Man in the High Castle

[IHEARTKALENA]

Sieg Heil

[fred41]

Watchmen was a very good movie. Alan Moore writes great graphic novels....the stories are very good ...excellent in fact...but he's not this genius that the pulp crowd makes him out to be. He's a bit of an annoying kook who happens to write good stories. I bought the book when it first came out. The writing was excellent and the art work was...okay. When the movie first came out I wasn't sure how I felt about it, but the reality was that if the movie didn't follow the graphic novel the way it did, it would not have worked at all. Simple.
Now it's a cult classic.
Upon reflection it was an excellent movie version of the graphic novel.

[fred41]

BTW...the twist to the ending was Rorschach's diary about to get picked out of the mail bag to write the story that Rorschach was killed for so that he couldn't reveal it. That's what made the whole fucking story.
Really.

[fred41]

Rorschach only cared about the truth...the facts....the how and the why. He didn't care about politics and the importance of the 'finesse' of the story and how it was perceived and how the truth needed to be massaged for the masses. He believed in the basics - good versus evil...and the truth.
...and he was right.
and he won out at the end

...

[qwerty81]

i really liked the man in the high castle. i also really enjoyed mozart in the jungle, which is classical music in manhattan centered and alpha house, john goodman as a unc basketball coach turned republican senator.

[crystalsopen]

...

Seriously, I think a lot of people secretly and actually LIKED Watchmen,but are just loyalists to Alan Moore, and thus, tow-the-line so to speak. I've personally enjoyed most every adaptation - V, League, From Hell, etc... all entertaining my book. If Watchmen comics had not existed and this movie was released as an original work, it would be beloved by many of those same critics... just my opinion.

Agreed. I would go further to say: the film is separate work and must be judged on its own merits, rather than be compared against the graphic novel.

[Wendy Summers]

Agreed. I would go further to say: the film is separate work and must be judged on its own merits, rather than be compared against the graphic novel.

And that's the thrust of my whole argument: Snyder didn't let the work breathe as a film -- he simply aped exactly what Gibbons drew in the novel. It had little artistic merit because he let something which was intended to deconstruct comic books stand unchanged. Worse by removing the Pirate comic from the story he even neutered the whole deconstruction.

Snyder is fascinated by the cynical aspects of Moore's views on Superheroes without actually understanding the commentary it is making. It bleeds over into his DC Cinematic work -- Man of Steel, for instance, where he makes Superman a mass killer. At the end of the day, his message to the audiences is that the heroes are simply bad people who are marginally better than the villains they fight.

So is his work fun to watch? Sure. Is it good cinema? I feel it fails in that regard.