I feel I have given Watchmen enough space now to comment on it. It has been a month and everything that needed to be said about it has been said by one reviewer or another, but just so my opinion gets added to the rest of the heap, my verdict is:

Good. Not Great. Good.

Now, it had all the elements to make it great. Good direction, fantastic cinematography, for the most part decent casting (Jackie Earle is frighteningly perfect), and a pretty good script considering how much stuff is in the book - they should introduce a new Oscar category for opening credits, what a brilliant way to handle all of that stuff. Considering that I enjoyed all of these facets of the movie, why oh why is it good, not great?

This material has been mentioned as “unfilmable” over and over. I don’t exactly agree with that statement. Perhaps it should be changed to, “not able to make into a film,” not necessarily “unfilmable.” I couldn’t help but think upon exiting the theater that those who hadn’t read the book might be lost. I don’t know why I thought that, the plot moves in a linear fashion, most of the character’s backstories and motivations are explained well. I just couldn’t help but think there was something missing. I’m also not going to be one of those people who sneers at Snyder’s deviation from the source material, because it is a movie, it has to deviate in order to reach a broader audience. Those who are familiar with the book will have left the movie nitpicking about what was left out and those that aren’t are going to be confused by all of the stuff put in that was a special nod to the reader. But, I will say this, Alan Moore chose to tell this story in comic format, not novel format. Adapting a novel to the screen is the art of transferring the pictures the text creates in one’s head accurately to the screen, those adaptations which succeed in appeasing the base readership are praised, those that fail are panned. But for this particular adaptation, all of the pictures are there. They have been laid out in specific detail, placed in a particular order for maximum effect, resulting in one of the greatest books ever written. Should every frame been in the movie? Of course not. That is ridiculous. The movie would have been 12 hours long.

But, Hal, you say, obviously this isn’t the first movie made from a comic book, those others worked, didn’t they? Yes, they did, but movies like Iron Man, Spiderman, Superman, The Dark Knight, these movies were script compilations of elements in these books spanning decades. The essence of character and several plots condensed into a neat little package for mass consumption. They aren’t direct adaptations, they are complied interpretations based on source material. For my dollar, I would rather Warner or Fox taken the rights to this particular property and headed right over to HBO and done a 12 part mini-series. If John Adams had been made into a movie, I would have fallen asleep, but the mini-series kicked my ass.

This brings me to my point. 2008 was The Year of The Comic Book Movie. Iron Man, The Dark Knight, The Incredible Hulk, Wanted, Hellboy II, etc. It was a heavy comic book year. Seems about the time that Spiderman triumphed at the box office, all of the studios’ ears perked up and started snatching and grabbing every comic property known to man. My last check on IMDB resulted in more than 40 comic properties that have either been optioned or scripted through 2012. Granted, this includes things like Iron Man 2, Spiderman 5, and Constantine 2, but still, that is a whole lot of intellectual property.

I am here to offer an alternative. For all the properties that have been scooped up and ready to flip into celluloid, including several things that I can’t be less excited for like Sub-Mariner or Ghost Rider 2, there have been some essential titles overlooked. I am not proposing that the studios widen their nets in picking up even the most miniscule of books, we are in a recession here people, I’m talking about widening their perspective to television. Newfound original programming on networks that until relatively recently have been exclusively for movies are starting to really push the limit beyond what the big four networks can deliver. A show on FX, Showtime, AMC, USA, HBO can do things that Heroes can’t accomplish while it slowly rides Rosebud down the bunny hill into the fires of cancellation. I will do my best to keep my Heroes bashing to a minimum, but, seriously, how did they screw it up so badly?

Sure, there is more money to make in movies, but there is also more money to lose. If a studio took the time, really took the time to develop a property into a show people would watch, they could grab several seasons of ad revenue, as well as DVD sales and syndication revenue, which is where most TV shows start to make a profit anyway, regardless of how successful the original airing is. I am not trying to be a stuck up fanboy, I’m just saying. Sure, The Dark Knight has grossed over $533 million at the box office as of this posting. I’m not talking about bringing Batman or Spiderman down to the small screen. For every Dark Knight, there is a Steel, which lost about $14 million, or even Tank Girl, which is a great property and had a small budget, but still lost about $19 million. Most television shows work on around a $5 million budget deficit while trying to recover ad revenue to cover production costs. I hate to talk numbers, but even if your show bombs, you are talking a savings of around $10 million.

Enough shop talk. Here a very small handful of properties that either have already been optioned, or should be, to become the next big television phenomenon.

The Justice League/DC Comics

I open with the JLA, not necessarily because it should be at the top of anyone’s TV property list, but because it immediately proves my point about finding the right medium. DC Comics is huge, they can do whatever they want with whomever they want, however, I’m sorry DC, but The Justice League will never be The Avengers. I started with this particular book because it is also the base of an inherent issue with most of DC’s properties. The Superhero Mythos. All of DC’s characters are likened to Gods. Even Batman, the one major DC character without any powers, has crazy ninja fighting skills and is genius level intelligent. Superman was downright boring until Kryptonite was introduced, believe it or not, first for the Superman radio show, as an excuse to make Superman more human (also to give the actor who voiced him, Bud Collyer, much needed breaks). Marvel has done well in the movie game because most of their characters were created in the 1960’s, when it was time for comics to take a new turn. Human beings with human problems. Mutants dealing with being different, a nerdy kid thrust into having the powers of a Spider and having to choose what to do with them, a scientist dealing with his Jekyll and Hyde ups and downs. Right now, Marvel is building to a huge movie event, The Avengers, and not surprisingly the properties they are having the most trouble pushing are Thor and Captain America. One is a God, the other is a frozen in time Nazi fighter. Not exactly down to earth stories. Which is why The Justice League and each of the small parts, each optioned for movies (Green Lantern, Flash, Wonder Woman), should be on TV. We saw with the failures when these characters are taken individually, The Flash (though it did have Mark Hamill as The Trickster) and Aquaman, which never made it past the pilot, because, well, if are one of the few (like me) who saw the pilot you know the show had nowhere to go. I’m not debating the greatness of these characters. The Green Lantern is still my favorite all-time comic book character, but I would rather see a TV show where he thinks up some crazy thing to do with his ring to help the team beat Darkseid than watch two hours of him getting montage trained by Sinestro before his mentor turns on him. The story of this team, how they work together, how they deal with their individual powers, how they butt heads, and how they justify all those things while trying to find their place in the world is where the story is. Their origins aren’t interesting enough to fuel a bunch of flicks, but would be great fodder for a TV series, if done right (ahem, NBC, cough). As the folks over at Smallville learned, the show has places to go once you get past just Kryptonite, finding the humanity of the show and the wide open spaces of television will allow for a new audience to find the greatness of these DC characters that have fallen by the wayside.

The Foundation/Boom Studios

Holy crap, the very first thing I said after reading this book is that it should be a TV series. The premise is that The Foundation is a secret group who interprets the predictions of Nostradamus to either prevent or assist the coming of future events. The whole first sequence of the first issue is about the team preventing a man from getting on a plane they know is going to explode. The new agent doesn’t know what the man is being saved for or why, he just has been told he has to be saved. The main character is new to the organization and is dealing with all of the morality of saving one, but not saving many, preventing/affecting the future and the implications of that, fate vs. destiny vs. reality. It was only a short run, 5 issues, and has nowhere to go but up. Like X-Files meets Men in Black meets Wanted, Wanted the book, not Wanted the crappy movie adaptation of that book.

Y: The Last Man/Vertigo

I submit this, here, now, as a red flag to Benderspink. STOP. BACK UP. START OVER. THIS TIME WITH A TELEPLAY. Benderspink, the production company responsible for the American Pie, Butterfly Effect, and The Ring franchises has optioned this property and are currently scripting. On the upside, they brought in David S. Goyer as a producer, on the downside, the result of this company’s last foray into comic books was A History of Violence. A mysterious plague has killed off all of the men in the world, save two, a man and his monkey. Okay, so that makes it sound a little bit like The Stand meets BJ and The Bear, but the idea of what would happen if there were no men left? Sounds like a feminists’ dream come true, right? Not so much. Lots of stories, lots of problems. Not to mention the most empowering group of roles for women on television since Buffy went off the air. Great television. Not a great movie. I can see the terrible trailer in my brain, and, honestly, it looks a little like I Am Legend. Replace Will Smith with Will Smith and a monkey and the zombie people things with ladies. That doesn’t sound like a good movie, though I’m sure there is a version of it floating around the adult film circles.

The Secret History/Archaia Studios Press

The Grail Myth. The Defeat of the Spanish Armada. The Cathar Purge. An entire history of humanity ripe to be infused with the secret practices of rune and dark magic. Everybody loves a good alternate history story and this book from the independent Archaia takes seven major events in world history and explains why they happened the way they did with unforeseen forces pulling the strings. Dungeons and Dragons meets Quantum Leap. That’s all I need to say about that.

Resurrection/Oni Press

We’ve seen it a hundred times. The aliens attack, humanity is screwed, we find a way to defeat them, hooray humanity is saved. But then what? Think about the end of Independence Day or War of the Worlds? The world as we know it is a desolate wasteland. How would mankind pick up the pieces? What would we do with the random alien technology now strewn about the planet? If there were enemy survivors, how would we deal with them and would we go back to our petty squabbles, or unite forever against a common enemy, one that could come back at any time? Now that we know there is one hostile race out beyond the stars, what if there is another one? These are all of the questions that make me wonder why Resurrection never exploded. Perhaps it was its small press run in limited markets, but an idea this good should be huge right now. I submit this property finally to show again that television has it’s place and purpose for the comics medium. Everybody wants to see the aliens defeated on the big screen, but people want to see humans survive on the small screen. I wouldn’t see this movie, but my God, would I tune in every week to see what happens when mankind has to deal with What If? The irony of this being such an amazing title with a bunch of television potential is that it is created and written by Marc Guggenheim, a TV writer for Brothers & Sisters, The Practice, and Eli Stone. Hey, Marc, if you happen to google yourself and read this, good job on the comic, I know Universal just optioned this, steer them towards TV, you won't regret it.

So, there you are. I picked five. Five out of thousands. Like I said, plenty of comics are going to be made into great movies and plenty of comics shouldn’t even be touched, but with that many choices out there, shouldn’t we have more Options?

Hal Gardner, signing off.

Blake and I had a chance to attend our local midnight screening of The Watchmen. I'll save my review for the podcast (although I do briefly mention in the vid that the film was 'well made' - that hardly comprises a review, does it?). As for the theater trip itself, not wholly enjoyable, as we did have the ticket printing issue. Blake bought the tickets beforehand, and we had to present the purchase to the ticket seller, not the ticket taker, have tickets printed, and present those to the ticket taker.

Yes, the refreshments we purchased did last the whole film, so we did an adequate job when we purchased the Mega popcorn and the two Large sodas.