Who watched Watchmen? (complete with SPOILERZ)

Movies
1

I didn’t know if the trailer thread would continue with all of the impressions from the people seeing it once it hit general release. I just got back and the way I feel about the movie is complicated.

The positive: Zach Snyder did what I feel is a fantastic job (full disclosure: I also loved “300”). I much prefer his direction to Nolan’s now, although the two are so different. Loved some of the choices he makes. I think the film manages to be accessible to those who haven’t read the book and at the same time appeals to those who have. The story is obviously stripped down but many of the themes are there, just not explored in as much detail as the book, obviously.

The actors did anywhere from acceptable to utterly fantastic. Jackie Earle Haley, Jeffery Dean Morgan, and Billy Crudup give stellar turns here. I was worried about Dr. Manhattan keeping a human voice; not anymore, as Crudup’s performance totally fits. Jackie Earle Haley was far down on my lists of Rorschachs but gives what has to be the strongest performance in cinema so far this year. I was shocked at how great he was, even if the delivery of a few lines wasn’t what I was hoping for. Completely owns it. Jeffery Dean Morgan has an easier time of it, as he is allowed a little more freedom and directness from the character in the comic: A better way to say it is that along with his dialogue he was much less subtle in places. Still, well played. Matthew Goode does a fin job as Ozymandius, although I find him a little “smaller” in the movie than in the book at the end. Patrick Wilson’s Night Owl was great in an understandable, underplayed way that gives the character more of an arc and places to grow. Malin Ackerman actually brought something to the dance. I was deeply concerned she would ruin so much.; instead, to adds something to the cast.

I thought the action was good, a departure somewhat from the comic

The special effects where great.

The negatives:From my perspective, not many. There was moments where I didn’t like the actors delivery of key lines. I thought some of the music cues were horrible. I didn’t have an issue with the new ending, which to me makes more obvious sense than the books, in that its a quicker path to what Veidt wanted; I did have an issue with them moving the “in the end” dialogue to Laurie and the willing-to-make runs Night Owl, as well as the inclusion of what was supposed to be a modern political joke. Also the way they drained much of what I thought was OK political stuff from Alan Moore (of all people) in the ending.

All in all, as a 20 year fan of the book, I was happy with the movie, which might ebe the biggest compliment I can give at this point. I will probably have better formed thoughts after my next viewing.

2

I watched the watchmen.

For my part, I enjoyed the movie. But it is definitely not the comic book, in tone and style if not intent. It’s very much a movie as directed by the guy who did “300”, and not the landmark story with depth, character and themes. Zack Snyder is a good director, but I doubt he knows the meaning of the word restraint, or nuance for that matter. The man does not shy away from gore, or the brutality of a fight. No, he shows you every bone breaking, every ear popping, every head chopping in brutal detail. I’m not sure it’s a tone that would have fit well within the comic book itself. Moore at least knew how to balance his violence with something else.

The movie on the whole feels like a comic book movie. It’s fairly ridiculous in places, and the dialog, sometimes lifted straight from the book, sometimes written with an overwrought attempt at aping Moore’s prose, is often too melodramatic spoken aloud. The rhythm of speech isn’t there. It feels like writers jamming those words down the actor’s mouth.

Which in part, most of them do a fine job of. Jackie Earle Haley, Billy Crudup and Jeffrey Dean Morgan are excellent as Rorschach, Manhattan and the Comedian while Malin Ackerman and Patrick Wilson do fine as Laurie and Dan. The only weak spot is Matthew Goode. I have a hard time believing that his Ozymandias is the smartest man in the world. He plays it more like a little boy scout who has just been given his first book on philosophy, rather than a man who plans his moves decades in advance.

The format follows the comic quite faithfully. To the point where the guy next to me complaint that it felt like a movie of 5 origin stories and the story didn’t really start until the prison scene. He had not read the comic. Movies demand a certain format to entice the audience into the story, and Watchmen didn’t follow that.

All in all though, I thought it was a decent movie. Nothing groundbreaking like the book was for comics, or the Dark Knight (or Batman Begins, whichever) was for comic book movies.

The big negative for me throughout the whole movie is Snyder’s song choice. The opening Bob Dylan piece was good but it went downhill after that. I realize 99 luftballoons is a cold-war era song but it really didn’t fit the scene in which it underscored. Neither did Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. Where some silence and mood music would have been nice, or a better choice, Snyder instead went with the most ostentatious piece ever. Most scenes of character drama are underscored by ominous violins. It was annoying.

And the kicker? My Chemical Romance as the credits play.

3

I watched the Watchmen.

For the most part, I loved it, despite it not being the book. I think even with it being Snydered up, it was excellent. The theme held, the concept held, and the changes to the ending were actually very effective I think.

Rorschach was surprisingly great, I had serious expectations of his castration in terms of raw sociopathic nature. Not even REMOTELY. I heard some complaint from hardcore fans about him only being in jail for one murder charge (versus the two assault charges), but I don’t think it was lost on anyone that he’s a cold, efficient killer, just from early Spectre and Night Owl conversations (dropping the guy down an elevator shaft).

I am sad we didn’t get to see Night Owl’s darker side, but overall, I still really, really loved it, even if there were a few moments of stupid audience catering. It’s nice to see that The Comedian was still the smartest man on Earth, and the overall dark, somewhat satirical tone wasn’t lost (even if the “there is no god” was), and I think the music helped underscore that often enough. Especially 99 luftballoons on the edge of nuclear destruction from the slightest of mistakes.

4

I’ve been wrestling with my opinion of the movie since I watched it last night and I Still haven’t reached a conclusion. I don’t really know what was missing all I know is that something got lost in translation. Maybe it’s all the little changes like the regular heroes having superhero strengths, and snyder’s jumping at every opportunity to turn an action scene into 300 ( ozy assasination scene I’m looking at you) I also think that the essence of the comedian was lost on screen where he appears to just be an asshole who doesn’t give a fuck. A departure from the comic book character who saw the world as a hellish place become a foil of that. Also the music was HORRIBLE in parts

5

Soundtrack was just nonsensically awful. And maybe it helped that I watched it at a drafthouse and was on my 3rd beer by the end, but Dr. Manhattan’s little manhattan was just really distracting. I guess now I know how women feel about boob jiggle animations.

The set design/costuming deserves an Oscar. So many small touches, masterfully done (I think they looted every thrift shop in North America for 80’s era clothing).

I thought the changed ending didn’t make as much sense. Man uniting against alien invasion - makes sense. Man uniting against… mysterious explosions triggered by Dr. Manhattan? Uh… whatever. Would have been just as easy to have Tentacle Monster, shrug.

I liked the way they used Nixon more and flat out had him push the button in this version (IIRC in the comic they hinted at it but didn’t go all the way). I liked the subtle touch of the changed-up star field in the flag and then later alluding to Vietnam as the 51st state (are they Democrat or Republican?).

The death of the auto executives during the Veidt assassination attempt = pure recession fanservice.

Replacing the joke about Redford with Reagan at the end - what? Was it deemed too subtle?

I know some comic purists will scream, but there were times where the word-for-word recital of the comic script just fell flat. What works in a comic doesn’t work as well in a movie.

Overall - it wasn’t completely awesome for me, perhaps because I was judging it against the comic. I’d be interested to see what someone who never read the comic (HI TOM) thought of it.

6

Saw it, and feel the same way that I do about the comic–lukewarm. I think the movie perfectly matches the tone, spirit, and quality of the comic, a fitful attempt at placing superheroes into a realistic world. Some of it works, some of it doesn’t: you have fleshed out characters like Rorshach and Comedian, and then hollow ones like Nite Owl, Adrian, Dr. Manhattan, and Laurie.

The action is mixed, with some pretty good fist-fights but some dodgy special effects. The dialogue was embarrassingly bad at times, especially in the intimate moments between characters which I think was a combination of bad script and bad acting. Nite Owl and Silk Spectre’s moments together were painful to watch, especially the clumsy sex scene in the Archimedes. It hadn’t occurred to me before that the point of Owl was to be a nerd fantasy, inspiring hope in comic book store owners that their tender meekness would be rewarded by a woman forcing herself on them. The music choices were ridiculous.

The opening sequence, showing vignettes of the heroes and bits of history was brilliant. The highlights were grittiness and dark humor of The Comedian and Kovacs, and the intriguing what-ifs of the alternate history.

The edits and deletions from the comic were fine with me; the device used for the ending cataclysm was less visually rewarding than the original may have been but is a bit more clever.

Yeah, I guess I totally disagree.

7

I haven’t ever read the comic, and I thought the first 2/3 of the movie was pretty fantastic, but the last act didn’t interest me.

I was invested in most of the characters and the Nite Owl/Comedian/Rorschach story, but I wasn’t even remotely invested in the larger story of nuclear war and the fate of the world at large. I also didn’t buy into basically anything about Dr. Manhattan – he looks horrible, and the inability of his effects to look natural was incredibly distracting. Unlike Lum, I wasn’t obsessively drawn to his penis, but any time he’s onscreen, his hands just don’t look right, and definitely any time he’s touching something (like, his girlfriend’s face, for example) it looks like a bad composite.

So for me, my lack of interest in Manhattan and the lack of early/middle screen time for Ozymandius combined with my disengagement with the nuclear war plot (I haven’t yet been able to pin down why that didn’t work for me) made the final act a total dud for me, and blew any real resonance or theme that the movie might have been going for.

I thought the first 15 minutes or so of it were phenomenal, and I really enjoyed it up through the prison break or so. After that I wasn’t sufficiently invested. Oh, and what was the deal with Ozymandias’ cat thing? Was that in the movie before the Antarctica sequence and I just never noticed?

8

I just got back from it, and while I enjoyed it, I really don’t see how this will have any draw outside of the existing fanbase. The devotion to the graphic novel is its strength and its weakness. That’s one long movie!

Overall I agree with the comments above regarding the acting quality; I had no complaints about anyone really, except for the first Silk Spectre. Effects were pretty good.

While I understand the changing of the ending, I think they should have stuck with the original. In for a dime, in for a dollar.

One thing I did like (and again, only the fanboys will get this) is the places in the movie where you see shoutouts to stuff they couldn’t include - like showing the newsstand with the kid perched next to it reading the Curse of the Black Freighter comic, and the Gunga Diner blimp and flyers for it here and there.

I attended a 4:40 show and I’d say the audience was 95% male (and only maybe 25 people total) so I don’t see this as having phenomenal box office numbers.

In the end, I think they would have been served by making the movie shorter and having less of the origin stories all there. Yeah, it’s good stuff, and it’s from the novel, but it just doesn’t translate to a good movie when it’s that long. Put out an extended director’s cut next year!

9

To me the number one sign that this is a bad adaptation is that the ending was so unaffecting. It should really hit you in the gut but instead they give this whole sci-fi sequence borrowed from the Day the Earth Stood Still remake and then Manhattan is turned into a crater as it has been many times before in many other movies. They could have handled it a lot better; as problematic as the original ending is it is a lot more grotesque and horrifying.

After that I wasn’t sufficiently invested. Oh, and what was the deal with Ozymandias’ cat thing? Was that in the movie before the Antarctica sequence and I just never noticed

It makes more sense in the comic, explaining why risks ruining the original plotline.

10

I wish I hadn’t watched The Watchmen. Ugh.

As mentioned earlier, the music was laughably bad at almost all times, culminating in the hilarious choice of ‘Hallelujah’ for the unbearably awkward sex scene in Archimedes. The gore fetishism felt out of place and offputting - what purpose did it serve to have extreme close-ups of broken limbs, exploded bodies, severed arms, or bullets punching through calves? It felt like the kind of ridiculous “GRRRRRRITTY REALISM” that made comics in the 90’s so hilarious. For all that, I enjoyed most of the first half of the film - it wasn’t until just before the prison break that things went terribly off the rails, and never recovered.

By the time of the showdown at Karnak, the audience I watched the film with was just totally gone, laughing constantly. Most egregious, though, were the hilarious additions - Night Owl doing his best Darth Vader impression (“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”) and then running back in to tackle and pummel Ozymandias, because by god, he needed to be scolded and told off!

It didn’t help that instead of getting time to know the characters and see them as real people, we had to shoehorn in several slow-mo martial arts badass beatdowns, to make sure they seemed suitably cool and capable and dangerous. Never mind the fact that the story was about the fallible people behind the masks and their ultimate impotence in the face of the apocalyptic savagery of human nature - we need to see them kicking more ass, so the audience knows how cool they are! Ugh.

I also wonder if I’m the only one who was pissed off by the way Silk Spectre I was rewritten into being a passive, shamed, apologetic woman, who couldn’t stand the terrible guilt of having slept with Blake. It was certainly a much more shallow portrayal than the comic - but then, that’s the problem this movie had in spades, isn’t it?

Yeah. The destruction of New York was so clean and sanitary as to be entirely without emotional resonance. No dead bodies, no human wreckage, no tragedy - just a smoking crater we see for a few seconds, before teleporting away. In making it so neat and tidy, the biggest sucker-punch in the book ended up robbed of any meaning or impact whatsoever, particularly since we were robbed of the chance to meet and connect with any of the people who actually died.

11

Jon still says the line during his temporal trainspotting, when he is at Christmas with Janey.

They explain that as well, although I don’t remember which character does it in a voiceover. They flash back to a shot of him undoing his pants during the attempted rape.

I was OK with the use of the period music. The place where I thought the score fell down completely was the lift off of the Crystal Watch Palace on Mars. It so sounded like a temp track. I liked Bates’ work in “300”. Here, not so much.

Every time this was onscreen, the kids in the audience tittered. I just tried to not stare and I understand why Snyder did it (“God wouldn’t wear pants”, etc.) but it just seemed unnecessary. The Archy love scene was way too long and unnecessary; This was another place where unintentional laughter ruled my theater. Awkward.

One thing I noticed was that after Ozy had announced he had already achieved his plan, it cuts to the generator about to teleport. There on the panel is an acronym of what the project must have been called: S.Q.U.I.D.

I didn’t mind the new ending, and all the plot points that had to be changed leading up to it (like the lack of Jon’s invention of alternate energy sources in the book) although there are two things after that chapped me pretty good: The ending between Laurie, her mother and Dan taking place at Dan’s place in New York with Dan talking about more extracurricular hero stuff. Also, and this is perhaps my biggest nerd gripe about the changes, Laurie’s “I know what Jon would say”. UGH. I thought that conversation between Jon and Ozy in the book was critical. I know Dan’s bit about deforming humanity rather than saving it fills a similar but these don’t do either point justice.

The Redford joke line converted to a Reagan (and Bush) joke was uncalled but in the spirit of the original, I guess. I think the book excoriates both sides of the ideological aisle, while the movie dabbles a little here and there.

12

I completely forgot about that. The movie doesn’t have any people in it, just heroes, criminals, and mobs.

13

All of that stuff was supposedly filmed and will be in the extended edition/director’s cut/money hats second DVD release.

14

The appropriate term is “14th St.”

15

There was no unintentional laughter in the screening I saw. I went to the 10am show at the Gateway here in Austin, and there were probably 40 or so people there, mostly older nerd types. Maybe 4 females?

16

Hrm. No laughter at my theatre. I’m glad that they had him without pants, and didnt wimp out for the ‘Ken’ look in the comic. It’s a penis, we have them, get over it. No one is complaining about boob shots.
I enjoyed it. Enough for the fan, and enough bending that first timers seemed ok with it. I really can’t think of a scene they left out that really annoyed me. As for the end, didn’t bother me one bit.
Not having Dr. M have a freaky voice was a brave and brilliant move.

17

Also, “do that thing you do,” and the replacement of Laurie’s huge introspective moment on Mars with some form of brain zapping time vision was just… so stupid. There’s no major plot point I’m angry that they left out, but what does bother me is that so many of Moore’s best lines were cut, almost invariably in favor of something much clunkier and less interesting. That just baffles me.

18

Just saw it here in Atlanta. They’ve got it on 4 screens at the local 24 screen multiplex - probably over a hundred at the 8PM showing, and there was a line of 50+ people waiting for the 8:30 screening when I got there.

I wasn’t disappointed, and I don’t even think the music choices was necessarily all that bad. The only two big issues I had were that the destruction of so many millions of people, truly the crux of the plot, had so little resonance and that the loss of the final Jon/Ozy scene even further weakened the ending.

19

Never ready the comic. Absolutely loved the movie, and I am glad I never read the comic. I think reading the comic may have lessened the movie for me. Now I can go read the comic and enjoy that.

I loved the soundtrack too. I can never get enough Dylan, even when it’s Hendrix doing Dylan. Maybe especially when it’s Hendrix.

I saw it in iMax. It looked great. It excited my imagination. It surprised me. I am going to see it again.

20

Definitely second the iMax recommendation if it’s an option for you. There’s a lot going on visually in virtually every scene.