Watchmen:
I know, this is coming out a bit late. Here’s a little Wild West Rorschach to keep you happy.
My position on the movie is influenced by the fact that I’ve been a comics reader ever since I was five or so, when my 50 cent allowance paid for four comic books weekly. And I read the original comic set around 25 years ago, and loved it. And never thought the day would come that a movie would be made of the thing.
This and LORD OF THE RINGS (my favorite fantasy book) were two that I had always heard were un-filmable, and I understood why; there’s way too much detail. And in the case of this book, there’s other bits that get in the way of the non-fanboi audience what loves every little bit of it.
First off, most people are used to Supah-Heeroes in the classic mold, where they can get the snot pounded out of them, but aside of Spidermanian angst and the Escape of the Villain to do some evile in a later issue, Everything Ends Up OK. Not too dark, boy mostly gets the girl, and the homicide level is not too messy or high.
Well, Jaisus H. Palomino Keerist, that ain’t the situation here.
Everything about the comic was horribly dark. Everything about the movie follows the line of the book on this. There’s no unadulterated heroes here. Petty and very nasty evil is everywhere. The movie is totally chockablock with people being seriously nuts to majorly neurotic to screwed up in so many ways you just can’t count. And the my-god-what-happened-ack level of people being twisted or minced up in gruesome ways is way past any count by Joe Bob Briggs (heck, I lost count of the number of people and mutated lynxes who had their intrinsic fields subtracted and / or blew up into something that resembled a woodchuck smacked with a antitank missile).
But people - that’s the way the book was. At the time, it was famous for being a Very different way of portraying ’superheroes’ in the midst of regular life. And only one of the ‘heroes’ is super-powered; the rest are Batmannish genius-techie-martialartist sorts who developed themselves into butt-kicking phenoms. And the book is basically revolving around their psychohistories and why they do what they do and what it did to them.
(And of course, I’m an alternate-history person, so I like digging a very different world, and who can resist lots of zeppelins? )
There’s a rich amount of background detail in the movie, and the opening title sequence does a fair job of introducing you to the milieu of the characters, and you can pick up most of the rest easily enough from the script. The acting of those characters works if the character is made to be interesting in the book; the fruitcakier the character, the more they had to do, and the better the performances were. Jackie Earl Haley as Rorschach was incredible. I also would not want to be anywhere near Rorschach in a million years.
Points that other people picked on that I didn’t:
Yes, Doctor Manhattan is glowing blue and isn’t too thrilled about being dressed up, in the same sense that your dog or your cat is not happy with being stuffed into a bagpiper’s outfit, no matter how authentic the tartan. So you see a few seconds of Blue Glowing Dong, which some Dong monitors went crazy over and endlessly ran through their minds, which says more about their dong-fixation and eventual sexual destination than the movie.
People, I found the endless sea of people getting ginked and split open a lot more icky than that. There are a few sex scenes in the movie, and one in particular goes on forever and is really when-is-this-over-Mr.-Director-or-are-you-waiting-for-them-to-get-stuck-on-the-gearshift dumb and silly. They could have cut way back on that one and it wouldn’t have upset me a bit. Or make their fake Nixon’s nose a little less donglike. That *was* disturbing. This is a movie that deserved a hard R rating for every possible reason you’d give one.
There were parts of the script that varied pretty significantly from the comic, principally because they decided to massively change the ending. To tell you the truth, I didn’t mind the changes - it made slightly more sense than the original one, but frankly, neither version is all that solidly plotted. The movie’s version frankly, makes me think of Jimmy Carter suddenly turning into Jason from the Friday the 13th slasher movies complete with a big pigsticker with dripping blood. and your reaction: “Uh, where the heck did this sudden change of personality come from?” Why, from the Space Squid store, of course!
One other cavil: there were a lot of fight scenes that resembled wuxia fly-through-the-air-with-the-greatest-of-ease camera tricks where people were tossed around and twisted up pretty effortlessly. This could have easily been toned down and reduced my eye-rolling levels.
In any event, if you came to think expecting your standard feel-good superhero movie, you won’t like it. If you came in as an ultra-purist nothing-can-change fanboi, or if you can’t take the things that gave this a hard R rating, you will not like it a bit. If you liked the odd stuff and the depth that made the original cool and interesting, you’ll like the movie, most likely. Like, you dig?