grace

… filling in the negative space with positively everything

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Peter Sellers plays three roles: Dr. Strangelo...
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Dr. Strangelove is haunting me.

It may be that I’m feeling slightly schizophrenic right now, playing a number of roles in business, the arts, politics, nonprofits, and personal spheres. Maybe it’s because it seems like the world is about to implode from this international economic crisis. Maybe I’m just seeing sex and symbolism everywhere these days. (Actually, I think I’ve always done that.)

Or it could be because I recently read The Watchmen. Then watched the movie. And it was a bomb. Not THE bomb – A bomb. The kind that turns into a big, bloody unfortunate mess.

While the film started auspiciously, remaining true to the graphics of the novel almost frame by frame, it did the richness and complexity of the plots, subplots, and characters within them no justice. Watchmen-the-movie turned Watchmen-the-graphic-novel into a cartoon. The terrible soundtrack selection lent to the movie’s degradation:  as each song for various scenes began, audible groans became increasingly common among the audience. (Whoever picked the music should be punched in the neck. By the Comedian.)

The sense of inevitable mutual destruction by nuclear war in The Watchmen – coupled with the war room scene of Nixon presiding over two rows of military men plus Soviet liaison – had the fingerprint of Dr. Strangelove’s alien hand stamped firmly on it. Yet where Stanley Kubrick achieved a complex masterpiece in his satire, filled with layers of allusion and meaning, Zack Snyder accomplished only a one-dimensional replication of the graphic novel. It’s as if he used the book as a storyboard, without paying attention to the actual stories.

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