The Watchmen trailer? Mostly awesome. I say mostly because that was one horrifyingly bad choice of music. Billy Corrigan's wailing gives entirely the wrong impression to the uninitiated. My brother's girlfriend immediately dismissed the movie as being, quote 'emo'. You heard it here first - The Watchmen is emo.
In other Watchmen news,
/film has some
interior shots of Dan Dreiberg's Owlship up, which is currently on show at Comic Con. Love the detail.
I'm excited for this movie, but the excitement is consistently mixed with dread. After all, it
is coming from the 'visionary' director of 300, a movie I hated with the passion of a thousand fiery suns. Seriously. I know 300 is a sacred fan object but dear freaking
god did I hate every last excruciating second of that dreck.
Especially the visuals. Sloppy fight choreography, lazy over-reliance on slo-mo, bullet time and of-the-now oversaturation, there was nothing about that I hadn't seen before, and done better at that.
Basically 300 is the movie version of a Limp Bizkit song - hillbilly stupid but pop enough to go down easy. You know you should hate it, for reasons of gross historical inaccuracy, racism, sexism, fascism and other assorted nasty isms, but it's so darn catchy and au courant that you find yourself singing along. Of course, a few years later you wake up and WTF at yourself - Delphic Oracle titty shot? Seriously? Of course, a few years after that it becomes a 'classic'.
***
Have you seen the seen the
October solicit for Ms. Marvel? OMG. I've been waiting for something like this. Actually I've been waiting for two somethings like this: 1) a cover that doesn't make me ashamed to bring it up to the counter; 2) a story about Carol's early years. Love the cover.
Brian Reed is doing an ok job with this book but it's past time for more of Carol's history to be incorporated into the new stories. A lot of the newer readers, coming in from House of M, Civil War or Secret Invasion, are completely unaware of her backstory, which sucks because despite the cracksanity of some of it (largely the superhero portion), the rest of it is great.
Especially for a comic book heroine. Carol's early days aren't edgey - they're awesome in a more ordinary way and imho, in a way that continues to be highly relatable without being anst-ridden. (Unlike the later downward spiral into magical pregnancies and forced-mutation).
Carol may have gotten her superpowers from an accident with some weird, alien technology, but before all of that she was a Real American Hero. And not in the sickeningly blind way - Carol was a good soldier, but she was also a soldier who questioned the status quo. A decorated Air Force officer, both a talented pilot and highly trained field operative, Carol worked with Ben Grimm and Logan, went on secret missions for the CIA and after reaching her best before as a field agent, she became head of security for NASA. She's like a Stargate character who got powered up by the Ancients, but rather than lose her fantastic abilities by the end of the episode, she put on spandex and got more and more powerful. (Carol could so be John's sister).
Now, all of this sounds pretty fantastic in of itself, right? But the key for me, the thing that sells it for me, is that Carol got all of this through her own hard work. Nothing fated, no interventions from on high - she joined the Air Force to pay her way through college and worked her butt off until she was a damn good officer. She didn't start out great - she worked until she
became great. She also faced significant obstacles along the way. Her sexist father refused to see why a girl would want to join the military, or even go to college, for that matter. A construction foreman, he could afford to send only one of his kids to college and he chose his eldest son. (It's nice to see a character who's not from the streets OR from the middle class - where have all the working class characters gone?) Like any woman in the military, she had to work twice as hard as her male colleagues, and even after becoming a decorated officer, her superiors doubted her abilities. By the time she's head of security at NASA (in Captain Marvel) she still hasn't convinced the brass that a woman can really handle that kind of authority without: a) going a little off; b) being less of a woman.
She ends up having to leave NASA because the situation is untenable (of course, the whole 'I met aliens' thing was also a factor) and what does she do in her civilian career? She starts writing about her experiences, and about those of other women in similarly high-stress occupations, and then later more broadly about Women's Issues. How do you not love it?
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aulayan raised a red flag over bringing back more of Carol's history, on the grounds that it's just too confusing and inconsistent (ie that she's a soldier AND a writer). So I fanwanked it. Quoting myself:
The best thing to do at this point, is to have a story where child Carol wants to have adventures, but because her father (who is canonically sexist), says that adventures are for boys, she decides to write her own. Then, when an older Carol joins the Air Force to pay her way through college, it's to pursue an English/Journalism degree. Once in the Air Force though, she finds that she's actually a really, really good pilot and goes out and has real adventures of her own. Needs to be canon - y/y?
