Watchmen

Watched Watchmen (2009) last night, id seen it before but had never tried to analyze it the way Danny keeps telling us. So i thought id give it a go and try really hard to not enjoy the film :-p

It starts with a very very good fight scene that has a mixture of live action, wire work, and CGI. it all blends pretty much seamlessly and looks really nice. With the whole scene being fought to the sound of Nat King Cole's 'Unforgettable' it lends the scene an oddly erie menace. Then the opening credits your given a kind of show reel that charts the history of the Watchmen and the Minutemen from the 1940s which is really nicely done. There are other fight scenes that work very well but are generally more of the same stuff but the scene where prisoners are trying to cut Rorscharch out of his cage and end up cutting the arms of an inmate looks fantastic, very good prosthetic work.

Something else i picked up on which i didn't see the first time round was the Structuralism similarities that were used. Superhero comics always have very powerful themes of good and evil but this film shows you the human weaknesses of all the characters. There is a very strong similarity between what happens in the film and the way comic book heroes have been used in the real world. Superman came out in 1938 and set the image of what a superhero should be in the eyes of a lot of people. When Captain America went to war against the Nazis it showed how a superhero could be used for propaganda. This covered in the film by having the Minutemen's costumes mimic those of the early comic book heroes. Dr. Manhattan and the Comedian both go to war during the Vietnam war. It is also mentioned during one of those scenes by the Comedian how he thinks if they hadn't won the war there it would have driven them mad as a nation. Its like the film tries to portray itself as an alternative actual world, a kind of what if superheroes were real, where other superhero films take place in cities that don't exist like Gotham and Metropolis. There is also the fact that most superheroes are portrayed with either less emotional complexities than real people or not effected by them. However in Watchmen they are plagued with emotional baggage, even Dr. Manhattan who appears to have no emotions initially is actually a complex emotional being that simply is less outwardly emotional. It is almost as if by making the superheros real they have lost there strong sense of structuralism. it is no longer a battle between good and evil, but now a battle between a 'grey' force where no ones is strictly right. Rorscharch is the only character to maintain a strong identity of good, even if he goes about it in a very dark and maverick way He also seems to have paid for this with deep psychological and emotional problems. Maybe this is an attempt to show that real people cant be superheroes or maybe it is just good cinema.

Intertextuality in Action

Over the weekend i saw Meet The Spartans ...... it was a bit crap, as most films of its kind are, but it did get me thinking about how it referenced other things not only in films but in current events. Which led me onto some of the more famous films of this style Police Squad, Naked Gun and Hot Shots. All of them rely on intertextuality to sustain them. Hot Shots and Hot Shots Part Deux reference Top Gun and Rambo so heavily that a lot of it wouldn't be funny or even make sense if you hadn't seen the films that they are parodies of. These kind of films show how important intertextuality is, but they cling to it like some kind of crutch, they don't move away and support themselves with originally entertaining content, but rather mock the films that they piggyback.

Another film that Ive seen fairly recently was the re-make/prequel Star Trek. This is visually a beautiful film the CGI is flawless, the ships look both classic and modern. Everything about how it presents itself is superb right down to the costumes. Story wise it reworks the whole timeline of the Star Trek history with a kind of alternate reality brought about through time travel. However there are more than enough nods to the original stories and timeline to keep the all but the die hard fans happy. This use of intertextuality is much more subtle than the spoof parodies of the the first group of films. It is however no less important for without its attention to intertextual detail it would have been pulled apart by fans who wanted a return to the old films.