Sunday linkdump #1.

* Spike and Angel debate the BSG finale.

* Neil sends along your yearly article on flying cars.

* "My career in academia has bankrupted me."

* MIT's faculty has adopted an Open Access ordinance. That's a pretty big deal.

* And then there's the question of blood, which is the reason I've gathered you all here tonight. Moore & Gibbons's Watchmen has some brutal violence in it, especially considering the context of mid-'80s superhero comics it emerged in. (Many more violent comics would eventually emerge, but that hadn't happened so much yet.) And when people are hurt badly in the original Watchmen, they do bleed. But watching Zack Snyder's Watchmen, I got convinced that he thinks the human body is a highly pressurized balloon full of blood and bones. It's an alarmingly gory movie, and many of the bloodiest moments are actually places where Snyder and his screenwriters depart from the text they're otherwise following so faithfully.

* Twins commit perfect crime. This gives me an idea, but to make it work I'm going to need an identical twin.

As if you might ever get sick of hearing about Watchmen, Bill's review at Candleblog takes mine as a starting point but goes on to defend the movie against me/Moore/itself.

Two more Watchmen links: the credit sequence—which is decent but which didn't thrill me quite like it did others, probably because I'd read exactly what it would be like in advance—and the real-life smiley face on Mars. Via io9 and AICN.

The review thread is still going strong, too, for those with more thoughts on the film.

Watchmen is, as feared, a creative failure. There's a lot that's already been said about this and a lot still to be said, but here in brief is my take on what went wrong.

The first half of the film, as I put it to our group shortly after leaving the theater, is not even terrible. It's just completely unremarkable—a perfectly slavish adaptation of the comic that holds about the same level of critical interest as a high school theater club production of Watchmen might. (This is, of course, a little too glib—there are numerous things about the first half that are in fact actively terrible, most notably the soundtrack and most of the acting, but let those slide for now.) The effort to recreate panel-by-panel the experience of reading the comic is impressive in its dedication but doubly wrongheaded, because (a) it will always fail to achieve perfect fidelity, and therefore fail to satisfy and (b) films are not comics, they are films. The point (if Watchmen must be made into a film at all) is not to "make the pictures move" but to translate from one media to another. Translation in this case would entail studying and appreciating the moves Moore and Gibbons make in the comic and then finding analogous moves that speak to/against cinematic form; it's not about doing a shot-for-panel remake.

One of the best shots in the film is therefore a shot of a door slowly swinging open and closed, allowing us momentary glimpses inside a closed space the camera does not enter. It's a shot that nicely evokes comics without using the already hackneyed slow-everything-down-to-the-speed-of-panels technique, while at the same time being something comics cannot themselves do. Sadly, there's hardly anything else like this moment in Watchmen, as Snyder relies almost entirely on slo-mo and failed attempts at direct quotation throughout.

That's the first half of the film: not even terrible.

The second half—beginning approximately at the moment of a laughable sex scene during which (among other things) the film's bad soundtrack completely jumps the shark—is terrible, precisely because it ventures away from inoffensive slavish fidelity to plot changes and directorial choices that completely misunderstand the very point of Watchmen. And no, I'm not talking about the squid. I'm talking about:

* the replacement of the Schmittian friend-enemy logic in favor of very poorly explained God-is-watching-you-so-be-good silliness;
* the inability of the filmmakers to let the characters fail as the theme demands they must, most notably in the case of the filmic Nite Owl pointedly not signing on to Ozymandias's scheme (but for some reason being allowed to leave Antarctica anyway);
* a general (if inevitable) dumbing down (instanced for example in the switch from "Robert Redford" to "Ronald Reagan" in the last scene, almost certainly because it was feared that the audience wouldn't get the reference).

Even "I did it thirty-five minutes ago" is bungled; the line is delivered, at which time we jump to a countdown-in-progress. The anti-simultaneity was the entire point. This isn't hard.

If Watchmen the comic deconstructs the superhero, does Watchmen the film? Not at all. The characters' rough edges have all been sanded away, leaving little more than generic action movie badasses that (in our theater at least) were getting cheers in all the wrong places. Both Rorschach and Nite Owl, in different ways, remain uncomplicatedly and conventionally "heroic" in word, deed, and presentation—with plot and dialogue changes shoehorned in whenever necessary to keep it that way—and if you were going to make a Watchmen in which such a thing were possible, you really shouldn't have made the film at all.

And did I mention the soundtrack? Unbelievably bad.

Could the Watchmen movie actually be good? A long interview with Zack Synder at io9 gives some reason to hope. Here's a sneak peak at the title sequence, which sounds promising:

Cut to the opening credits playing the way too obvious and too long "The Times They Are A-Changin'" by Bob Dylan. But besides the extra-long song the viewer is treated to a montage pictures and video showing the creation of the Minutemen superhero team. If you need a historical point of reference, Watchmen's opening credits has 1,000 of them. Ranging from Silhouette replacing the sailor in the infamous nurse-kissing V-Day black and white still, to Ozymandias standing outside of Studio 54.

Finally we got to see the creation of Dr. Manhattan and listen to the inner monologue of the "god" himself. Watching him turn from Dr. Jonathan Osterman to blue beast was amazing. The detail that they went into ripping out each little organ was shocking. The appearing-reappearing floating circulatory system that floats about days later is forever burned in my eyes. I really see why this character is Snyder's favorite.

Overall there was a lot of stuff that was a little "I get it — the Watchmen are a part of history". But besides that and a few scoring changes it was gorgeous, the characters were so lovely that even their teeth were sparkling in the Snyder film. Dr. Manhattan's back story alone (just the simple day-to-day life of a 1950s) man was strikingly detail oriented.

My first reaction was "'The Things They Are A-Changing'? Why not 'Desolation Row'?" but I see now that that will be playing over the end credits.

I'm officially upgrading my expectations on Watchmen to "cautiously optimistic."