io9: bloggers love Watchmen, critics..not so much
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I probably should have been able to pare things down as as succinctly as io9 did when I wrote about Watchmen yesterday. I compared Alex Billington's fanboy like lust for Zack Snyder for filming the "unfimlable", to reviews from the mainstream press that were less than kind, even amongst people who had read and liked the graphic novel.Put simply: bloggers loved it, everyone else thought it sucked.
Bloggers loved the idea of Snakes on a Plane (which I think had more to do with their unassailable love of Sam Jackson) and they gushed all over Hostel 2 (again, I think that had more to do with Eli Roth than it did the movie.) Both movies sucked and bombed at the box office. It turns out that the only watchable part of Snakes was Sam Jackson, and Eli Roth blamed piracy on the failure of what I'm sure was his thoroughly disgusting followup to the thoroughly disgusting Hostel.
So, yeah, it's not like blogging blinders is a new phenomena. In this insular little world, the quality of a film of TV show can rest largely on the reviewer playing favorites.
UGO called Watchmen a "masterpiece", Cinemablend (which I addressed and quickly dismissed as fanboy blathering) said it was "really, really good". Harry Knowles nearly shit himself in ecstasy. Contrast this to the AP, which called Snyder's adaptation "hugely disappointing". USA TODAY seems to represent the consensus opinion amongst the film's detractors in saying that Watchmen is mostly forgettable after the opening scene, but piled on by saying that it was 'poised to self-destruct."
Early projections look good, but if word of mouth gets around that this movie sucks or, at best, is fodder for your shiny new home theater, Warner's is going to be sorry they didn't let Watchmen toil in development hell for another 10-15 years. Fox, which sued WB over film rights, might regret wasting money fighting over a failure.
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