's snooping. [ETA: buymeaclue, a more alert reader than I, points out that Laurie's snooping in the book, too. Mea culpa!] And she doesn't press the button for the flamethrower because she thinks it's the cigarette lighter. She presses the button for the flamethrower because she wants to know what it does. My inner twelve-year-old tomboy is so vindicated.

Also, while all the casting is eerily perfect and the performances likewise, Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach is solid-state awesome.

Comments

[cassiphone.livejournal.com]

I had blocked out the cleaning part obviously. I didn't remember that at all, so didn't register it as a change. But yay for snooping.

Hee I totally read that scene as not her wanting to know what the button does, but her already knowing and DOING IT ANYWAY.

I do love that Laurie has so much more agency in the film, and that we get to see her joy of being a superhero as well as her original motivation of doing it to please her mother.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

As buymeaclue points out above, I was wrong about the cleaning. It's been a long time since I read the book. I apologize.

Laurie DOES have more agency in the movie, and I also enjoyed that very much, but I think Moore and Gibbons were actually trying to make a point about how much being a superhero wasn't Laurie's choice or her desire, that she was forced into it by her mother, and that that damaged her.

In general, I found that where the movie failed to be true to the book was in its failure (or refusal) to deconstruct superheroes. The scene where Nite Owl and Silk Spectre take out all those rioting prisoners (a.) isn't in the book and (b.) is unabashed superhero porn. And Nite Owl has a swirly fluttery superhero cape, of exactly the type that gets Dollar Bill killed. (I kept hoping they'd have a scene where a bad guy grabs the cape and it just detaches, but if they did, I missed it.) The sense of irony is missing. I don't think this makes it a failure as a movie, but it is one place where the book's subtlety and complexity were left behind on the page.