Who Watched The Watchmen?Saw 'Watchmen' last night.
What really worked:
Rorschach
The Comedian
The prison stuff
The 'world history in 5 minutes' montage at the beginning
Rorshach's death
The art direction
What didn't quite work:
Veidt's reveal
The coda w/ Sally Jupiter
Silk Sprectre II
Not enough Bernie/Bernard
It wasn't the differences per se, or the more faithful bits that kept the movie this side of great. It came down to the cuts more than anything else - Moore and Gibbons wove everything into the story, and the cuts removed a lot of the nuances that fleshed out the story. Additionally, the cuts made Moore's already weak depictions of women a lot more problematic.
All in all, it's a
good movie, but not quite a
great movie. The graphic novel was, for its time, absolutely ground-breaking and shattering of the superhero tropes as we knew them in the mid-eighties. Since then, other comics and superhero movies have been informed by
Watchmen, so that we've seen all of this before - maybe not in the same movie all at once, but we've seen it.
I give Snyder full points for having the balls to attempt to adapt
Watchmen, and had his source material been less weighted with its own history and the emotional history of its fans, I think he could have had a great film. In the end, though, there's too much to put on the screen and Snyder fell just a wee bit short. And I'm OK with that - I don't think every hit has to be a home run, it's perfectly OK to get a solid base hit.
So I'll go see it again, and I'll go see the Director's Cut when it comes out, and I'll buy the DVD.
I will be interested in reading/hearing the reactions of people that came to the movie without reading the source material.
posted by Adam C. Lipscomb at 7:54:00 AM
