Quis custodiat, et cetera.

[word_geek]

I saw Watchmen on Saturday with bionic_kate, which was probably a good thing, since judging by the latest box-office numbers, it may be gone by next week. I did a number of unusual things with this movie that I've never done before, the first of which was that I didn't avoid reading any articles or reviews in advance. After all, I'd read the book (and read

Comments

[jacquilynne]

Having not read the book, and only being as familiar with Watchman as one gets by osmosis when one's friends are all giant nerds, I saw it on Saturday night and I found large portions of it unwatchable because of the arterial splatter, and the close-ups of fingers breaking -- and even turning your head away didn't help with the breaking bones stuff because of the stomach-turning foley work.

I thought the plot was interesting if convoluted and kind of predictable. The rich, pretty-boy hero turned out to be the bad guy? Shocking!

I kind of came away from it feeling like it either needed to be an hour longer or an hour shorter -- either explain all sorts of things that only sort of made sense, or, drop them from the movie altogether, fan-boys be damned.

[jacquilynne]

I want to add though, that a touch I liked was the way different shots would slow down or speed up and then almost but not quite flash a comic book panel freeze frame and then continue. It was a visual nod to the origins without resorting to actual comic book panels being drawn on screen.

[word_geek]

The plot point you mention is another thing that highlights the lack of subtlety in the film. In the book, it comes completely out of left field -- or so I thought when I first read it. Ozymandias is kind of a background character...he's a vain sell-out, but the idea that he's the mask-killer doesn't even occur. The fake assassination comes off much more believably in the book as well.

[tangerinpenguin]

That, in turn, is one of the things I can honestly see them having to struggle with in a feature movie - for the first half (at least) of the original series, you could still think of it as a whodunit around a very ordinary murder of a man who (it was increasingly clear) had given a lot of people potential motive. The growing realization that there was much more in play (or at least the confirmation of that) built fairly slowly until the last few chapters. In the movie, they almost completely dispensed with that element in order to get into all the flashy parts that you think of as "the real story" after you've read it, in retrospect. I think they'd need jacquilynne's extra hour or more to have built it up gradually but still include all the key margin elements.