Geek Cred
Mar 9th 2009tbMovies & Thoughts
I’ve been thinking long and hard about this post for awhile. With my recent flurry of geeky activity, it’s apropos to write about what it would take to, as they say on Slashdot, turn in your geek card. It started while madly trying to catch up watching BSG (that’s Battlestar Galactica for the uninitiated) and being emotionally tossed around. I only wish I could say it was for the gripping drama. Don’t get me wrong, it has good shows, but even in Season Two, they stringed along three stink-burgers in a row. It got to the point where we looked at each other and thought that if there was one more aimless, over-dramatic story told with the kind of ham-fistedness you would only find in a butcher shop during their yearly “Ham-o-rama”, we would kindly pack the DVDs back in the box and not feel bad for not watching the rest of them. Fortunately, a merely adequate episode followed and so we continue watching.
But where the geek cred gets it’s test was this weekend during the opening weekend of Watchmen. I kid you not. I was not looking forward to this. Here was a story that when I first read it in the early years of my college career, I was stunned by it’s power. Perfectly encased in a single story, I neither wanted or needed to know the backstory (that wasn’t already provided) or wish for a sequel. It was the rare entity that stood on it’s own, the mere thought of a follow up would diminish it’s greatness. And twenty years ago when I read it, I also thought that there was no way that this could be done in movie form.
And then they made it.
I was weary from the start. The thought of taking something so deep and complex and try to jam it into even a three hour movie seemed to be impossible. Friends of mine sent me photos, saying that it looked like it was going to be fine and I sneered because I know what Hollywood does to movies, what directors do to things to “make their stamp” on the world. The movie would not live up to the hype, it would not be true to the story and end up being a bad film overall making millions of dollars.
Then Wil Wheaton, whom I respect as a fellow geek, liked it. Suddenly, it had cred. It had geek cred. I hesitated and gave it a moment. It might not suck after all. And I had read on Wikipedia that Alan Moore had thought the guy who wrote the screenplay got it as about as good as it was going to get, even though he still wasn’t going to see it.
The reviews poured in, decidedly mixed. Most “serious” critics thought it was a mess. Some, like the guy who does reviews for the Star Tribune, didn’t like it because of all these theories he threw out there, all of them sounding like shit I heard in my literary criticism class in college, none of them actually hitting the mark. Reading it was kind-of funny because he was so far off about what the graphic novel themes were. It got some good marks from Ebert whom I tend to agree with more than I disagree.
When Saturday night rolled around, I went with my wife and a couple friends. I watched. I laughed, cried, winced and wondered throughout the movie. It was okay. They didn’t screw the pooch on the story…it wasn’t perfect, but it was damn close.
But, oh…as a movie. I don’t know what to say. The music choices were all wrong, out of place, out of time. No atmospheric music I can remember from the show, but I remember thinking when they played Mozart’s Requiem 1) “this is the stupidest use of this song I’ve ever seen” and 2) “this is the most blatantly obvious music-as-message cheap trick I’ve seen in a movie” and 3) “they completely misinterpreted the scene and the music with it”.
They got the damn story right! How can they get the other things wrong? Some of the casting was spot on (Nite Owl, Rorscharch, the body of Dr. Manhattan, the Comedian) and others were weak (everyone else). This movie won’t go down in geekdom like Lord of the Rings did…it will be passable. Not a total embarrassment, but not truly showing the emotional and psychological side of Watchmen as a story.
