Saffron 7 published, The Watchmen review

Hello everyone, here’s a normal Sunday blog post.

Biggest piece of news, for myself, is that I posted chapter 7 of Saffron, “Enter Lin Mai”. It’s a good intro to a character, and sets up a good little rival for now. She’s a surprisingly easy character to write, her dialogue seems to flow, but she doesn’t sound much like a nine year old. Shame, but that’s just how she came out. William doesn’t sound like a 10 year old nor Saffron an 8 year old. But I liked it. Next up is a draft of Terra.

Seems that FP should be back up for good…maybe. We shall see I suppose. I changed my avatar back to an old one, although I horizontally mirror flipped the image. Then I made a pretty nice signature pic from something that my buddy Theromen had worked on for a while as a potential banner, which was apparently rejected. So I took his long pic, edited it down a bit, cut out half of it, added in my name and Terra’s, and used it. Came out nice, I like it quite a bit. Also updated my signatures on FP and F3 to reflect the new stories, Saffron and Chrysanthemum.

Sucks but a place I used to love went down. Pal’s Archive of Erotic Cartoons, well, was great. That was back when I was younger and there were just so much to see, my 56k couldn’t download them fast enough. But more than that, it was the first forum I was really a part of. Where I really belonged. There were a lot of people there that I used to enjoy chatting with, Ilaekae, Skeeve, Otaku H, Princess Koriand’r, That Evil Bastard, Onafez, Victor2k, along with so many others. I racked up 4,000 posts there. It was one of the first places I posted my stories But it’s gone now. Kind of sad, but it had been dead for a while now.

Enough whinery now, not much new is going on. Here’s my review of the first big summer movie.



SPOILER WARNING FOR THE WATCHMEN SPOILER WARNING

I saw the Watchmen, it was better than I had anticipated. I had expected, I don’t know, something lousier. They did a good job of recreating most of the plot points. I’ll just go on with what I think.


Characters

They did a great job on Rorschach, really making his character come to life. He was the character he was in the comic books, and it really showed that they worked with him. Some of the story lacked his narration but it worked. 

The Comedian came through fairly well, he was a little bigger in the comics but not by much. It worked well, they got his 3 major points done.

The Night Owl and Silk Spectre romance worked very well, it was believable. The sex scene seemed right on par, not classy enough but not smutty enough either, just right. They had chemistry, most importantly. 

Ozymandias was kind of a miss, he’s so absent that it’s hard to consider him a good guy, and the flashbacks don’t focus enough on him to really matter. He’s seen as a villain too easily, even if you knew what was happening, in the comic books he didn’t seem as obvious.

I just didn’t like what they did with Doctor Manhattan. Firstly they kind of went overboard with his looks, making him into too jacked of a person. He was too muscle bound. I didn’t mind the nudity, it worked fine enough, but his body left something to be desired. Not only that, but there was a fundamental problem with me about how they went about him. He felt like a person to whom feelings and emotions were completely alien, which never seemed his character in the graphic novel. He was a human being who had lost touch with humanity, who was questioning whether or not he had any humanity left or not. He wasn’t someone who didn’t understand what emotions were. He seemed more like Data than Dr Manhattan.

And the minor characters worked well, Nixon, Silk Spectre 1, and the Squid, all good choices and executed well.


Setting

The setting was too gritty, in my opinion. The creators no doubt used their experience from making 300 and the popularity of The Dark Knight and cast the world into a darker vision, not figuratively but literally. Things looked very dark, which was something I never quite felt reading the novel. The darkness was there, in the characters, but not visually. It was dark and gritty when it didn’t need to be. Part of the thing that was so surreal about it was that the characters doing these kinds of things were superheroes. People who were dressed in costumes and fighting bad guys were attempted rapists, murderers, etc. That’s sort of what hit me so heavy, because the morality was so skewed, the people who looked like guys would do wrong. I’m not saying the decision is terrible, but it’s a visual change.




The plot

They got pretty much everything they wanted to. They did all the fan service visual imagery, all of the fan service lines, everything. They put everything that they could in it with the constraints of it not being a six hour movie in place. Even so, it was way too compressed. There were major timing troubles, as the watchmen took place over some time, not just a few days. The narration problems hurt it, it wasn’t crafted as well as in the original graphic novel, but it couldn’t have been. What can you do, ask the audience to wait until the next part comes out? It’s just too much to absorb in one sitting for most people.

The new ending worked, although I would have liked to see the original ending. And having Dr Manhattan be the villain makes little sense, as I seriously doubt that the combined might of the US and USSR could possibly have defeated him. But c’est la vie, it didn’t really matter.


The action

Very little real action scenes, and most of them are short. The movie is compressed, and so making the action scenes, which further the plot very little, as short and as few as possible seemed the goal. With the exception of scenes which did further the plot, such as The Comedian being killed, Dr Manhattan in Vietnam, or Rorschach fighting the police, this was the case.


My conclusion

As good as they could have done it without making it six hours long. It was a good movie, and it was more than I had expected. In the end it will probably fall short of expectations, but it would be almost impossible not to. I didn’t think it would be nearly as commercial a success as it is, but I think people were expecting a batman/x men type of film, and The Watchmen is certainly not.

If you enjoyed reading the graphic novel, see it. If you absolutely loved the graphic novel, don’t, because you can’t possibly enjoy it, it’s not going to live up to your expectations anyway. And if you haven’t read the graphic novel, it’s cheap now, if you don’t want to download it. Read it first, you’ll get much more out of the film, trust me.

And I did enjoy it. Give it a 9 of 10.


For laughs





Peace
SomeRandomBastard
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