Thursday, March 12, 2009

Q1 Watchmen (movie) visual style

Kristen asked: Was it lazy or genius to recreate the shots from the GN onto the screen so perfectly?

3 comments:

Nic said...

I think it was respect for the novel, Zack Snyder said he was determined to put the novel back in the film. I liked it!

PJ said...

Me too, I liked being able to recognise certain scenes (despite only being 1/3 of the way through the novel). I think that there is an art to the placement of everything in the square in the graphic novel, and it looks artistic in the movie. Different angles or something.

detecktive said...

I agree with PJ. While there have been some very ordinary and possibly 'lazy' translations of comics to film, in many ways I think it can be more exacting than coming up with original material.

This is mainly when you consider the pressure to do justice to the source material. Comics tend to attract 'fanboys' - a vocal group of zealots who will exact metaphoric or actual revenge if you stuff up their 'love'.

Imagine the pressure Sydner must have been under to translate Watchmen, which has cult like status in the graphic novel world, after it had fallen through so many times and had been labelled 'the unfilmable graphic novel'.