Because the best thing about being underemployed right now is going to the movies on a Friday morn..
...I saw Watchmen today, all by myself. Literally. I was the only person in a 300+ seat theatre.
The best thing about it, and conversely the worst thing, is that it changes/exorcises some key plot points from the graphic novel. They wisely changed the part of the ending where Veidt's evil plan to unite people in fear--and therefore avert WWIII between the USSR and USA--was unleashing an alien on NYC and killing millions of people. In the movie, they altered the means from alien to framing Dr. Manhattan, which was a wise move in my opinion because I found the alien reveal to be somewhat cheesy and having Veidt frame Dr. Manhattan has more emotional resonance and less giant alien-brain-mutant-tentacle-thing. So props for that.
On the flip side, they still had to exorcise large-ish chunks of the graphic novel in order to not have the movie clock in at 5+ hours in length. A lot of this is at the expense of character development, specifically Silk Spectre and Rorschach. I found the truncated Rorschach backstory hurt his character because it didn't give a clear enough explanation of why he became the sort of uber-crime-and-punishment vigilante-justice-wielding borderline sociopath he became. There were only a couple of flashes to his childhood--at least they kept the part where he bites off a piece of one tormentor's face (charming)--and no mention at all of the infamous Kitty Genovese indecent in the mid-sixties that spurred him to don his Rorschach alter-ego. All that said, Jackie Earl Haley was a superb choice to play Rorschach. Even though most of the movie has his face covered in the Rorschach mask, his physicality and his raspy-gravelly voice is exactly what you'd imagine Rorschach's to be.
As for Silk Spectre, the reveal of her bio-dad (Comedian) and her acceptance of it is so slam-bang fast as to almost give me metaphorical whiplash. Her truncated backstory did nothing but hurt the character. And of all the Watchmen, she comes across as the flattest, which seems counter intuitive since she got more screen time than most. I think a lot of that had to do with Malin Ackerman herself. She just looks too young to be playing someone in her mid-thirties, and unfortunately her performance didn't do enough to overcome that. I had the same problem with Matthew Goode as Adrian Veidt (Ozymandias). He just looks too young and too--I don't know, slight?. He's a good looking man, no doubt, but the character is someone who is sort of classically handsome, a kind of all-American ex-football jock type. He has brains and brawn. Goode really only has brains working for him at the level he needs for this role. And the weird, vaguely German/English accent did nothing to help. That was probably the most distracting thing in the whole movie for me.
As for the rest of the Watchmen, Jeffrey Dean Morgan brought just the right amount of sadistic glee to the Comedian, Patrick Wilson as Nite Owl proved it is possible to make a pretty man look convincingly schlubby with prostheses, and Dr. Manhattan's almost complete detachment from humanity is right in Billy Crudup's wheelhouse. And yes, you do get several shots of Dr. Manhattan's glowing blue junk. And his fine, fine derriere.
As adaptations go, this was a pretty good one. Director Zack Znyder is a professed fan, and you could tell. There were many scenes in the movie lifted directly from the pages of the novel, right down to each "a" or "the" from the original dialogue. Film is a different medium that comics. It just is. Where in the comic you can linger on a panel or page and have pages and pages of extra material not directly tied in to the action in the panels, a movie is always moving forward to the finish--and will get there in under 3 hours, preferably. As I understand it, much of the extra stuff from the comic--the comic-in-a-comic, the magazine excerpts, news clippings etc. will be included as extra features in the DVD. Which is nice, because it does a great job of putting the action in a much richer, colorful context. It's just too bad there couldn't have been more of it in the actual movie itself. But you could tell he wanted to cram in as much as possible, which resulted in some very compelling visual story telling. Perhaps the best example comes right at the beginning when we get an introduction to this parallel universe by way of a montage of significant historical events from the '40s-'70s if superheroes had been there. This was adaptation at its most effective.
I enjoy the graphic novel quite a bit--it's long and dense and begs repeat readings to peel back the payers. The same is true of the movie version. There is simply too much going on to be able to absorb it all in a single viewing. I'm just concerned people will decide it's not worth their time--it's about an AU where not-very-popular superheores are real and just as fucked up as normal people--or they'll see it and be disappointed that the ads misled them into thinking it was going to be a nonstop action-fest bloodbath. And that would be a shame. Because as comic movies go, this was definitely one of the more original and interesting takes on the genre and I would hate for this to been seen an epic fail (a steep drop-off in second weekend ticket sales will tell) and result in more dreck like fucking Spiderman 4.
Also at girljackie
The best thing about it, and conversely the worst thing, is that it changes/exorcises some key plot points from the graphic novel. They wisely changed the part of the ending where Veidt's evil plan to unite people in fear--and therefore avert WWIII between the USSR and USA--was unleashing an alien on NYC and killing millions of people. In the movie, they altered the means from alien to framing Dr. Manhattan, which was a wise move in my opinion because I found the alien reveal to be somewhat cheesy and having Veidt frame Dr. Manhattan has more emotional resonance and less giant alien-brain-mutant-tentacle-thing. So props for that.
On the flip side, they still had to exorcise large-ish chunks of the graphic novel in order to not have the movie clock in at 5+ hours in length. A lot of this is at the expense of character development, specifically Silk Spectre and Rorschach. I found the truncated Rorschach backstory hurt his character because it didn't give a clear enough explanation of why he became the sort of uber-crime-and-punishment vigilante-justice-wielding borderline sociopath he became. There were only a couple of flashes to his childhood--at least they kept the part where he bites off a piece of one tormentor's face (charming)--and no mention at all of the infamous Kitty Genovese indecent in the mid-sixties that spurred him to don his Rorschach alter-ego. All that said, Jackie Earl Haley was a superb choice to play Rorschach. Even though most of the movie has his face covered in the Rorschach mask, his physicality and his raspy-gravelly voice is exactly what you'd imagine Rorschach's to be.
As for Silk Spectre, the reveal of her bio-dad (Comedian) and her acceptance of it is so slam-bang fast as to almost give me metaphorical whiplash. Her truncated backstory did nothing but hurt the character. And of all the Watchmen, she comes across as the flattest, which seems counter intuitive since she got more screen time than most. I think a lot of that had to do with Malin Ackerman herself. She just looks too young to be playing someone in her mid-thirties, and unfortunately her performance didn't do enough to overcome that. I had the same problem with Matthew Goode as Adrian Veidt (Ozymandias). He just looks too young and too--I don't know, slight?. He's a good looking man, no doubt, but the character is someone who is sort of classically handsome, a kind of all-American ex-football jock type. He has brains and brawn. Goode really only has brains working for him at the level he needs for this role. And the weird, vaguely German/English accent did nothing to help. That was probably the most distracting thing in the whole movie for me.
As for the rest of the Watchmen, Jeffrey Dean Morgan brought just the right amount of sadistic glee to the Comedian, Patrick Wilson as Nite Owl proved it is possible to make a pretty man look convincingly schlubby with prostheses, and Dr. Manhattan's almost complete detachment from humanity is right in Billy Crudup's wheelhouse. And yes, you do get several shots of Dr. Manhattan's glowing blue junk. And his fine, fine derriere.
As adaptations go, this was a pretty good one. Director Zack Znyder is a professed fan, and you could tell. There were many scenes in the movie lifted directly from the pages of the novel, right down to each "a" or "the" from the original dialogue. Film is a different medium that comics. It just is. Where in the comic you can linger on a panel or page and have pages and pages of extra material not directly tied in to the action in the panels, a movie is always moving forward to the finish--and will get there in under 3 hours, preferably. As I understand it, much of the extra stuff from the comic--the comic-in-a-comic, the magazine excerpts, news clippings etc. will be included as extra features in the DVD. Which is nice, because it does a great job of putting the action in a much richer, colorful context. It's just too bad there couldn't have been more of it in the actual movie itself. But you could tell he wanted to cram in as much as possible, which resulted in some very compelling visual story telling. Perhaps the best example comes right at the beginning when we get an introduction to this parallel universe by way of a montage of significant historical events from the '40s-'70s if superheroes had been there. This was adaptation at its most effective.
I enjoy the graphic novel quite a bit--it's long and dense and begs repeat readings to peel back the payers. The same is true of the movie version. There is simply too much going on to be able to absorb it all in a single viewing. I'm just concerned people will decide it's not worth their time--it's about an AU where not-very-popular superheores are real and just as fucked up as normal people--or they'll see it and be disappointed that the ads misled them into thinking it was going to be a nonstop action-fest bloodbath. And that would be a shame. Because as comic movies go, this was definitely one of the more original and interesting takes on the genre and I would hate for this to been seen an epic fail (a steep drop-off in second weekend ticket sales will tell) and result in more dreck like fucking Spiderman 4.
Also at girljackie