I am Kyle's self-indulgence

I have a few more thoughts on Watchmen, and then I promise I'm going to quite blogging about it for a while.

After watching the trailer a couple more times I've decided I'm not ready to discount the movie yet. I do think the tone of the trailer is completely wrong for the story, but I realize that a lot of movie marketing is designed to pander to the audience rather than faithfully represent the complete film. It's very possible that the movie itself is not nearly as melodramatic as the trailer makes it appear.

What the trailer does give us a strong feel for is the look of the film, which in this case is very glossy and overproduced--but then again, the trailer mostly shows special effects shots. Could the rest of the film have a more toned-down, realistic look to it? Let's hope so.

Even if I suspend judgment on these things, I still have a big problem with the CG Dr. Manhattan. Every filmmaker in Hollywood should have figured out by now that aesthetically speaking, creating CG humans is a bad idea. Computer animation works great for monsters and other imaginary creatures, but when it comes to making something look like a real person, there's no substitute for...a real person. There's also no reason to use anything else, because Dr. Manhattan does not do anything in Watchmen that cannot be done with conventional special effects. Flying, teleporting, being in three places at once, growing to 50 feet tall--all of these things have been done with human actors in movies for decades. The only additional bonus of creating a CG Manhattan is that the audience will look at it and say, "Wow. That's a very CG-looking blue guy."