First, Devin Gordon wrote this in his Watchmen review for Newsweek magazine:
Snyder’s attention wanders when it comes to meat-and-potatoes storytelling, perhaps because he’s never really had to tell one before. He draws performances that range from sublime (Jackie Earle Haley as a bitter antihero named Rorschach) to ridiculous (Malin Akerman, who has a sweet onscreen disposition but is nonetheless the Jar Jar Binks of “Watchmen”).
Then, SpoutBlog ran the following picture with an article by Christopher Campbell called ‘5 Reasons a Watchmen Movie Was Unnecessary’ — an article, I might add, that never uses the words “Jar”, “Jar” or “Binks”:
And then, I discovered that the image below was one of six finalists in Gizmodo’s ‘104 Ways to Hilariously Ruin the Watchmen Movie’ PhotoShop contest:
Well, at least that last item wasn’t necessarily saying that the movie was ruined, only that it could have been ruined.
I must confess, I am kind of curious, now, to see if this meme has any sort of staying power. But just for the record, I saw the film myself this afternoon and I do not think Akerman is the Jar Jar Binks of this film.
I am not quite sure just what I do think of the film itself, yet, but for what it’s worth, Jeffrey Wells‘s reaction comes close to my own on several points, and I agree with Heidi MacDonald that the pop-song picks on the soundtrack are often “embarrassingly on the nose”.
Oh, and my favorite exchange from the book — and one of the book’s pithiest, most significant bits of dialogue — has been completely recontextualized and given to two completely different characters, in a way that robs the exchange of its full power, I think. I can’t decide whether this is better or worse than, say, the way Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001) simply omitted several of the funniest and most character-revealing lines from its source material. I mean, at least the Watchmen exchange is still in there, somewhere… but if they’re not going to do it right, then why do it at all?
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