Why do people dislike watchmen

Not even a little. I find Watchmen dull, flat, and, above all, pretentious. First, it is ugly. So ugly. I get that aesthetic and artistic quality are in the eye of the beholder. My students and I regularly have arguments about whether or not Charles Schulz could draw well.

So, yeah, I get that we can enjoy comics drawn in a bunch of different styles. And yes, the visual style is working actively to help tell the story of the ugliness of the world. I get it. I could let the ugliness slide, though, if the characters were in any way interesting. I feel no connection to these characters. Laurie Juspeczyk and Dr. Rorschach and Ozymandias are just dicks. The cynicism of the story, and, frankly, the cynicism of many of its fans, is just plain tiresome — not artful, not clever, not profound, just tiresome.

Like the hipsters slouching in the corner, smoking American Spirits, harshing on the squares, I find Watchmen guilty of trying way too hard. That is, would you also feel that it was wrong to suggest that there might be downsides to romance novels, or horror film, or for that matter literary mid-life-crisis fiction? I also think that, while Moore and Gibbons do connect superheroes and right-wing politics to some extent, they also connect them to liberal politics.

I find that she is too quick to dismiss the genre and its readers as willfully disconnecting from reality because fantasy is bad, right? The difficulty with doing academic work on genre fiction is that there is so much of it, and so much variation, even within generic conventions. Maybe if it were just a random book in a bookstore that I picked up, thumbed through, and put back on the shelf, I would have no opinion on it all. I would think, if anything, stereotypical superhero fans found validation in the literary qualities of the book.

My hobby is not pathetic! Manhatten, is completely mentally out to lunch, not interesting in humanity at all, let alone interested in controlling them. He gives you something clever to play with while also delivering the pulp fun and the pulp violence. I could be wrong about that. Me Hearties! I think he allowed many fanboys like me to see their favourite genre from a whole different point of view, and I find that valuable in itself.

There are a few small moments of feeling, throughout the story that reveal that there is a heart behind it. Like for instance Rorschach. I think that works very well in a character that until then has been characterized as sociopathic.

You might try reading Modleski again. It was good thought exercise, if nothing else. I hope that everybody around here caught my tongue-in-checkness. I say this because with the www you never know…. The relationship between academia and genre is weird. At the same time, a friend of mine who is an academic felt she had to write under a pseudonym when she wrote an article about loving regency romance, because if it came up on a google search it might well hurt her tenure chances.

When Noah announced this hate-fest, I knew immediately that someone was going to write about Watchmen. Personally, I was hoping Domingos would. At least he would have read the whole thing. But by all means, mount a campaign for Domingos to write a hate-post about Watchmen. We all want to read that. Alienation from art is a really pretty universal experience in our current pop culture milieu; surely just about everybody who interacts with art has been told to consume something that they find indigestible, for one reason or another.

The knee jerk assumption that these often very strong reactions are unimportant, or have no critical value, strikes me as really wrong-headed. The alienation seems to be from preconceived expectations. The answer, possibly, is to ignore or toss away the preconceived expectations. Or ignore the work. Is there really nothing redeeming in Watchmen? Aja, it seems to me like your preconceived expectation is that the alienation from the work must come from preconceived expectations.

Oh, and like I said, the person who initially talked about doing Watchmen but bailed was Derik. My problem with this sort of critique is that it tells more about the critic than the book. I am perplexed by my distaste for this book precisely because, on paper, it has so many of the things I like in all books not just comic books. Still, I was excited to see this show because trailers made it look like it was going to explore very real issues — discrimination, the normalizing of white supremacy, women as avengers for justice — inside a fictional universe.

Cop Angela Abar Regina King leads the effort to eradicate the terror group. Then there are all the other story arcs rooted in utter fantasy — squid dropping from the sky, mind control, a doomsday clock.

Vigilante justice meets institutionalized racism meets time travel meets a blue god and the end of the world? It evokes brutal truths, like the Tulsa race massacre, lynching and police brutality.

Overall, it seems irresponsible and exploitative. That the show exists largely on an alternative timeline — certain events, like the Tulsa massacre, are historical fact; others, as with an ongoing Robert Redford presidency, might be called historical fun — lets it off the hook to a certain extent, I guess.

I do like the fact that in this world, people get their news from actual print. The series is built around a a core of vigilante heroes and superheroes, cops who act like vigilantes, and a couple of mad scientists who might as well be called superheroes since they invent impossible things with ease — all of whom seem to be trying to save the world in their cross-purposed way.

And how are we meant to regard the country as a whole, which is fleetingly suggested to have become a liberal nanny state? So did she. ALI: Right, the show wants it both ways — racism is bad, but hey, white supremacists are tired of being stepped on too!

What is their purpose? There are cars that drop from the sky, a Vietnamese holiday on which folks paints themselves blue in honor of Dr. What it reveals about Ozymandias is everything. It's proof that he's haunted by his strike on humanity. It's proof that he's remorseful, not just a calculating monster - even if he believes he had to carry out the act despite the pain he would be forced to live with afterward. That complexity is stripped from the film, compounded by Matthew Goode's portrayal of the character as a run-of-the-mill villain.

The squid very well could have ripped viewers unfamiliar with the source material out of the experience. It may have seemed jarring and out of place, a complete subversion of everything before it. But that's exactly what it was in the comic book. What's most fascinating about the book's inclusion of a giant squid going after New York is just how comic book-y it is, because the rest of the story makes a concerted effort not to be. The superheroes are not actually superheroes.

But when the book subverts all of that in the end, it serves as a clever reminder that what you're reading is indeed a comic book, yet is still as substantive as any work of literature. On top of that, the removal of the squid changes the ending of the story, effectively making Dr.

Manhattan a pariah. Either way, their " amazingly bad " performances made an impression. The TV said you were on Mars! Goode's portrayal is even more unforgivable because he plays Veidt as a cookie-cutter villain. That's not who or what Ozymandias is. When he enacts his plan to unleash a destructive squid on Manhattan, he does it, at least partially, out of a sense of compassion; it's not a simple equation for him, as the movie makes it seem.

To say nothing of Goode's general lack of suitability for the role, according to the Boston Globe 's Ty Burr : "In a role the comic creators thought of as a jut-jawed Redford type, [Goode] only suggests Seth Myers of Saturday Night Live - a petulant lightweight rather than a Master of the Universe. Snyder tried to stay true to the comic in many ways. Unfortunately, that included taking some lines from the books verbatim.

This happens in the reconciliation scene between the Silk Spectres, in which certain bits of dialogue were pulled directly from the book. What should be a moment full of real emotion becomes a stiff, hollow nothing. There's a certain amount of exposition required in a comic book by virtue of the medium. Clumsy exposition is a cardinal sin in movies, though, and that happens a lot in Watchmen , often when lines are directly transferred.

It was always going to be difficult to condense all of the graphic novel's themes, narrative, politics, and world-building into a movie, even one that's nearly three hours long. What suffers most in the short form is the development of the characters and their interpersonal dynamics.

Osterman's passing and resurrection as Dr. Manhattan need to be a far more painful experience - not physically, but on an emotional level. In the movie, his tragic state is more about his loneliness than it is his loss of humanity. Perhaps worst of all is the sanitized relationship between Rorschach and his therapist.