Watchmen

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (“Who watches the watchmen?”) ~ Roman poet Juvenal

As I penned earlier this year, with signs of the second Great Depression nipping at our frosty heels, and all indicators pointing to motion pictures being a badly needed form of escapism during these times, I anticipate that 2009 shall be a big film year.

(This 03.01.09 photograph of me, taken by Bob Rickard of Fortean Times, in London, is purely by coincidence, as far as the framing here. The above Watchmen photo was undiscovered until today.)

The most successful films during the 1930s and early 1940s spilled over into the kinds we love, and these include all the varieties of cryptozoological and cryptocinema types.

Watchmen: Scheduled, famously, for 03.06.09 (clever), this cryptopolitical more than cryptozoo film will follow in the successful wake of the visually beautiful 300 (which is a “character” in Peyton Reed’s Yes Man, please note).

Alan Moore’s graphic novel is called the “Citizen Kane of Comics,” and thus great expectations proceed this movie.

Any storyline that has a caped anti-hero named Mothman (Nite Owl II is shown above) in it is well-worth our attention. (It seems like such a long time since The Mothman Prophecies was released, in 2002.)

A few things to share (without giving away anything, after having seen the film):

1) Yes, Mothman is only shown in group photos and being taken away to the “insane asylum in Maine,” which gave me a chuckle since that’s where I live.

2) Malin Akerman is the actress who plays “Laurie Jupiter”/”Silk Spectre II” in Watchmen. I thought her acting was rather good, and she handled all her scenes fluidly and with confidence. I felt she was an attractive and believable superhero.

3) Some comments are coming in that because Alan Moore will not see the film, various people are going to wait to see it.

Why should what Alan Moore thinks about the film influence anyone? He refuses to see any of his films, so he speaks without any foundation in his cinematic criticisms, specifically. Does not some of his fame and financial success not come from the movies made of his craft?

“I find film in its modern form to be quite bullying. It spoon-feeds us, which has the effect of watering down our collective cultural imagination. It is as if we are freshly hatched birds looking up with our mouths open waiting for Hollywood to feed us more regurgitated worms. The Watchmen film sounds like more regurgitated worms. I for one am sick of worms,” Moore told a reporter for the Los Angeles Times in September 2008.

“Collective cultural imagination”? And this from a man who creates comics but does not comprehend films!?

Moore told the LA Times he has never watched any of the film adaptations of his comics creations (which have included V for Vendetta, From Hell, Constantine and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) and Moore, not surprisingly, believes Watchmen is “inherently unfilmable.”

Well, my creative imagination tells me that Moore says such things to stir up the media. Either that or he really is truly a self-described recluse who is both cynical and disingenuous.

Here’s a revolutionary suggestion for Alan Moore: Allow the artists of cinema to alert you to the fact it is not the 1950s. Go out and see this film for it is a remarkably complex, serious, and beautiful adaption of a great comic book maxi-series.

Loren Coleman About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct). Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015. Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.

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