12.2.09

Why is the world determined to make me sad?

So, on the advice of those evil sons of bitches at Ain't it Cool News I swung by http://www.minutemenarcade.com to check out the flash arcade game tie-in for the Watchmen movie.

It's advertising schemes like this that make no sense to me - it's basically just a flash demo of a side-scrolling game, where you get a chance to walk across the screen, pressing the punch or kick buttons to watch a single frame attack defeat the same three enemies over and over again.

There's also a jump button, but it does nothing, since there is no jumping attack. There are better 2/D beat 'em ups made by small companies and released for free all over the internet.

Why make something this small and pathetic when, for the cost of just a couple of small ads (50-100 Thousand dollars), you can pay someone to make a full-on 8-bit style game with actual characters, levels, and moves? Release the thing for free on the xbox, ps3, and over the Internet and you'll have the best word-of-mouth advertising you could hope for.

Seriously, even the game where King Kong throws Pringles cans at you was better than this.

Upon beating the short, unsatisfying game, a trailer for the film played, depressing me more than I'd like to admit.

I hate to think of myself who gets upset too easily about nerdy things (although every Episode of theAvod would serve to confirm that assessment), but it just looks awful. Isn't there too much story to tell to waste so much time on slow-motion? What's going on with Rorschach's voice? Just how much action have they tacked onto this to justify calling it a 'superhero' movie? They're not suggesting there was a team called the 'Watchmen', are they?

Whose idea was it to have Jeffrey Morgan play both the 60-year-old version of the Comedian and the 20-year-old version? (Although, if I'm being completely honest, he is perfect casting for the 40-60 aged Comedian who appears in the majority of the book - the one piece of perfect casting in the movie)

Why is everyone rallying around this terrible idea?

And why does the most perfect man in the history of the world look like I could beat him up?

Most importantly, when I'm crying in the theatre because the movie got to that part (you know the part I'm talking about), will it because the movie actually did that scene perfectly, or because the original scene is so powerful that even the reflected, trace elements of that perfection could be stomped down by the film's fundamental misunderstanding of everything that made the source material so wonderful?

In case you're wondering, yes, I'm describing my reaction to the Valerie scene from the nightmarish Wachowski hackjob that was V for Vendetta.

Okay. It's time to sleep now.

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