I like these images, even Silk Spectre and Ozymandias, because they look exactly like you'd expect superheroes and superheroines in a modern comic book movie to look -- which means that there's the potential for surprise once the movie actually rolls. It's like the Liam Neeson trick in Batman Begins.

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Looking at those pictures, I expect a kick-ass first hour and fifteen minutes. After that, no promises.

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Weirdly I feel differently about films of comics. While I now hear Ron,Harry, Hermione, etc. as the characters from the films, with comics I have the visuals right in front of me, so I can't see it any other way.

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I think they all look great. I am a bit annoyed at the Silk Spectre - but I expect Hollywood to make all female superheroes into dominatrixes. They don't seem to realize that latex thigh highs rip rather easily!

That said, if they keep the rather disturbing sexual attack scene in the film (which I hope they do) it will be even more disturbing due to the dominatrix quality of her costume.

N.

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I was annoyed at first, until I realised that since Laurie's costume was lingerie and fetish gear in the book, this totally fit the character.

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Silk Spectre's costume doesn't bother me so much (it's about as practical as her graphic novel outfit and frankly looks better) as the fact that she's gone from looking like an ordinary-sized but very fit woman to a tall skinny runway model who doesn't look like she could kick anyone's ass at all.

I'm sure there's plenty of apologia that could be made along the lines of "but, see, if she doesn't look like she could hurt people, then she has the element of surprise!", but I don't buy it. There's never any dearth of excuses for glamming up female roles that really don't require it.

That said, I'm glad they got the hair right.

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*spoiler*

The sexual attack in the comic series was directed at Sally (Silk Spectre 1) and not her daughter Laurie (Silk Spectre 2, depicted in the picture above).

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First Off: Anyone expecting a big-budget action movie to have a "pudgy" main character is going to be highly disappointed. I can't imagine they'll go that route...
...but I will accept them working Dan through the story's character arc as originally presented. It's movies, and if I didn't give some to the exigencies of Hollywood productions, I'd be sitting in even fewer movies than I do, now.

Also: I seriously doubt these are "stills" in the normal sense. They look more like promo pieces, staged and Photoshopped, than anything from the actual movie.

Fianlly, note that the Silk Spectre basically ran around in lingerie, and latex is the new lingerie...I actually think this outfit, from what I can tell of it, represents Laurie and her more forceful personality better than the comics one.

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I agree with you about Voldemort, though luckily his face in the movie is similar enough to my headspace version that he hasn't taken over. He still has scarlet eyes and a cold whistling voice in my head... thank goodness. But it pissed me off that they deliberately avoided those two things; I heard they thought giving him bright red eyes would make him too scary for kids. HE JUST KILLED A YOUNG STUDENT, OF COURSE HE'S GOING TO BE SCARY AND INAPPROPRIATE FOR CHILDREN OF A CERTAIN AGE! Why do the thing at all if you aren't going to do it right?

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This is what I said about Narnia, but in the end, it wasn't good enough to overwrite for me.

I guess I'd better get to reading Watchmen.

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I spent the whole time I was watching The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe wanting to punch Susan. I do not remember her being that useless and annoying in the books.

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She wasn't, at least not until Caspian (and even then not as much as in the movie). XP

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Wait, that's not Ms. Marvel?

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Not enough exposed shaved crotch to be Ms. Marvel. Oh, and her boobs are too small.

But, yeah, they copped a Greg Horn for this pic....

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hear, hear. i hate it when the cineastas screw up books for me. i know how the characters look, and i certainly know better than any ari gold in hollywood does ...

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What gets me is how we see so many people masturbating like caged apes about any impending movie adaptation of a comic or graphic novel, and then who blow up if anything is changed from the original. Even considering that changes might be necessary to convert the story from comics to film, why are they bitching about something they begged for?

I get really tired of this, especially with the whole Cat Piss Man attitude of "I'll demand that an adaptation be made to my specs, up to and including threats of boycotts, but when I get the adaptation I just threw a tantrum to get, I won't see it because I didn't get credit for my efforts." We have the original source material, which worked perfectly well, or do these louts prefer the adaptations of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Swamp Thing and V For Vendetta because now they have something else to bitch about?

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and then who blow up if anything is changed from the original

Hell, these are comic book fans. How many Retcons have there been in DC and Marvel history? "OMG THEY CHANGED SOMETHING!!!" Hey, fanboy, they change something all the damn time.

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I think it depends on what they change and why. Frex, there's a scene in the first half of the Two Towers that isn't in the story so much as it is in the appendices to the story: Aragorn's deathbed with Arwen mourning over it. I don't think it was exact, and as I said, it doesn't appear in TT at all, but it FELT true to the story and the characters. But later in the same movie, Treebeard and Faramir do things that are anti-thetical to their book characters. I rather howled over those decisions (although quietly, in the back of my head, so I wouldn't get kicked out of the movie theatre.) I can accept decisions made because the media is different (ie. condensing the action in Spiderwick down to about two days worth of time instead of several weeks to months) or leaving out the small detail maybe only I would notice, but when you start futzing with characters, stuff gets tricky. (Which I guess was the point of TheFerrett's whole post.)

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That looks enough like Laurie Juzpeczyk to me...

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Wow. I'd completely missed that a Watchmen movie was really going to be reality.

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I read Watchman at the insistence of a man I was dating around 1996-97. It was a struggle: I'd never read a comic book before, and it requires completely different skills from reading a novel. (Except, you know, for the mundane "reading text" part, which is only a small part of reading a comic book.) I enjoyed it, but not enough to read another--too much work!

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Completely understandable- I have a few book series like that- if anyone EVER tried to create a film of them, I would only be able to watch them- if ever- by telling myself either, "It's an alternate universe version that happens to parallel MY world" or "This is someone ELSE'S opinion of these events... Therefore- it's going to be skewed from MY version of these same events."

That being said, I suspect that - should Anne McCaffrey's 'Dragonriders of Pern', or the others, ever make it to a screen- it will probably be only by chance that I see them, as I won't go out of my way to a theater for it.

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I've been living in terror of this movie since the first time it got optioned, because there is no way for a 90 minute or even a three hour script to do justice to that plot. I heard a rumor that Terry Gilliam told them that the only way to do it any justice would be as a twelve-hour miniseries, which seems actually plausible to me.

And I can excuse the Silk Spectre II costume, because the one in the book is literally impossible. You can't make fabric do that. I'm having a harder time, though, with how butch they made Night Owl II's and Ozymandias's costumes. There's an awful lot of Tim Burton's Batman in those costumes, and that's not a favorable association for me.

But damn. Those backlot photos very nearly sold me. In particular, the corner with the news stand? That level of painstaking recreation (aside from literally sending chills down my back) speaks to a real determination to do justice to the book.

I still don't see how it could be done. But now I'm faintly curious.

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This is where I always fail at getting comic book geek cred: I couldn't make it through Watchmen. The best I could do (on three separate attempts) is to scan through large sections while attempting to pay attention to what might have been thought of as the plot (not saying there wasn't one, just that I could never get what it was or where it was coming from). I really liked a lot of the visual aspects (like the glass castle on Mars scene), but it was really hard to read.

Admittedly, if I had been able to read it one issue at a time instead of the enormous trade all at once, perhaps I might have an easier time of it. Most trades I can devour in a matter of hours (half an hour for ones like Fables or the Ultimate series), and Watchmen had me struggling for several hours before giving up in confusion.

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"Watchmen is mine."

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The promo stills are a bit on the unfortuate side -- the Comedian looks like he's channeling Burt Reynolds, for one, and Ozymandias looks like his costume clamps hard in the crotch.

The Silk Spectre image, though, is sailing the failboat because it makes it look as though Laurie's acquired the ability of producing Super Flaming Girl Farts -- I mean, that squat, the placement and angle of some of the flames....

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LOL You have a point there.

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Plus, they're conspicuously avoiding Dr. Manhattan, which means that he probably looks like a cross between Conan and a Smurf with a dot on his head.

Not to mention that either A) they will have to show him only from the waist up B) make him wear pants C) be as anatomically correct as a Ken doll. Given the nature of the character, it has to be A because his disinterest in clothing is kinda important and he's having sex so he's gotta have the equipment. But then it will be a bit odd that 1 guy in the entire movie is shown waist up but nobody else is and its for Rating reasons not drama or anything.

That all being said, I read Watchmen for the first time about a year ago and while it was neat, interesting, and different I just don't understand why its considered the SUPERMEGAWESOMESAUCE that alot of people seem to treat it as.

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... or, his genitalia might retract when they're not of service.

He can remove and rebuild his intrinsic fields, you know. He can do anything, as long as it doesn't involve his own free will.

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For years I wanted to read The Watchmen, because I had heard so much. Finally my darling gf gets it for me (not the $120 version, but still a compilation of the series) and I excitedly read through it, absorbing every word, waiting to be amazed and delighted.

It never happened. It was a serious "WTF?" at the end. I worried I read the wrong comic somehow, but you're naming the characters right.

Is this one of those situations where I can't relate because it was specific to its time, much like kids today can't appreciate Star Wars because they've seen the Matrix? What the heck am I missing with this series?

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That's why you have to make sure that kids see Star Wars *before* seeing The Matrix. I've taken this task seriously and now my four year old son is a Star Wars junkie. =P

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I'm torn on seeing it, though for the same reasons. I've got my own version of how their voices sound, their body language, movements, etc. I don't know that I want to have that overridden by what Hollywood puts out. The costumes do look good overall, though that leaves a lot of room for them to still really screw it up.

On the other hand, the chance to actually see the story on the big screen is awfully tempting. There's some parts I really want to see, just to get a gander at how they were put together, both for special effects and also for choreography I'd also be curious to see how they're going to do with Rorschach's history, as that was a rather intense part of the book.

I guess I'll make the decision once the movie's out.

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I feel the same way about Dune (my favorite book ever), which is why I haven't seen the movie (any cut) or the Scifi miniseries. And won't, if I have my way.

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I consciously decided never to watch the Lord of the Rings movies for that exact same reason. I enjoyed "DM of the Rings" though...

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I've seen multiple cuts of the movie and the sci fi miniseries, and they have yet to ruin Dune for me. It's like they are unDune. My brain doesn't even process the blond kid from the SciFi Channel one as Paul. Kyle Maclachlan kinda gets off easier, but still, when I re-read the books, Paul is still Paul and not some actor.

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Yeah fuck this movie, man. Totally.

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I think the problem will be that it'll be unlikely to show the correct level of "darkness" in some of the scenes. I just can't see Hollywood allowing a "hero" to randomly break fingers in a bar etc.

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If we're lucky, they're not showing Dr. Manhattan because they're actually gonna have him naked, junk and all.

And the Silk Spectre's costume makes some sense for a modern audience. Her normal costume wouldn't make a modern audience think "dressed up like a whore" as much as "weird silly retro thing." And that's kinda important.

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My nephew and niece have read all the Harry Potter books but have no interest in watching the movies for the same reasons you cite above: they don't want to lose "their" version of the characters and settings.

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