Agreed on both points, although I think the Redford to Reagan switch was done less to be political and more to make the joke less subtle. The switching up of the “nothing ever ends speech” was my only major complaint. Ozymandias begging Dr. Manhattan for absolution, and receiving only the enigmatic “nothing ever ends”, was the perfect ending to the comic; they really should have kept it. I know they added Ozy letting Night Owl beat him up as a sort of replacement, but that just made Night Owl seem less meek and ineffectual, which also wasn’t cool.
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.
That wasn’t intentional? The characters were meant to be awkward people in the process of accepting their awkward and, ultimately, ineffectual lives (still though, that scene was almost unwatchably awkward.)
Also, wasn’t there a Philip Glass piece that was playing during Dr. Manhattan’s Mars reminiscence scene(before he raises the crystal city)? That one wasn’t bad.
I liked the music. Actually, iFanboy.com’s podcast on the movie pretty much nailed my thoughts. It’s nowhere near the book but yeah it’s good. I’ll be picking up the Ultra Super Edition on Blu-ray.
Audience enjoyed it.
I thought the acting was ace.
I think this is as good as a Watchmen movie as we could ever get. For that I’m happy.
You know, I thought the book was pretty good but I never really understood the wow factor it had on a bunch of readers. And some of them did try to explain… but… eh.
I’ll probably catch the flick on DVD. By the way, the NYT review eviscerates the movie and splatters the book a bit in the bargain:
[i]The sex may be laughable, but the violence is another matter. The infliction of pain is rendered in intimate and precise aural and visual detail, from the noise of cracking bones and the gushers of blood and saliva to the splattery deconstruction of entire bodies. But brutality is not merely part of Mr. Snyder’s repertory of effects; it is more like a cause, a principle, an ideology. And his commitment to violence brings into relief the shallow nihilism that has always lurked beneath the intellectual pretensions of “Watchmen.” The only action that makes sense in this world — the only sure basis for ethics or politics, the only expression of love or loyalty or conviction — is killing. And the dramatic conflict revealed, at long last, in the film’s climactic arguments is between a wholesale, idealistic approach to mass death and one that is more cynical and individualistic.
This idea is sickening but also, finally, unpersuasive, because it is rooted in a view of human behavior that is fundamentally immature, self-pitying and sentimental. Perhaps there is some pleasure to be found in regressing into this belligerent, adolescent state of mind. But maybe it’s better to grow up.[/i]
I saw it. Loved it for almost all the reasons posted above, and hated very little of it. A few lines fell flat, but every movie has a few lines that just don’t sound right.
I think the changed ending fit perfectly fine, and made just as much, if not more, sense than the comic. Don’t get me wrong, the Comic was awesome, and will still be awesome.
But the movie was good. Some of the music parts made it awful, but otherwise… I have to say i’m pretty happy with how it came out.
Also; fuck the people who laughed every time Dr. Manhattan was shown, particularly his dangle and his ass. Grow up. Fuck.
I see your NYT review and raise you a positive review from the SF Chronicle:
The appeal of “Watchmen” is really about something else - the sight of a blimp passing by the twin towers, as seen from an office window. It’s about the uneasiness we feel when we see those towers resurrected in an alternate universe. Part conscious and part unconscious, “Watchmen” tells us of a world without hope and then makes us wonder if we’re already living in it.
I’m really glad I’m not the only one who identified the prison break as the shark jumping. I also agree with everything else you said. Spot on.
Preach on. Also, speaking of impotence, they really neutered Dan’s naked speech in front of his Night Owl costume. That scene, much like the finale, lacked any kind of gravity…
Which you also pointed out. I further felt cheated by the ending’s ridiculous “Dr. Manhattan did it so the world unites!” premise. If that’s the case, I don’t see why it’s any less likely that the world would unite behind Veidt doing it, and why Rorschach has to die. I suppose you could argue that Manhattan’s inhumanity makes him a more likely scapegoat, but that’s a pretty big leap for me to make. Rorschach has to die because he threatens to expose this whole thing as the work of a single individual, not some extraterrestrial force. If you’re going to expose a single individual who is undeniably tied to a single nation, (“… and he’s American!”) it doesn’t work.
Rorschach’s death is the heaviest hitting moment of the story for me, and I felt completely robbed of it.
I always thought the squid was retarded, so I’m glad for the change. Man (temporarily?) uniting in fear of a very real omnipotent figure that the world had witnessed for a while? Feels better to me.
I enjoyed this a great deal. I had the same feeling as when watching LOTR:FOTR, wanting to come back and re-read it to see the changes. Ya, the ending and alternate energy thing were glaring script changes, but all in all I thought it remained pretty true to the original story.
As I was leaving though, I felt empty in one respect and I believe when I was driving home it hit me: The Watchmen is really two comics and we only got to see one tonight. The entire story of Curse of the Black Freighter was not there and it was so much a part of reading the The Watchmen.
Like others, I enjoyed the opening montage and especially liked seeing how the comic died. It illustrated he was still a bad-ass even at ~60.
The voice-over work of Rorschach was spot-on from my brain-memory. I liked seeing his stealth moves, and the back-story of the six year old girl and the dogs…man left me speechless.
I can’t stand the reviews that tries to criticise the film and the comic by associating them with stereotypes. Comic nerds suck, and their precious comic too! If you like this movie, you’ll be just like them. They fire pot shots at the comic without engaging it directly (or correctly.) So Nietzche is juvneille now, and all about the nihilism? Intellectual pretensions, anyone?
At least I know never to read any review by Anthony Lane and AO Scott again.
Yeah, I’m learning a lot about movie critics with this movie. Any shot against Moore’s actual comic is usually just bullshit. To me Watchmen was perfection of fiction moreso than anything else (except perhaps The Wire).
It wasn’t just that the world united against Dr. Manhattan. The attacks were meant to be interpreted as a warning, that the world had to step back from the brink because Manhattan was still watching. Veidt is a much less omnipotent threat.
I felt that the performances were fantastic, that overall this film was a great adaptation and am curious to find out what people who haven’t read the comic think.
The area I have issues with is the ending. Firstly, I don’t like the Manhattan attack plan, simply because it makes things personal with Veidt. Veidt making Jon the bogeyman without his prior consent is just disrespectful towards him, forcing him to go into exile to maintain the peace. The step from making a colleague he could respect appear to have accidentally given those around him cancer to making him the biggest threat to Earth ever is a big one, IMO.
I also missed the final scene with Jon. Him seeing Laurie and Dan lying together and smiling gives them his blessing, and his conversation with Adrian shows a level of Ozy that the film didn’t really touch on: that he was human, unsure of if he did the right thing in the end. The Ozy in the film is a megalomanical, kinda-snotty villain in the end, not the morally ambiguous question mark the book leaves you with. Him seeming to know 100% that he is right puts him ultimately in the Doctor Doom category without that softening of him at the last that does the character an injustice.
Lastly, one thing I loved in the movie that wasn’t in the book was a throwaway line. When Dan goes to Adrian to warn him, Veidt says, “Thank you, Dan,” with such warmth and gratitude, it seems he’s genuinely touched by Dan’s concern. It helped me reconcile why Adrian lets Dan and Laurie live at the end instead of just getting rid of them to tie up any loose ends; he knows that Dan is genuinely good people, the kind that you don’t want to get rid of in a better world. Dan is a good friend to Adrian, and Adrian appreciates that.
In closing, you should all watch this, it is hilarious.
Saw it today and left the theatre very satisfied, despite all the compromises that were made in the adaptation. I was also relieved that the censored version wasn’t as butchered as it could have been. I’ve written about the ridiculous R-13 rating we have in the Philippines (in fact, IMAX screenings of Watchmen were cancelled here), but thankfully the only cuts I could detect were from the Archie sex scene. It’s still annoying, though.
Good performances, for the most part. I wasn’t too keen on the portrayal of Veidt and lukewarm on Silk Spectre, but I liked Patrick Wilson’s Nite Owl and loved Haley’s Rorschach and Crudup’s Manhattan. (I also wish we could’ve seen more of Stephen McHattie as Nite Owl I–maybe in the DVD?) Rorschach’s arrest and incarceration were my highlights of the movie. Shame the prison breakout had to include that silly slo-mo gauntlet run by Nite Owl and Spectre. I did appreciate how the film was able to incorporate Rorschach’s child-murder investigation, his awkward apology to Dan, and even his half-masked bean eating.
The ending seemed fine when I saw it, but nagged at me afterward. If Manhattan unwittingly becomes a common threat, then comes to accept his scapegoat role, shouldn’t the repercussions change accordingly? As frank austin wrote, the alteration saps much of the rationale for Rorschach’s death, and it loses a lot of its impact, too.
Man, I didn’t come away with that at all. I got the idea that he knew it would work, but hated the cost. The line about forcing himself to see it or know everyone he was destroying. It gave me the idea he was making sure that before he did it, he KNEW the price.
And I still thought Rorschach’s death was…well, a hell of a punch to the gut. You knew it was coming just by the nature of the character, but it still hit hard.
Oops, looks like this is the official thread to talk about the movie, so I’ll repost:
Went in with no expectations, and not even particularly excited. In fact, walking into the theater, I was even sort of wishing I was seeing Coraline instead. But I had a really great time. I liked it a lot, and found myself grinning happily during much of it, mainly because it was so different and so character driven. And the characters weren’t at all what I expected.
I’m not particularly convinced I need to read the comic book now, since I feel I got plenty from the movie. But as far as a biggish-budget movie goes, what a delight to see something this risky, this distinct, and this thoroughly uncommercial. It featured no celebrities, almost no action sequences, and a really unconventional ending. There were times during the movie when I was thinking, “I can’t believe this thing got made…”
Also, it’s a goddamn shame that Jackie Earle Haley hasn’t been working more often. What a great performance of a really great character. I was a bit afraid that once the mask came off, he wasn’t going to be able to live up to the character they’d built. But once he took it off, I was so completely sold.
My buddy who’d read the comic explained the ending to me, and based on his explanation, I have to say I prefer the ending in the movie.
A giant tentacle alien monster eats New York? Really? Good lord, that would just seem silly. And isn’t blowing Manhattan up with a nuke (well, sorta) much more, uh, trenchant? I can’t help but think it’s a better choice.
I like the theme of Ozimandias manufacturing a scapegoat, and doing it to someone who was already losing interest in humanity. What a great way to subvert the traditional Superman myth of someone who’s effectively indestrucible and therefore all-powerful! He would lose touch with being human, and ultimately become detached and incapable of interacting on a personal level. So why not use him as a dupe to save humanity? I loved that part of the story.
Really, a giant squid? Can someone post a picture from the comic? I have to see what this thing was supposed to look like.
Crudup’s Manhattan at Karnak didn’t seem right to me. He got completely enraged at the television studio, but then he’s entirely back to cold robot god mode after he gets duped into killing millions of people, presumably including his ex. Big and not angry just didn’t work.
The movie didn’t really make the extremely violent anti-vigilante riots plausible, either. Not sure that the book did either though, so enh.
After the alleyway, Spectre and Nite Owl dismantling another passel of thugs at the prison was completely gratuitous, but boy is that a minor complaint. Rorschach in prison was the setup for his death that it needed to be. The proof is in how everyone in the twenty-something years Watchmen has been around is trying to find an out for him again with this modified ending. Rorschach will always die and be reborn. It is the point of the story, and if you want to change it then the story did its job, because you can’t, and that’s the point, and if you want to change it–
I say that overall it’s a great execution of a horrible way to present the book. I actually liked Ozymandias-- he came off as a mirror universe Carl Sagan, and I found that appropriate while still being amused by it.
