Watchmen: The Review

So I cheated, and got really lazy with this review, I did not see this movie on the 8th of March when it came out, rather I saw it on the 28th of February during a special pre-screening at my local theater. Yeah, 10 days before it officially came out and I’m just now writing my review… feel free to begin pelting me with rotten vegetation trust me I think I deserve it, (my wife will be happy because with all that vegetable matter around and on me, I might just eat something vaguely healthy…)

On to the review!

Holy shit this movie was utterly fantastic, I enjoyed it alot and I found it to be an excellent adaption which is an oxymoron if ever I’ve typed one. If we literary people know anything that except in insanely rare exceptions hollywood cannot do anything but fuck up adaptions, it just can’t possibly work out properly. I am pleased to report that they did a very decent job of transmitting watchmen over, did it have the same depth as the comic? was it able to raise the psychologic issues, moral issues and etc that are brought up by the comic book? For the most part, yes. Some of it was really lost in translation like the depth of Rorschach’s insanity or some of the finer grain of the Comedian’s paired sociopathy and PTSD but the primary psychologic focus was always. Dr. Manhattan and the real question of a superhero. If a man, a human man gets incredible powers will he still view himself as “just human”? Jon obviously doesn’t and his humanity is gradually washed away to be replaced with something else.

The moral issues as always are the highlight of the piece with questions being raised like the often heard “kill a few to save many” and so forth.  Again they used a lot of text with only minor adaptions from the book for all of this and that really makes it shine in my mind. The other excellent use of material from the comic was the flashbacks which are alot easier to accomplish in a verbal medium but a lot more difficult to have flow in to the script, plot and timing in a movie. These were seamlessly handled and fit in well where they were placed, so that even movie goers who had no idea what was going on when they walked in could grasp and understand the whole story.

On to my cons, there really wasn’t alot of negatives to the movie, though I do think that the movie was almost unnecessarily graphic on alot of scores, I know hollywood has had to step it up in light of how the world’s been going and how dark our entertainment’s been getting but some of it’s just plain to much in my mind. Like I didn’t need to see Dr. Manhattan’s manhood hanging out pretty much the entire movie, some of the gore seemed kind over the top and gory merely for the sake of gore as well. Again that’s all probably just me being a bit of a prude and not exactly being a gore fan.

Trailers (again)

Quotes of the Post:

The world will look up and shout “save us!” and I will whisper “no”

-Rorschach

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes”?

“Who watches the watchmen?”

-Juvenal