More does not equal better

I think it was Ken Levine, over at his blog, who said - if a film is over three hours long, it should not be eligible for 'best editing' in the Oscars.

I would agree.

Long films are often a chore. Not always. But often.

For example, I was bought those extended editions of the Lord Of The Rings films each Christmas three years running.

I still haven't watched them. It's not that I don't think I'll enjoy them. It's just that amount of time is a serious commitment and I can always think of several other shorter things I'd rather do. And I have to wonder, will they really be better movies than those already long movies I saw in the cinema? If anything, that Ent sequence needed to be a lot shorter.

More often than not, I find that cut scenes are cut with good reason. For example, the extended cut of Aliens added some good scenes on their own, but broke the flow of the movie in several places. Most importantly, they took the movie from being Ripley's story to something far less coherent. The DVD of Donnie Darko had the deleted scenes with commentary from the director in which he explained very well why those scenes didn't belong in his movie. The "Director's Cut" recut those scenes into the movie and, as it happens, it turns out he was right the first time.

I enjoyed Watchmen earlier this year.

And I'm looking forward to it on Blu-Ray. But it seems the Blu-Ray version is 3 hours and 10 minute. Now, at the theatrical two and a half hours, that film was on the edge. It kept me interested but was definitely on the edge. And, as a fan of the source material, there isn't one thing cut from the graphic novel that I missed in the movie. Do I need another half hour or forty minutes added to it?

No. I do not.

More does not equal better.

Watchmen

I wasn't much of a superhero comics fan as a child. I loved comics and certainly the idea of drawings and words together and I grew up with 2000AD and stories like Dredd, Rogue Trooper, Nemesis the Warlock and Bad Company. If you also grew up with those, then you'll know that most superhero comics, by comparison, were plain stupid. Backwards.

Man in tights battles the forces of evil. Even as a young teenager, I'd think, how utterly naive. I think the only US comic that drew me in was Neil Gaiman's Sandman, mainly because it didn't treat me like a complete idiot.

Now people who don't know comics might be thinking at this point - well, of course. Comics are for kids. And, mostly, they are. But so were all those 2000AD stories and they weren't anywhere near as insulting.

Alan Moore wrote for 2000AD.

And then he wrote Watchmen. His take on the US superheros. And, when reading it, it was clear he was thinking the same thing I was - how utterly naive. He took that, and made it real. Showed how it might actually be if the world had supermen. And the world became a scary place. Many superhero comics tried to show human sides to their characters but Alan Moore actually made them human. And the one that wasn't... wasn't. Watchmen was a defining book of the '80s.

Many years later Zack Snyder made a remake of Dawn of the Dead and then went on to direct a movie version of Alan Moore's Watchmen. He stuck rather close to the book. Possibly too close at times - you wouldn't read the whole book at once and it was put out as clear distinct chapters with breaks whereas a movie is an 'all at once' experience. That made pacing very difficult. And some of the speeches that read fine on the page, sound a little odd spoken out loud in context.

So, if anything, I think the film could have done with more adaptation. A little more leeway in how faithful it had to be. Sure, some fans would spit venom over this and that being changed but a book is a book and a film is a film. All adaptations need to be, well, adapted.

And yet the one major thing that was changed didn't quite add up for me.

But, for me, what the film absolutely nailed were the characters. Those characters had all the spirit of the characters I read twenty years ago (yikes, is it really that long? Holy crap! How old am I?!) and, more than that, they had spirit on their own terms. I loved that all through it, Dan and Laurie just felt like two plain ol' regular people. And Jon's disconnection, his combination of look and that calm voice was perfect and had with it a sadness. I barely even need mention Rorschach. It was like they just pulled him from the pages and stuck him up on screen and he worked.

And, for me, that book was always about characters. If the film got that right, and for me it did, that's 90% of the battle to win me over.

I liked it. Just like the book was like no other superhero comic before it, the movie adaptation is like no other superhero movie.