Watchmen is an entirely different experience: it punishes the audience. When Batman puts on his costume, that's badass: 'Yeah Batman, go kick some ass'. What's popular about The Dark Knight is that it's a superhero movie at its core. "It's a two-and-a-half hour R-rated movie, and there's no precedent for that type of film becoming a huge blockbuster. And if you try to analyse it in those terms – and not in terms of its relationship to pop culture – then you kind of miss the point. Because it really is not a movie, in a traditional sense. "I feel like a lot of them just went to Wikipedia. "The thing I find fascinating about the whole way Watchmen was received is that 10% or less of the critics seemed to have actually read the graphic novel," laughs Snyder. A significant minority labelled the movie a flawed work of genius. Yet few could criticise Watchmen as the sort of hack job expected from a former commercials director with only two previous features under his belt (a remake of zombie classic Dawn of the Dead, and another comic book adaption, the notoriously gory 300). That may have been its downfall with the critics, who were not always kind, and it certainly didn't help the movie's box office, which failed to meet expectations of a giant, Dark Knight-style haul. Just as the original graphic novel represented a sea-change in comic book sensibilities, Snyder's film bears little resemblance to any other comic book adaptation of recent times. From the glorious, hyperreal montage that comprises the opening scene – as Bob Dylan's Times They Are A-Changin' serenades 50 years of alternative US history where masked vigilantes have changed the course of the 20th century – to the climactic denouement, rather different to Moore's (pretty bonkers) ending, the film is resolutely Snyder's own. It too has its own identity, one which transcends its roots in Moore's original comic book. Photograph: Johannes Simon/Getty ImagesĪnd that's also what's noticeable about Snyder's version of Watchmen, out on DVD in the UK next week. Snyder at the Berlin premiere of Watchmen. When you have people on screen that the audience doesn't know so well, the characters have their own identity: it becomes its own thing." I'm not sure it would have worked with, you know, Brad Pitt in the Nite Owl suit, or whatever. I think in the end it's a perfect cast because they are those characters. "The truth is that it's a difficult thing for actors to be that self aware. "But the problem was that, as I was working on that concept, it was all about the irony of casting a movie like that, with big stars, so that the casting kind of commented on their roles. "It's funny because early on we talked about doing a bigger, more sort of Ocean's Eleven style cast," says Snyder, on the phone from LA. The idea was to use the celebrity status of the actors to mirror the obsessive public scrutiny experienced by Watchmen's "masks", who exist in an alternate 1985 in which superheroes - of a sort - have been walking the streets for the past half century. Zack Snyder is talking about an early conception of Watchmen, his adaptation of the seminal Alan Moore graphic novel, in which the various characters were to have been played by A-list Hollywoodlanders.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |