There are comic book movies whose main audience is kids or teens, but which can be enjoyed by adults as well. Watchmen is not one of those movies. Watchmen is a comic book movie aimed squarely at adults, with nothing for the kids. It is necessarily rated R, and for the same reasons as the rest of Snyder's work in Hollywood. It is vitally imperative that parents not make the mistake of assuming that since Watchmen is about comic book heroes in colorful costumes, it is a movie appropriate for kids. Remember, the man who directed this movie also made 300 and the remake of Dawn of the Dead, and it is easily as age-inappropriate as either of those movies, including a rape scene, numerous gruesome fight scenes, a convict's arms being sawed off with an angle grinder, and a mugger's arm being broken with such fury that the bone comes out of the skin.
Watchmen is set in the Eighties, in an alternate reality in which costumed superheroes have been a part of American culture, not in comic books, but in real life. Far from making the world a better place, the presence of these heroes has exacerbated the social and political tensions of the Cold War era, despite the fact that they have been all but eliminated by a law passed in 1977. At the start of the movie, a former government operative and costumed hero named The Comedian is murdered in his apartment by a mysterious assailant. The movie follows the remaining heroes as they investigate the death, and shows the history of the characters and the truth of the murder through a series of flashbacks.
I've been a fan of the comic since I was introduced to it in 2002, and I'm honestly incapable of emulating the viewpoint of somebody who's never read what is widely considered the greatest graphic novel of all time. If you've ever read and enjoyed Watchmen, then you should definitely see this movie. It's conceivable that a non-comic fan, or a non-Watchmen fan, would enjoy this movie, but I would tend to bet against it. This is not only because of the subject matter, but because the movie is nearly as dense as the book, despite leaving out more than half of the comic book.
Despite the numerous missing chunks (many of which we are promised will be restored in multiple upcoming special director's cuts), Watchmen is as faithful an adaptation of the source material as is humanly possible. This works both for it and against it, as the book is not to be read once at a constant pace, but to be pored over, to be read repeatedly and absorbed at leisure.
Although not as convoluted as the book (in which almost every panel has multiple meanings), Watchmen is packed with little Easter eggs in the background that may not be caught on the first viewing. My favorite of these was when in the first few seconds of the
opening credits, Nite Owl I (who the moviegoing public will generally believe to be based on Batman) saves a couple who look suspiciously like Thomas and Martha Wayne from a gun-toting mugger outside the Gotham Opera House.
The Best Things about Watchmen:
Jackie Earl Haley does an excellent job portraying the (physically and morally) repulsive Rorschach. Jeffrey Dean Morgan does an equally good job portraying the equally repellent Comedian. Both of them basically become their characters, and I can't think of a single actor I'd rather play either.
When I heard that Zack Snyder was directing this movie, I was totally content with that directorial choice. The guy who gave us 300 and Dawn of the Dead is the exact guy that I'd pick to "give us bodies beyond all our imaginings". Now, despite the fact that we apparently didn't GET bodies beyond all our imaginings, I don't feel that my trust was misplaced, because the rest of the movie is 99% faithful to the book.
All the little additions that are faithful to the spirit of the book, even if they aren't in it. Notice how every time you see out the window of Ozymandias's office, the blimp slooooowly moves closer to the Twin Towers, but you never see it get there. Sort of a 21st-century update to the Doomsday clock, for those young enough not to remember a time when there was a very real fear that nuclear war might annihilate the human race tomorrow.
"So tell me, Doctor... what do you see?"
Most of the soundtrack. Opinions on it are mixed, but I thought all but one of the songs was appropriately used.
The Worst Things About Watchmen:Yes, there were some flaws. As I've already pointed out, we didn't get bodies beyond all our imaginings. We got all the breasts, blood, and blue cosmic-being schlong we could possibly want, but the one scene to which I refer (hopefully with enough circumlocution to avoid spoiling it for anybody who doesn't know what I'm talking about) was strangely...sterile. In the book, that scene was as viscerally horrifying as seeing people jump out of the World Trade Center live on CNN. In the movie, just as the cause of it is changed, so is the impact. We don't see any dead, we just see a bunch of ruined buildings and hear about it on the news.
The utterly terrible CGI Bubastis. They should have just left her out if they weren't going to bother doing her right. In the first scene she appears in, she blends in with the actors approximately as well as Toucan Sam convinces you he's really in the kitchen with those kids pouring them a bowl of sugary breakfast food product. As she bounds up the brightly-lit staircase with her master, it's vividly apparent as she bounces in and out of his shadow that she doesn't cast one of her own. This is all the more unfortunate when compared to the flawless CGI work done on Doctor Manhattan, whose blue glow reflects off the actors in every scene he's in.
The final song on the soundtrack, that plays over the ending credits. Every song in the movie up until then was appropriate to the time period. Then, we're jolted out of our suspension of disbelief by My Chemical Romance, for Pete's sake. It really felt like they did that on purpose to get people out of their seats. "Time to go, folks, movie's over, get back to the 21st century and let the janitor sweep up the popcorn and candy wrappers!"
Inna final analysis: If you're a Watchmen fan, go see this movie. Much like Doctor Manhattan, you can know exactly what's going to happen and still be surprised by it. Even if you don't like it (and if you feel that Watchmen doesn't belong on film, I will not contest that despite how much I liked the movie), Hollywood needs to get the message that we want faithful adaptations of works like this, not Saturday Morning Watchmen.
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Topic: Watchmen (Read 6123 times)