(Editors Note: Be sure to check out the full Roundtable coverage of the Watchmen movie from the full Big Shiny Robot! crew. They all saw the movie yesterday, read what they had to say here.)
There are certain people for whom, no matter how good a film Watchmen is, it will not be good enough to meet their expectations. I am not one of those people. I was lucky enough to see Watchmen at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin on Feb 23 with a preview audience.
Going in, my expectations had to be met based on one standard: taming the beast. Other than epics like Anna Karenina or perhaps the Bible, Watchmen seemed perhaps the hardest piece of western literature to adapt to film because of its intricacies and layers. Could you tame the beast and make a film that was still Watchmen and only trim fat, not muscle, bone and sinew?
This film is Watchmen, the same comic book/graphic novel you fell in love with and which nearly every nerd and geek alike sees as a sort of password or shibboleth – “Oh, you’ve read Watchmen? You’re one of us.” Zach Snyder and his team of screenwriters tamed the beast and kicked ass in the process.
They left in every iconic moment, every scene you’ve wanted to see in full motion rather than as a pane of Dave Gibbons’ artwork, every phrase of dialogue you’ve wanted to hear. (There was a cheer when Kovacs proudly yells in the jailhouse mess hall, “I’m not locked up in here with you, YOU’RE IN HERE WITH ME!!!”) Every Alan Moore project that has been raped in the past is hereby redeemed. The adaptation is just that good.
So, this is an excellent adaptation of the source material, which is the first question every has asked me so far about it. The second question almost always is “Did they have the part where….”
Here is a quick answer to all of those that I have been asked so far:
(Invisotext included: highlight for answers – beware spoilers in invisotext)
A giant alien squid?No, but I like what they did instead better. More on that later…
The paranoia and cynicism of the book? YES.
Doomsday clock? Oh, yes.
The boy at the newsstand reading Tales of the Black Freighter? Yes.
Naked Silk Spectre I?No. And good thing, too. Miss Jupiter’s rape was tastefully yet brutally done. This was an act of violence, not of sex, and it showed.
Naked Silk Spectre II?Oh, yes. And she and Nite Owl get it on to Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and there’s a funny orgasm joke.
Naked Dr. Manhattan?Yes. Plenty of naked blue for the ladies, including the “ménage a Manhattan” (creepy, imho)
Enough nudity: How did Dr. Manhattan look and sound? I didn’t get what Billy Crudup was doing for the first half of the film and I thought Manhattan looked a little odd. His performance seemed so “affected” and the character so cartoonish that it was a little hard to get into. By halfway though I had “gotten” what he was doing in being so detached and ended up LOVING it by the end. Somehow, it all makes much more sense when he goes to Mars.
Were there scenes on Mars? Yes, in the same way it unfolds in the source material.
Did Mars look good? Oh, yeah. Have you not seen the trailers?
Bubastis? He was there, and looked way cool. Completely CG, but fit well into the world.
Was Rorschach in any way sanitized or made more palatable? Very much not so. They include the story of the kidnapped 8 year old girl and how the last bit of humanity of Walter Kovacs went away that night.
Does Rorschach ever say “Hrmf”?Yes. Several times.
Was his mask cool? Absolutely. Looked great. My only complaint is it never once turned into a question mask, but oh well….
Did Rorschach eat beans? Yes.
Does Rorschach… Geez, there are other great characters in this movie, people!!!
Was there Grafitti? “Who watches the Watchmen?” The guy with the sign that says “The End is Near”? Yes, several times.
Who was your favorite? The Comedian. A character I had really hated in the book, now possibly my favorite of the bunch. He is pure slime, but if all the world’s a joke and he’s the one who gets it, maybe it’s time for us to get in on the joke, too.
Ok, so it’s a fair adaptation of the source material.
But is it a good film?
I would say so. It’s harder to judge because my instinct is to compare it to The Dark Knight or Iron Man or X-men 2 or Spiderman 2 or the other great comic movies. And yet, I feel like that’s comparing Star Wars to Lawrence of Arabia or The Ten Commandments. They’re all great films, but they somehow don’t belong on the same shelf of my DVD collection. So does Watchmen belong in its own class as a comic book film. If this is a comic book movie, it’s not an action-popcorn flick like most of it’s other brethren. There are action scenes, and they do kick all kinds of ass (my personal fav is the jailbreak with Nite Owl and Silk Spectre), but these are few and far between, much like in the comic. But a normal comic book movie rises and falls on the quality of the action sequences, with great character moments in between.
This is the inverse of that same wave, with the character pieces making the movie and the action sequences providing needed relief from the ennui and oppressive paranoia of the world that gives so much angst to our heroes.
So it might not be as good of a movie overall as The Dark Knight (perhaps the best expression of its genre so far), but it is close. Again, it’s like asking me what i liked better: Empire Strikes Back or The Godfather? Comparisons fail.
So, what didn’t you like?
I thought Nixon was overdone. I thought his makeup looked like a bad Nixon mask that someone accidentally melted too much in the microwave. But… he did look a little like Gibbons’ Nixon. Probably having just seen so much of Frank Langella as Nixon put my expectations too high.
The violence was brutal.
The sex and nudity was a little much, so… I don’t know if I should say I didn’t like it. I liked some of it (the violence). I liked some of it a lot (man these superheroes can kick some ass). However, it was a bit much, but, I will be the first to say that I am a bit more squeamish than your average movie-goer (I’m just a good little Mormon boy, blah blah blah).
Just know that this film is not for the kiddies. Leave anyone under the age of 14 at home on opening night and see it for yourself before bringing your teens unless you (or your children) are intimately familiar with the source material and think your kid can handle it. That being said, when my son (now 7 months old) turns 14, I will probably sit down and watch this film with him. But maybe I’ll fast forward some of the sex in the owl-ship….
Also, I had always said certain names differently in my head: Veidt, Ozymandius, (I swear when we talked about this poem in AP English we pronounced it differently) Bubastis, and Moloch. Oh well.
And what did you REALLY like?
Purists may disagree with me here, but I loved the new ending.
***BIG SPOILER ALERT STOP READING NOW IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW MORE. YOU’VE BEEN WARNED****
Well, I was disappointed that there was no giant alien squid. That being said, it seems kind of silly to have that as the climax of your film. It’s like the spider at the end of Stephen King’s “It” or…. well, basically the end of ANY Stephen King book or adaptation. Really? A giant squid? It’s just so bat-shit insane it only could’ve come from Allan Moore’s deranged genius head.
Instead, Veidt has engineered a weapon that mimics Manhattan’s power signature, making it look like all of the major cities had been attacked by Dr. Manhattan. I thought this worked, perhaps, even better than alien squid invasion. It galvanized the world in peace in the same way, but reinforces the theme of “Who watches the Watchmen?” and gives Manhattan a much better reason to have to leave Earth forever.
Overall, that’s what I thought was amazing—the attention to theme and that they got so many of them in this film. Going along with theme, the soundtrack was fan-fricking-tastic. “Ride of the Valkyries” as Manhattan and Comedian attack Vietnam? The opening credit sequence that immediately puts us into this world of the Minutemen-Watchmen-Nixon Reelected to 4th term-Keene Act-1985 world is set to Bob Dylan’s “The times they are a changin” and is pitch perfect.
Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. All Along the Watchtower.
Mozart. It’s amazing.
The great thing was, the people who we had in our group who were not at all familiar with the source material seemed to have as good of a time as those of us who were. This should hopefully mean broad appeal to mass audiences the same way.
Final Judgment
I’ll have to reserve final judgment on this film through repeated viewings, and I noticed small things every time which piqued my interest (the opening credit sequence along bears repeat viewings). Let me put it this way: The first time I saw the first Spider-man and two weeks later when I saw Attack of the Clones I had very similar feelings about both films. On repeat viewings, Spiderman has become by far the better and more icnonic film. So, am I full of Star Wars prequel-esque drunkenness, so happy to finally see some of this on film that I rate it higher than it deserves? Or am I full of Spiderman-esque shock that it seemed like they got everything right but I wasn’t sure if I just really liked it or REALLY REALLY liked it? Time, repeated viewings, and the full-Blu-ray treatment of the 4 ½ hour director’s cut including Tales of the Black Freighter and Hollis Mason Behind the Mask will seal the deal.
Until then, sleep well, fans of Watchmen. The undoable has been done: Watchmen has been made into a great film worthy of the source material. This is a good movie, and in the immortal words of the Gin Blossoms, “If you don’t expect too much from me, you might not be let down.”
*** ½ (out of 4)
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