I'm going to make a bunch of rambling comments cause I can't help it!
I loved the opening sequence so much. It was actually released a few weeks before the movie opened, and I couldn't stop watching it. I was impressed by how they managed to condense almost all of the Minutemen history into that one sequence. (A couple of things that you probably already noticed but I wanna say cause it's awesome: Sally's party that mimics the Last Supper, and when Nite Owl is beating up that criminal he is doing so in front of the Gotham Opera House, having saved a wealthy couple including a woman wearing pearls, and there's a batman poster in the background)
Billy Crudup may not have had to fight like the others, but did you see the suit he had to wear? Total props to him for putting up with that.
I can think of two possible explanations for the whole buff thing, though I don't think there's a definite answer. One is that Jon Osterman in the book had a very different build from Billy Crudup, so it's plausible that he was already ripped (Dave Gibbons tends to draw ALL his characters with a typical superhero hyper-masculine figure - even the women to some extent) and they just decided that it would be strange to make movie-Manhattan less muscular. The other possibility is that when Jon was rebuilding his molecular structure (like a watchmaker putting a watch together from scratch - heee!), he made no real effort to made his new form look like his old self because he was working so tirelessly just to have a body again, and instead tried to replicate the ideal statuesque human form that's so popular in history and mythology.
Rorschach's mother, the prostitute, was the abusive one. His father left for unknown reasons when he was young, but Rorschach idolized him long after he'd been taken into foster care (part of the reason he generally dislikes woman and respects men). INTERESTING THING: One of the remnants of his father's influence on his moral values is that Rorschach respects President Truman (as his father did) for his decision to drop the atom bomb on Hiroshima and grew up thinking that those kinds of choices had to be made by the righteous to save the many and that it was a sacrifice worth making and so on. This of course makes the shock of being near the center of such an event at the end of the story even greater, as he is horrified by the reality of the action, which suddenly calls all of his core values into question so that he starts to doubt the validity of everything that he has worked for, and you get the picture. On top of this is Manhattan's name being a blatant reference to the Manhattan Project. DO YOU SEE ALL THE DETAIL THOSE CRAZY BRITS PUT INTO THIS STORY JESUS H. CHRIST
Another note, in case you're ever debating with some crazy hardcore nerds, in the original story the group isn't actually called "The Watchmen". There's no one called Watchmen, and the only time that word appears is in graffiti form in the background. It was meant to be subtle (in fact, the phrase never even appears in full, as part of it is always obscured or interrupted), but of course Hollywood doesn't do subtle. They thought that average moviegoers would say "BUT WHY IS IT CALLED WATCHMEN HURR DURRR", which is valid enough from the studio's point of view but still upset most of the fans. Luckily they only mentioned it a few times. To further your nerd cred, the original name of the group was Crimebusters. It was meant to sound stupid (part of Captain Metropolis' optimistic naivete in trying to start a second crime-fighting group), but the group was together only briefly before the Keene Act was passed, so it wasn't really significant.
Oh wow, lots of rambling thoughts! Sorry about that, heh.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2009-09-18 08:21 am (UTC)I loved the opening sequence so much. It was actually released a few weeks before the movie opened, and I couldn't stop watching it. I was impressed by how they managed to condense almost all of the Minutemen history into that one sequence. (A couple of things that you probably already noticed but I wanna say cause it's awesome: Sally's party that mimics the Last Supper, and when Nite Owl is beating up that criminal he is doing so in front of the Gotham Opera House, having saved a wealthy couple including a woman wearing pearls, and there's a batman poster in the background)
Billy Crudup may not have had to fight like the others, but did you see the suit he had to wear? Total props to him for putting up with that.
I can think of two possible explanations for the whole buff thing, though I don't think there's a definite answer. One is that Jon Osterman in the book had a very different build from Billy Crudup, so it's plausible that he was already ripped (Dave Gibbons tends to draw ALL his characters with a typical superhero hyper-masculine figure - even the women to some extent) and they just decided that it would be strange to make movie-Manhattan less muscular. The other possibility is that when Jon was rebuilding his molecular structure (like a watchmaker putting a watch together from scratch - heee!), he made no real effort to made his new form look like his old self because he was working so tirelessly just to have a body again, and instead tried to replicate the ideal statuesque human form that's so popular in history and mythology.
Rorschach's mother, the prostitute, was the abusive one. His father left for unknown reasons when he was young, but Rorschach idolized him long after he'd been taken into foster care (part of the reason he generally dislikes woman and respects men).
INTERESTING THING: One of the remnants of his father's influence on his moral values is that Rorschach respects President Truman (as his father did) for his decision to drop the atom bomb on Hiroshima and grew up thinking that those kinds of choices had to be made by the righteous to save the many and that it was a sacrifice worth making and so on. This of course makes the shock of being near the center of such an event at the end of the story even greater, as he is horrified by the reality of the action, which suddenly calls all of his core values into question so that he starts to doubt the validity of everything that he has worked for, and you get the picture. On top of this is Manhattan's name being a blatant reference to the Manhattan Project. DO YOU SEE ALL THE DETAIL THOSE CRAZY BRITS PUT INTO THIS STORY JESUS H. CHRIST
Another note, in case you're ever debating with some crazy hardcore nerds, in the original story the group isn't actually called "The Watchmen". There's no one called Watchmen, and the only time that word appears is in graffiti form in the background. It was meant to be subtle (in fact, the phrase never even appears in full, as part of it is always obscured or interrupted), but of course Hollywood doesn't do subtle. They thought that average moviegoers would say "BUT WHY IS IT CALLED WATCHMEN HURR DURRR", which is valid enough from the studio's point of view but still upset most of the fans. Luckily they only mentioned it a few times. To further your nerd cred, the original name of the group was Crimebusters. It was meant to sound stupid (part of Captain Metropolis' optimistic naivete in trying to start a second crime-fighting group), but the group was together only briefly before the Keene Act was passed, so it wasn't really significant.
Oh wow, lots of rambling thoughts! Sorry about that, heh.