(no subject)
Just saw Watchmen. (Spoilerinos ahoy)
Zach Snyder did not ruin it. As one of the few people in the circles I run in who severely disliked 300, (not gonna say I hated it, but I did not enjoy it) I was pleasantly surprised by this. I liked it overall, but rather than any kind of half-hearted review that I'll likely get bored of writing halfway through, I shall instead make a little list of points that occurred to me over the course of the movie.
-I was not expecting to like the soundtrack as much as I did. I don't mean the ambient orchestral stuff, I mean the honest-to-god-real-life songs they used. From 'The Times They Are A-Changin'' with the opening credit montage to "All Along The Watchtower" near the end, I thought it was really well done. I thought about going and picking up the soundtrack, then I realized that the reason I liked the soundtrack so much was because I liked the songs on it, and I already had most of them anyway. Almost embarassing! (As an aside, I LOVED 'Everybody Wants to Rule the World' playing fairly quietly in the background of one of Veidt's scenes. The song isn't even on the official soundtrack, but it was a cool little aural cue.)
-Casting was pretty good, no complaints. Rorschach was, in my opinion, pretty dead on in voice and appearance and demeanor.
-But because the portrayal was so dead on, I felt a bit let down when it came to his backstory flashbacks. I can understand truncating the psychiatrist scenes: pacing those would have been tricky in a movie already almost 3 hours long. I hope that maybe some of the missing elements pop up on a DVD: the Kitty Genovese reference to show why he did the hero thing in the first place; why he wore the mask ("Black and white, always changing, never mixing into grey").
Again, spoileroonies ahoy.
What did bug me was the way they portrayed that moment of his psychotic break. Yes, he killed the kidnapper. In the film version, he takes the cleaver and hacks the guy's head after chaining him to the stove. Yes, he's a crezzy murderer, we get it.
In the comic, he chains the guy to the stove and puts a hacksaw next to him. (It might have been the cleaver, I don't have it handy at the moment to verify.) He sets the place on fire around him and lays out the kidnapper's options: hack his own hand off to escape the flames, or die in the fire.
I can't quite put my finger on why this change bothers me, but it seems very wrong to me. Rorshach is a fairly complex character and I feel like when they got the chance to shed a little light on him, they backed off. Why not leave it in? Time issues? They could have shaved a couple minutes off one of the (vaguely laughably Cinemaxish) sex scenes if they needed a few more minutes.
Other than a few other quibbles (quite a few of which were quibbles I had with the source material anyway) I largely enjoyed it the movie, though.
And somewhere, Alan Moore broods crankily on his onyx throne and smothers another angel in his beard.
Zach Snyder did not ruin it. As one of the few people in the circles I run in who severely disliked 300, (not gonna say I hated it, but I did not enjoy it) I was pleasantly surprised by this. I liked it overall, but rather than any kind of half-hearted review that I'll likely get bored of writing halfway through, I shall instead make a little list of points that occurred to me over the course of the movie.
-I was not expecting to like the soundtrack as much as I did. I don't mean the ambient orchestral stuff, I mean the honest-to-god-real-life songs they used. From 'The Times They Are A-Changin'' with the opening credit montage to "All Along The Watchtower" near the end, I thought it was really well done. I thought about going and picking up the soundtrack, then I realized that the reason I liked the soundtrack so much was because I liked the songs on it, and I already had most of them anyway. Almost embarassing! (As an aside, I LOVED 'Everybody Wants to Rule the World' playing fairly quietly in the background of one of Veidt's scenes. The song isn't even on the official soundtrack, but it was a cool little aural cue.)
-Casting was pretty good, no complaints. Rorschach was, in my opinion, pretty dead on in voice and appearance and demeanor.
-But because the portrayal was so dead on, I felt a bit let down when it came to his backstory flashbacks. I can understand truncating the psychiatrist scenes: pacing those would have been tricky in a movie already almost 3 hours long. I hope that maybe some of the missing elements pop up on a DVD: the Kitty Genovese reference to show why he did the hero thing in the first place; why he wore the mask ("Black and white, always changing, never mixing into grey").
Again, spoileroonies ahoy.
What did bug me was the way they portrayed that moment of his psychotic break. Yes, he killed the kidnapper. In the film version, he takes the cleaver and hacks the guy's head after chaining him to the stove. Yes, he's a crezzy murderer, we get it.
In the comic, he chains the guy to the stove and puts a hacksaw next to him. (It might have been the cleaver, I don't have it handy at the moment to verify.) He sets the place on fire around him and lays out the kidnapper's options: hack his own hand off to escape the flames, or die in the fire.
I can't quite put my finger on why this change bothers me, but it seems very wrong to me. Rorshach is a fairly complex character and I feel like when they got the chance to shed a little light on him, they backed off. Why not leave it in? Time issues? They could have shaved a couple minutes off one of the (vaguely laughably Cinemaxish) sex scenes if they needed a few more minutes.
Other than a few other quibbles (quite a few of which were quibbles I had with the source material anyway) I largely enjoyed it the movie, though.
And somewhere, Alan Moore broods crankily on his onyx throne and smothers another angel in his beard.