seriousfic

Watchmen - The job of a movie adaptation is to distill a novel, play, or comic book which can be thousands of pages (or in the case of a long-running character like Superman of Spider-Man, decades of canon) long into a movie that will generally run more toward an hour and a half than three hours. Then a trailer further has to distill that movie into a spot of about two minutes, designed to force this movie into the forefront of the audience's minds while also not giving away too much.

Think of it as Spider-Man's organic webshooters or the X-Men's black leather uniforms writ very, very large. The job of Hollywood is to make cool things that are generally only cool within the subculture of comics. Then you get something like Watchmen whose job is to point out how uncool it is.

So what happens, when Watchmen the graphic novel is condensed into Watchmen the movie and that's further condensed into Watchmen the movie trailer to make a population of people who have (this is the important part) never heard of Alan Moore or Watchmen go see it... is this.

Normal people: Hmmm, this looks interesting. I might go see that if the reviews are good.

Watchmen fans: Oh my god, I always imagined Rorschach as having the voice of Ethel Mermen! THANKS FOR NOT READING MY MIND AND TRANSLATING IT TO THE SCREEN, ZACH SNYDER! AND THANKS FOR RAPING MY ~~CHILDHOOOD~~ YOUNG ADULTHOOD!

In fact, while normal people see concepts and characters that are supposed to be dorky and just look cool, they only process this as cool. But when Watchmen fans don't hear lines like "The Crimebusters are disbanded! Clearly, the Magical Ziggurat of Johnnyville is behind this! Quick, daddy-o, to the brigand bash!", it somehow becomes less cool than the dorky thing that was never supposed to become cool. Thus, in trying to get across the cool parts of the story instead of producing a more technically honest trailer that would have audiences rolling in the aisles, the trailer becomes this to Watchmen fans...

Adrian: Ja, herr secretary general, I vill detonate un atomic varhead... unless you give me... one meeeeluyon dollars!

Rorschach: I don't think so, Veidt. How about some ice for that BURN!?

Chris Tucker: (below frame) Aww hell no! It ain't enough we got the white man on our back, now the blue man's starting in on us! Fuck this Smurf bullshit!

Laurie: Don't think your manly and impetuous charms will work on me, Comedian. You don't play by the rules. I could never love a man with your blatant disregard for authority, just because you get results!

Comedian: Yeah, it's a shame you can't heal the scars left when Veidt murdered my wife. That was his first mistake. His second was kidnapping my baby girl. Now he's going to pay... big time.