Watchmen
7 March 2009 - Saturday
Watchmen is the cinematic entry to whats arguably one of the most influential graphic novels of all time. Many directors and studios have tried at some point to bring Watchmen to the big screen, with little success. Finally Zack Snyder stepped up to the plate, and delivered what is probably the best cinematic version of Watchmen that we can possibly hope for.
The story of the Watchmen is, distilled to its core, a murder mystery. It starts with the murder of The Comedian, and the subsequent investigation by Rorschach into whos killing masked superheroes. This is set against an alternative 1985 in which Nixon is president, and the ever looming threat of nuclear war is hanging above everyones heads. The superheroes in the movie are all ordinary people who don costumes and fight crime, with the exception of Dr. Manhattan, who due to a scientific experiment gone wrong, is the closest thing to the traditional superheroes that we know.
One of the reasons why Watchmen was called unfilmable, was due to the intricate backstories of all the characters, during the twelve issues of the comic their whole histories were investigated and brought to light. Thankfully almost none of this is lost in translation. The only character that suffers is that of Ozymandias, all the others had their backstories sufficiently fleshed out.
Overall, Im extremely happy with the movie version, it never disappointed, even with all the changes that theyve made to the comic book story. I definitely want to see this movie again, as theres a lot that one misses, little touches that theyve added to remain faithful to the source material.
So far, one of the best movies of the year for me. I will admit that Im having trouble giving it a final score, the more I think about the movie, the more my opinion changes ever so slightly. I definitely will review the score once the directors cut gets released later this year.
Score:
Originally posted at broken.co.za.