1/22/09

As a goober/geek, I'm required to have a strong position on the question of the Watchmen movie. I don't think it is "unfilmable" as some have suggested. Snyder's choice to excise the Black Freighter portions into a separate form (a DVD I think) is probably the best choice if you had to adapt it to feature length. On the other hand, I think there's enough scope to the series that it would probably have been better served by a mini-series if you had to have a live-action version. All that being said, I am both excited...and fearful.

But my reason for fear may be odd.

It is that I'm worried about Tyler Bates.

Bates composed the score for the Watchmen movie. You only catch a little bit of his score in one of the trailer versions. The one in widest distribution has a song by, I think, My Chemical Romance. I'm old enough that I couldn't actually identify one of their songs and since they aren't features in Rock Band or Rock Band 2, they definitively fall outside my experience range. Anyway, Bates scored Snyder's other big movie...300. And I hated the music to that film. Mind you, that movie was deliberately over the top but the score goes above the call of duty. And unfortunately what little I've heard of the Watchmen music makes be think it will be equally over the top.

Mind you, I probably won't care while I'm watching it. But I'll be snobby about it later, mostly when I'm watching the special edition Blu-Ray disc I buy the day it comes out. It just seems like a real opportunity squandered. I don't mind bombast (I like Brian Tyler's score to Constantine, Clint Mansell & Marilyn Manson's score to Resident Evil and John Powell's work on the Bourne films. But by the same token, this seems like a movie that's going to need careful and subtle texturing which overdone music may not carry (and potentially Snyder's direction may not contain).

In brighter news, there's a new Neko Case album coming out in early March. All my hopes for humanity rest there.