[spoiler alert: full plot details of both film and comic versions are discussed]

Any film adaptation is automatically a mixed blessing: the chance to see some beloved story translated from a book/comic/radio show/TV show/videogame to the big screen, counterbalanced by the risk that it will get fundamentally ruined in the process. Of these, the trials of moving from books to movies are probably best established—massive plot compression, reduced complexity, characters that don’t “look right,” jettisoning of descriptive language—but comic adaptations are a much newer phenomenon with their own pitfalls. To begin, one might argue that Watchmen is only the second true conversion (what in videogame terms might be called a “total conversion” from mod culture), following Frank Miller’s Sin City, with most other superhero and even explicitly comic book movies often closer to “inspired by” or “featuring characters from” than outright transfers from actual comic runs or specific graphic novels[1]. Even previous efforts to adapt Alan Moore in League Of Extraordinary Gentleman, From Hell, and V for Vendetta, and Watchmen director Zach Snyder’s previous outing with Frank Miller’s 300, diverged quite widely from the source material. By contrast, Sin City was almost a shot-for-shot remake of the Dark Horse series. But even it suffered in the process of combining multiple short story arcs into an attempt to create a coherent longer film, and from the innate limitations of the flat-affect noir patois in which it was composed. Watchmen was conceived first as a 12-part comic run and then collected as a graphic novel, ostensibly providing a more linear narrative to put into a film script. Once the initial jitters that the material would be handled indelicately had passed (Snyder went out of the way to reassure fans), the more apropos question became: does Watchmen even work as a movie? With Snyder’s Watchmen, we have a vastly ambitious attempt to convert what has been called an “unfilmable” work into celluloid. How well viewers think the effort turned out is breaking down along traditional party lines, with mainstream critics bothered by its structure, pulp excesses, and even its slavish devotion to the text (cf. the first two Harry Potter films); and fans thrilled to see familiar scenes brought to life. At the risk of rehashing overchurned ground, I think the movie succeeds and fails precisely by those measures and your ultimate enjoyment will be determined how much you give credence to each. Let’s start with the structure.
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Albums added in February: 17,821

Featured Selections

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Apoptygma’s Stephan Groth met stiff scene resistance in shifting from earlier, harsh attack EBM to the kind of epic synth rock exhibited here to great effect. Naturally, cries of ’sellout’ and fan rebellion were followed by the album achieving runaway success, particularly in Tokio Hotel-loving Germany. Anthemic, crashing chords tear the roof off with tracks like “In This Together” and the gripping “Cambodia.”

Asobi Seksu, Hush (12)

Asobi Seksu return with more immaculate, Lush-esque twee dreampop.

Autechre, Amber (11)
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Before they got self-consciously experimental to the point of becoming ‘difficult’ music, Autechre put out some wonderfully melodic IDM in Incunabula and Amber, which would be followed shortly after by Tri Repetae.

Scooter, Jumping All Over the World (24)

It’s Scooter. Jumping All Over the Place is pretty much self-descriptive.


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