EDITOR’S NOTE: Referencing events from waaaay back in classic Epic Fail issue 1 and issue 2! -Retarded Rob Reuter
If you don’t speak the language of comic books (EDITOR’S NOTE: The first person who says “Biff!” or “Pow!” will be cheerfully beaten and / or sodomized with my Frank Miller Dark Knight statue), you’re just not going to see a lot of what’s happening in Watchmen.
Take Dr. Manhattan. At face value, he’s a moody, self-absorbed prick with superpowers. But when viewed through the right eyes, you recognize that he’s actually a stand-in for the Superman archetype, which adds a whole new level to his actions. When you can get past saying, “Wow, Dr. Manhattan’s a real scumbag,” and start saying, “Wow, Superman would be a real scumbag,” you’re getting the entirety of his character arc. Without it, he’s just a douche with a blue wang, and that’s not entertaining for anyone outside of basement clubs in Haight Ashbury.
“Okay, smart guy,” you might be saying, “If Dr. Manhattan’s actually Superman, then who’s Batman?” Glad you asked. It’s actually two guys: Rorschach and Nite Owl. Rorschach’s the dark, obsessed part of Batman… and appropriately, he’s a broke motherfucker with mommy issues who lives in utter squalor with no treatment for his obvious crippling mental illness. After all: losing your parents would be horrifying, but something tells me little Bruce Wayne would be able to afford therapy, or at least enough Paxil to avoid dressing like Dracula and grappling with spastics in dirty alleys.
No, there’s only one reason a rich guy would piss away the family fortune building vehicles that look like animals when there’s a perfectly good Toyota dealer down the street: because it gives him a boner. Enter: Nite Owl, who apparently spent half a billion dollars on the Owlship alone, all to give him an excuse to indulge his spandex-on-spandex fetish with similarly unbalanced chicks. Looked at correctly, he’s one feathery cape away from being a fucking furry.
But it’s the only excuse for a perfectly good rich guy like, say, Bruce Wayne to dress up and kick strangers in the junk: it gets him off. But let’s be fair: it WAS 1985, and with Viagra 13 years in the future, his only other alternative would be choking down powdered tiger balls… which might explain why he has so many fucking sugar cubes around the house… but I digress.
There are literally hundreds of little things in Watchmen that are meaningless, if not downright stupid, if you’re not a comic book addict. You might have read on the Internet that a lot of we fanboys are up on arms that Zack Snyder changed the end of the comic, in which the bad guy teleports a giant squid into the center of Manhattan. And you might be thinking, “Good! That sounds fucking retarded,” but that’s because you haven’t seen it.
Here it is. See? See why that’s so awesome? See how it looks kinda like Starro the Conquerer? No you fucking can’t. You have no idea what Starro the Conquerer is. You see the dumbest maguffin in the history of movies. Comic book people see, in one image: “Holy shit: The Justice League of America lost their first battle.” In one image, comic book nuts would see more story implications than in a hour of Michael Caine yammering exposition at Katie Holmes. You would see disturbing Japanese tentacle porn and wish you’d seen Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li again.
And even though Zack Snyder pulled out the squid, all reports indicate that he left in dozens and dozens of other images straight from the book that will be meaningless to you. We comic geeks are mashing our zippers to see them, but they will be lost on you, leaving for you only an ugly story about ugly people tuning up other ugly people for ugly reasons. Which is entertaining for some people… but those people are called “goths” and “emo kids”, who will be too busy watching Twilight on DVD, drinking Clamato and moping about how unfair it is that cheerleaders and / or quarterbacks won’t touch it to go out to see a movie about superheroes.
“Well Rob,” you might be asking, “Won’t the comic book nerds like yourself carry the movie into financial profitability?” The answer to which is: what are you, stupid? Geeks and Internet dwellers certainly make our presence heard, what with our cosplay and our fervent Web forum postings and our awful, awful BO funk, but that only masks our numbers, which are small. We geeks were so loud that we got Serenity made after Fox canceled Firefly, and we got Warner Brothers to let Sam Jackson shout, “I want these motherfucking snakes off this motherfucking plane!”, but when it was all said and done, geeks only gave those movies a combined domestic box office total of $60 million, which wouldn’t even cover Nite Owl’s tearaway codpieces.
Look at it this way: the biggest selling actual comic book of last month was Amazing Spider-Man 583, which sold 352,847 copies. And for fun, let’s completely ignore the fact that that was the issue with President Obama on the cover, and that probably fully 150,000 of those copies were sold to investors who not only don’t read comics, but who will find themselves sorely disappointed when they try to sell it when their oldest kid’s college tuition comes due.
If every single one of those “readers” buys a ticket to Watchmen and somehow convinces an real, breathing girl to go with them, and they manage to get a hold of the chloroform it would take to drag the girl back to see it a second time… that equals an opening weekend box office gross of $14,113,880… or roughly 200 G’s more than The Fucking Love Guru. And THAT abomination only cost $62 million and Mike Myer’s eternal soul to make.
So my prediction is a pretty big opening weekend, between every comic book fan in the world hitting opening night Friday and a halfway-decent cross section of normals like you who have a warm, fuzzy carryover from The Dark Knight… and the fact that there’s not a single other studio movie opening that weekend. Call it 35, 40 million. Then it’ll go down faster than Nite Owl in front of a model in Milli Vanilli pants, for a total of, say, $55 mil.
At least 60 bucks of which will be from me, my girl and my buddy Trebuchet. Hey, I only said that YOU wouldn’t like it. We speak the language this movie’s gonna be speaking.
Granted, we usually slur it, but we definitely speak it.
[tags]Watchmen, comic books, Dr. Manhattan, Rorschach, Nite Owl, Superman, Batman, dark humor, satire[/tags]
