{"id":14056,"date":"2009-03-07T13:01:51","date_gmt":"2009-03-07T20:01:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/?p=14056"},"modified":"2009-03-07T13:02:05","modified_gmt":"2009-03-07T20:02:05","slug":"movie-review-watchmen-2009","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2009\/03\/07\/movie-review-watchmen-2009.html","title":{"rendered":"Movie review: Watchmen<\/i> (2009)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lee and De, Stan, Randy, Jackie and I went up and saw Watchmen last night. Here’s the story.<\/p>\n

(I will endeavor mightily to be spoiler-free <\/strong>in the review, but no guarantees about the comments.)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

Watchmen<\/a><\/em> (2009)<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
Overall<\/strong><\/td>\n <\/td>\n Story<\/td>\n <\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Production<\/td>\n <\/td>\n Acting<\/td>\n <\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Directed by Zack Snyder. Screenplay by David Hayter and Alex Tse, from the graphic novel by Alan Moore (uncredited) and Dave Gibbons.<\/em> <\/p>\n

There’s two ways to judge an adaptation from another work, like Moore and Gibbon’s seminal graphic novel. There’s taking it as an adaptation (faithfulness to the original work) and there’s how it stands on its own. It’s difficult for me to do the latter, but I’ll try to do both here.<\/p>\n

As an adaptation, Watchmen is remarkable. Unlike Sin City <\/em>(which literally tried to recreate the comic book on screen), director Zack Snyder is willing to make changes — in costuming, setting, and one significant plot point — but he does so while remaining so true to the original dialog and plot that it’s fair to say that this was “only” a recrafting of the book for the screen, with some 21st Century aesthetic applied to it.<\/p>\n

People who know the book will recognize scads of dialog and setting lifted straight from the original — and going back to the book after will reveal that many “adds” were also from the original as well. The costumes have been updated a bit (though both the Comedian — sans S&M mask — and Rorschach are nearly untouched — and Dr Manhattan, of course, doesn’t have much in the way of costume). A few scenes have been modified (the assassination attempt on Ozymandias is in a different setting, arguably more plot-advancing, though it weakens a later scene), and a major notorious plot element at the end has been fairly seamlessly changed into something that most people except the highest purists won’t object to (it works, plotwise, but it’s close enough in concept to the original to “work”).<\/p>\n

The main title sequence<\/a> — a time line of the heroic set from the 40s onward — is stunningly done, establishing the setting while paying homage to much of Dave Gibbons’ art. (It’s marred only by over-extending Bob Dylan’s “Times They Are A-Changin’,” a song I don’t care for all that much to begin with and which is not helped by repeating two of the verses multiple times). The sequence also touches on the film’s adaptation of the book’s use of flashbacks — toned down quite a bit here (and likely just as well), but still enough to give you a sense of history without intimacy. As part of this, the makeup and CG work done on the characters to (de)age them in different scenes is very, very well-done. You do, in the end, have a sense of some 40-50 years of history going on around you.<\/p>\n

The actors do a stand-out job of playing what are, to be fair, iconic characters. Moore’s more interested in concepts than people (a trend that has grown (worse) over time), and here he was more focused on the whole deconstruction \/ final comment upon the super-hero genre, than on creating truly life-like characters. This is a story about conditions and plot, and how the characters work within it, than a story about people structured within a tale. Within those bounds, most of the actors hit things spot-on. Jackie Earle Haley’s Rorschach, in particular, is excellent, but<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

 Jeffrey Dean Morgan plays the Comedian straight-on, and all the others (and the supporting characters) do quite decently (the weakest performances are from the two women, who still do okay, but simply aren’t as rock-solid as the male characters).<\/td>\n

The overall attention to visual detail, both obvious and subtle, both to provide a rich tapestry and to harken back to the book, is well done. Just the fact that you have Gunga Diner blimps in the air — never called attention to, but still there — shows how Snyder is really trying to bring in all the set pieces.<\/p>\n

The current soundtrack is made up of various period pieces, most of them appropriate (a few, like one rendition of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” playing as Muzak in the background in one scene, are perhaps a bit unsubtle). It does set parts of the movie in the era (mid-80s), and the original score around it complements things nicely.<\/p>\n

The movie is, as rumored, pretty violent, well-justifying the R rating. But it’s not unremittingly so, falling somewhere between 300 (non-stop sword-fest) and a movie with a standard four or five “fight scenes.” Violence is part of the Watchmen <\/em>world, and Snyder doesn’t shy from it. Much of the violence is brutal — bone-breakings, gunshots, not to mention general martial arts mayhem — but I’ve seen far worse. Further, looking at the original graphic novel last night, the scenes where it most stood out (the alley fight, the attempted rape)were, in fact, just as violent — it just seems <\/em>less so in static pages than in “real life.”<\/p>\n

While the violence is present, there’s also a fair amount of sex. This is true to the book as well, but here it sometimes seems … overly long. No objection to sex scenes per se, to be clear, it’s just that the point of them in the story seems accomplished long before the movie leaves them.<\/p>\n

Speaking of sex — yes, Doctor Manhattan is naked, and, yes, we do get some full-frontal view. Unless you’re, say, sitting at the center front row at the IMAX, it didn’t really “stand out” to my eye compared to the overall character and the scenes he was in. It was just part of what he was, a familiar, idealized shell of a the man he had previously been. (The use of a motion-mapped CG construct for Doc worked pretty well, lending him just enough of an air of unreality and artificiality.)<\/p>\n

As to other remarkable effects — it’s a toss-up between Bubastis (of whom I want to see more), Doc’s Crystal Clockwork Palace (spectacularly rendered but abstract in the first place), or Nite Owl’s flyer, Archimedes (which gets my vote as Best Super-Hero Vehicle To Date).<\/p>\n

The movie comes in at 2:35 in run time — the “Director’s Cut” is promised to be much longer, including a bunch of stuff that was trimmed out. The biggest gap from the original book was the excision of the “Tales of the Black Freighter” parallel story — which, honestly, I didn’t at all miss (and which will be available as a separate animated release, ho-hum). A lot of the “civilian” stuff that didn’t directly impact the main story — the psychiatrist, the newsstand, the tax driver — didn’t make it into the main cut, nor did anything more than a brief scene with Mason Hollis, the original Nite Owl. That robs the climactic moment of the Bad Guy’s scheme of much of it’s emotional impact. Some of Rorschach’s origin story (the fabric part) was elided (and a key element in his “crazy” origin was altered from the original, too — in this case, not as well).<\/p>\n

So, as an adaptation, it’s excellent, remaining highly faithful without being a mirror image (the best analogy I can think of is a well-done Shakespearean play adapted for the screen, faithful to the words and narrative intent of the Bard while taking advantage of the different medium). Alan Moore, of course, did not think that a suitable adaptation could be done, though Dave Gibbons, the artist of the original, consulted closely with Snyder.<\/p>\n

Outside of the adaptation, how is it? Hard for me to judge, of course. Jackie, the non-reader-of-the-original who was at the flick, didn’t give a definitive answer, aside from finding it very violent, and that it didn’t seem to focus well on any particular characters. I’ll be curious to see what Margie thinks when we get the DVD. <\/p>\n

Part of the problem, of course, is that what Moore did with Watchmen <\/em>— making the super-heroic condition “real” and extrapolating out what that would mean to society and individuals — is not nearly as fresh and original today as it was in 1985. Not that it’s often been done as well, but it’s ground that’s been gone over in a lot of different ways, and so is less impressive to the neophyte for all that. <\/p>\n

As well, it may be that not knowing the full background of the characters, as laid out in several ways by Moore in the original, the abbreviated parts we do see — which to the knowledgeable eyes stand out as enhancements to the overall fabric — don’t stand well enough alone. There are a lot of characters we touch on — the six Watchmen, plus supporting cast. They perforce are going to get short shrift, even though the movie manages to get their origins and their key drivers on-screen for them. It’s difficult to think of how the movie could be better in that fashion within the compromise of the (still long) run time (and it will be interesting to see how it works with the longer director’s cut).<\/p>\n

Overall? Glad I saw it, glad enough I saw it on IMAX just for the overall impact, and I think it’s as good a job of adapting the source material without substantial change as I could have hoped for. It’s not perfect, and I could probably spend a lot of time discussing its flaws, but I’ll confess this geeky fanboy is well-pleased.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lee and De, Stan, Randy, Jackie and I went up and saw Watchmen last night. Here’s the story. (I will endeavor mightily to be spoiler-free in the review, but no guarantees about the comments.)     Watchmen (2009)  Overall Story Production Acting Directed by Zack Snyder. Screenplay by David Hayter and Alex Tse, from the … Continue reading “Movie review: Watchmen<\/i> (2009)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14055,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14056","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-media-comics","category-media-movies"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/03\/watchmen-poster.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":132944,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2017\/02\/28\/movie-review-watchmen-2009-2.html","url_meta":{"origin":14056,"position":0},"title":"Movie Review: "Watchmen" (2009)","author":"***Dave","date":"Tue 28-Feb-17 12:17pm","format":false,"excerpt":"This remains an iconic comic book adaptation, despite Zack Snyder's best efforts to scrub away any nuance or critique of the genre from Alan Moore's original. I find my rating of the film continues to drop down over the years -- I still like it, but the creative flaws become\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "~PlusPosts"","block_context":{"text":"~PlusPosts","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/plusposts"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/watchmen_ver19_xlg5B15D.jpgimgmax%3D660.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/watchmen_ver19_xlg5B15D.jpgimgmax%3D660.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/watchmen_ver19_xlg5B15D.jpgimgmax%3D660.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":14048,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2009\/03\/06\/watching-the-watchmen-in-1.html","url_meta":{"origin":14056,"position":1},"title":"Watching the Watchmen … in 17 …","author":"***Dave","date":"Fri 6-Mar-09 7:32pm","format":false,"excerpt":"Watching the Watchmen ... 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More later.","rel":"","context":"In "~Tweets"","block_context":{"text":"~Tweets","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/tweets"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":25954,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2012\/02\/01\/joe-straczynski-on-the-watchmen-prequels.html","url_meta":{"origin":14056,"position":3},"title":"Joe Straczynski on the Watchmen prequels","author":"***Dave","date":"Wed 1-Feb-12 8:51pm","format":false,"excerpt":"JMS summarizes his answers to the various questions\/objections raised by folks about the propriety (artistic or legal) off his being involved in the prequel comics to Alan Moore's Watchmen saga. #ddtb Embedded Link Rather than answer... | Facebook Fans of J. Michael Straczynski wrote: Rather than answer the questions about...\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "~PlusPosts"","block_context":{"text":"~PlusPosts","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/plusposts"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":31379,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2012\/11\/15\/fatherdaughter-week-watchmen-2009.html","url_meta":{"origin":14056,"position":4},"title":"Father\/Daughter Week: "Watchmen" (2009)","author":"***Dave","date":"Thu 15-Nov-12 8:58pm","format":false,"excerpt":"No, I didn't watch \"Watchmen\" with Katherine. This was more of a \"after Kay is down to sleep\" watching sort of movie.I haven't watched this since I saw it in IMAX at the theater. \u00a0And, really, aside from some fairly awkward acting in places, it's a hell of an amazing\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "~PlusPosts"","block_context":{"text":"~PlusPosts","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/plusposts"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":46049,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2014\/10\/23\/who-watches-the-watchmen-fixing-watches.html","url_meta":{"origin":14056,"position":5},"title":"Who watches the watchmen fixing watches?","author":"***Dave","date":"Thu 23-Oct-14 3:19pm","format":false,"excerpt":"A short but interesting tale of pocket watches, fading memories, and the Civil War. The Secret Message in Abraham Lincoln's Pocket Watch President Lincoln never knew the hidden message he carried with him every day. 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