Watchmen

Fan of the book, hopefully will be a fan of the movie. Who's ready for Watchmen tomorrow?
I'm not going to be able to sleep... I wish there was a midnight showing around here.:willy_nilly:

 

Watchmen
Movie Blurb by Shale
March 7, 2009

First off, I was never familiar with the Watchmen comics before this movie came out. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons did this DC graphic novel in the late '80s and it is not to be confused with Superman, Batman, Spiderman or the Fantastic 4.

This movie is rated R and the Cineplex where I saw it had a reminder on the box office window that no one under 17 would be admitted without a parent or guardian. It has nudity, sexual themes and graphic violence. Think Sin City, only the blood spatter is dark red, not white and stylized.

Now, everyone knows how I hate long movies and most of them I can see where that extra half-hour or so could have been edited out. This movie was two-hours-forty-three minutes long and it kept me engrossed the whole time and I don't know where I would have cut anything.

The movie had a lot of time to cover as the forebears of the Watchmen started at World War II and that history was shown on the opening credits with Dylan's The Times They Are A-Changin. We move from the generation of the Minutemen to the now retired Watchmen in an altered history of the late 1980's with Richard Nixon on his fifth term and the world seriously down on costumed vigilante's more than Spidey and the Dark Knight ever had.

Watchmen Formal Portrait in Better Days


The Comedian, Silk Spectre, Dr. Manhattan, Ozymandias, Nite Owl, Rorschach

The narrative is of Watchman Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) who is investigating the murder of fellow Watchman The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). Now these guys are badass, so it's as much a mystery who could murder one of them as it is who would. This brings into play the others of the group, Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson) and Silk Spectre (Malin Ackerman) who is in love with Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup) the only one with serious superpower and who is openly known. The other of the retired Watchmen and also known to the public is Ozymandias (Matthew Goode) who is an industrialist working with Dr. Manhattan on developing alternative energy.

A word here about Dr. Manhattan. He was a brilliant and promising physicist who had an accident in the lab where he got disintegrated. He then reconstituted into his blue form with powers over matter, energy and time. Luckily he was one of the good guys.

And he is also a nudist and Crudup's computer generated body is quite well built and well endowed. Yep, there is full frontal to this nude member, altho he does dress up on occasion.

Dr. Manhattan in scene from trailer altered for all audiences


However, not so good are the rest of the Watchmen especially The Comedian who delights in killing and Rorschach who tortures or dispatches people most brutally.


The story in this altered history is that we are still in the Cold War; Russia and the U.S. are very near the potential nuclear destruction that some of us grew up with. There are intrigues and disagreements among the Watchmen and apathy from Dr. Manhattan who is a player in the balance of power. Having lived thru all the historical points of this tale, I think it was made entirely for an older audience to appreciate.

And I did. I liked this movie. Not only do I plan to get it on DVD when it first comes out, but I have already ordered the animated graphic videos in the meantime.

 

Just to give you an idea, this is closer to what you will see on screen of Dr. Manhattan.



Maybe we are finally breaking away from on-screen prudery. I was surprised at the first scene where this CGI blue figure was standing with his back to us, for it is so seldom they even show butts in movies but then he turned around.

There was some curiosity as to why they made the Dr. so well endowed when he is not in the graphic novels. Who knows.

 

dude. i can't wait to see it. if only i had the funds...

 

i will more than likely go check it out

 

Amazing movie.
I saw it yesterday and it's simply brilliant.
As Shale said, I had no knowledge about the comic books, or any background information besides the fact that it's based on a graphic novel.

Very compelling movie, especially Rorschach who's character presence, and character in general is so brutally, grotesquely, phenomenal.

Very long movie, like mentioned but it's worth every minute.
Unless you don't understand (lack the literacy, no offense).
The person I saw it with was dumbfounded, and I had to explain to him how it all worked, and how it's genius. After the movie, I went online and did a little research on the storyline and characters, I'm interested in seeing it again while actually understanding the whole concept and story.

 

That was really comforting to read, Insecticide. Most people that have been posting elsewhere that did not read the comic didn't like the movie, panning it as "goofy", long-winded", and "fragmented." A lot of people didn't understand it, but I think you're proof that it WAS accessable to people that hadn't read the GN, something I wasn't sure of as I had read it about a week before the release of the film.

I really loved it, myself. I spent a good deal of the movie either laughing or crying or being really pissed off. It pushed me in so many different directions that I left the theater in silence, trembling and on the verge of tears. It was so incredibly powerful... if you GET IT, that is...

 

Two points of interest here. One, and if you've read any of my other blurbs on movies, is that I do not compare movies to their source material. A movie is not a book or play. There is a difference in media that does not always translate directly. However, I think graphic novels would translate easily to the movie format. They use "story boards" in the movie process that looks much like a graphic novel and perusing thru the Watchmen book, looks like they used these frames in the movie.

So, I think movies should be free-standing, so a person who has not seen the play or read the book will be able to enjoy it. That was the case here; they explained the history of the Watchmen, their peculiar pathologies and conveyed the dark, pre-apocolyptic world that the illustrator and writer of this graphic novel put to paper.

Interesting that you were hyped after this movie. I was tooo calm. Immediately outside the theater was the bloodmobile (offering movie passes for a pint). I went in as I am a frequent donor and almost failed the little pre-donation physical. My pulse was 48 on first count. The second tech said it made the required 50. My blood pressure was 108/70. Now I've always had a low pulse (it gets up over 120 when I run the quickly goes back to 60 or lower) My B/P has always been classic 120/80 but as I got older has been more like 130/90 and on occasion when the doctor takes it is actually borderline high.

So, I figure watching the Watchmen wreak havoc actually had a calming effect on me. Go figure.

 

yeah, i saw this movie on friday and I thought it was great. the CGI animation was phenominal, i loved the gore scenes, they were pretty depictive.
but i heard this movie was getting some bad reviews; id guess possibly due to the story line which wasnt that fluid. i didnt like the fact that the comedian died at the very beginning either...

 

I saw it on Friday after class. I love the comic and I loved the movie. Rorschach, who happens to be my favorite character) was done PERFECTLY. They adhered to the comic almost word-for-word and the soundtrack was spot on. 11/10.

 

Yeah, I had no intention of seeing this movie aswell, just putting that out there.
I saw the first trailer before the movie, and wasn't too thrilled, but after seeing the movie itself, I was at awe.

But everyone's entitled to their own opinion towards the film, it's just a pet peeve if they deem the movie 'terrible' if they didn't understand the majority of it.

 

Amazing visuals and action and music. Some very compelling characters and drama. The first 2 hours are a freaking amazing thrill ride with some bad ass hard, core nitty gritty fighting. The vigilantes in this movie don't pull their punches, they kill and they kill with flair and all the heat and anger would come from being in a situation and dealing with the ugly side of life. This movie is not cleaned up or sanitized, it is bloody and seedy and shows the nasty side of things and earns it's R rating just like 300 did. Denny Duquet from Grey's Anatomy steals the show as the Comedian and he's only in about a third of the movie.

My buddy loved it the whole way thru, maybe becaue he was mesmerized by the blue cock showing in the screen...lol! But I have to admit that I thought the last 30 minutes or so dragged. Maybe I was getting tired since was 2 in the morning, I don't know. Don't let that discourage you from seeing it, it's an amazing spectacle of a film to watch even with that blue cock...lol!!

I already want to watch it again.

 

I just got back from seeing it-- I really enjoyed the GN and was sort of excited about this, especially when I heard it was basically a panel-for-panel remake of the GN. So yes, I went in comparing it to the GN, but really, considering that this was an extremely faithful adaptation, I don't think that's unreasonable.

The problem is that the comic wasn't adapted with any sort of intelligence or sophistication. The actors give lifeless performances, the symbolism falls flat, and it's hard for me to imagine anyone who hasn't read the GN being able to follow any of it. I guess some people here say they could follow it without having read the novel, but I for one thought it was a complete mess. It takes zero brainpower to take what someone has written and make a movie out of it... but, like the critics have been saying, the secret to a good adaptation is to capture the essence of the story. If you ask me, this movie did nothing of the kind, and it didn't have its own identity either.

Parts of it were definitely very well done, but for everything that was done really well (The Dr. Manhattan story, the opening credits... and uh... well... maybe that's it), there were four things that were shallow, or just unforgivably awful. First of all, I'm all for making a superhero film for adults. The GN was definitely for adults, as in, people who know what it's like to be old. None of the sex in the novel was gratuitous, the violence was never unnecessary or over-the-top, and when it was, it was done for a reason.

This film is for teenage boys. Gore flies around for no reason. There are shots of naked bodies fucking. Some of the most striking images in the comic book were passed by without leaving any time for absorption, while blood splatters and oozes, bodies break apart, etc. etc. etc. If this sort of thing was in the comic book, it's not at the forefront of your mind when you're finished reading it.

And considering how good the actors in this movie are, it's amazing how bad their performances were. Somehow, the two-dimensional comic book panels were infinitely more expressive than the three-dimensional actors. I couldn't imagine Silk Spectre being a less interesting character in the film, whereas in the book she held the whole story together... and you really believed that everyone and their brother would want to fuck her. The actress playing her in the film wasn't exactly Jessica Biel as Susan Storm, but she did absolutely nothing with the character-- she wasn't playful, alive, sexy or anything... I found myself in the odd position of being more attracted to a drawing than a real life woman. I think Night Owl was okay in the film, but I always pictured him as being really uptight... that wasn't really there in the film so much.

Some people are saying that Rorscharch was good, but I wasn't all that impressed. So what, he's a tough, nasty guy... and that's all?? No, he's supposed to be a troubled boy who never grew up. In fact, about the only performance that didn't strike me as a huge letdown was Ozymandias, if only because he wasn't so prominent in the GN. The Comedian was actually middle-of-the-road-- WTF?? Despite how extensively their backgrounds were explored, none of them seemed all that distinct-- except Dr. Manhattan... who was basically a one-note performance (though a lot comes out in the origin story scenes). I can just picture Zack Snyder saying 'just talk like a robot'.

Also, and most importantly, the film completely excised the tension, the sense of mounting doom that the comic book had in spades. The most important part of the whole story in the GN was whether or not these guys would get their shit together before the world ended-- there was a whole subplot involving a news vendor, and about how people were freaking out over it. You just don't get that in the film. The Richard Nixon bits weren't half as effective as the news vendor story in the comic.

So yeah, I was disappointed. This was a brilliant story and they made it into a so-so film. It's watchable and maybe I can understand why some people would like it, but there's nothing particularly smart or impressive about it... any intelligence it has is borrowed directly from the book, which is much better, so there doesn't seem to be much of a point. Maybe it would have been better if they'd split it up into a series of films... but who knows?

I give it a 5/10.

 

***SPOILERS***

I should add I thought the Comedian was especially awful-- he has his throat slashed and kills a woman who is pregnant with his child, and then calmly, blankly philosophizes to Dr. Manhattan ten seconds later. HOW could this actor not know how to do this scene???

The end scene was also fucked. The bit about Rorschach's diary in the GN was kind of a funny aside, but the real ending was when Silk Spectre I quietly, privately, secretly forgave The Comedian for everything after hating him passionately for the rest of the story. That was gold. The new ending is meaningless, where it should be climactic.

 

I'm seeing it tomorrow night, looks pretty cool.

 

awesome movie! it was a lot better then i thought it was going to be. just kept you into it the whole time. didnt even realize how long it was till the end. but yes amazing fucking movie, so many epic parts.
And i saw an angels and demons preview before it that looks pretty cool. i was kinda surprised to see what it was about

 

I just saw the movie, not quite sure what to make of it yet, I'm a little confused. I think I'd probably appreciate it more on a second viewing, or possibly just after I have some more time to process it.

 

I don't really understand why it was THAT hard to follow.

 

I've been looking forward to seeing it but sadly Im stuck in the hospital for some testing and gotta wait till I get out. As soon as I feel better I'll go though.

Interesting post, Im glad I got to see some reviews.

 

It's not that, I'm just not sure what I think of it, whether I actually liked it or not.