By now, you’ve probably heard of a little movie called Watchmen. It’s based on an excellent graphic novel by Alan Moore, the man responsible for V for Vendetta, The League of Extraordinary Gentleman and From Hell. All of those have been turned into somewhat successful movies, but none of them (except for maybe V for Vendetta) really captured the whole look and feel of a graphic novel. Watchmen does this, and achieves this feat with style, intense action, and yes, an unnecessary amount of blue penis.
But I digress. You probably want to know some background on this wild and wacky story. The easiest way to explain it is to think about it this way: Watchmen tells the story of people in the 1980s who put on “super hero” costumes, go outside, and beat up bad guys. Eventually it comes to the conclusion that you have to be a tad bit of a psychopath to even try playing dress up/murder. None of these guys actually have any powers, save for the owner of the blue penis, Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup, who actually gives a soul to this blue muscly man), who has all powers. The good Dr. sees time like an ocean; he can experience the past as clearly as the present or the future. Oh, and he can manipulate all matter, i.e. make mofos explode by thinking it. Neat! Next up you’ve got your short, muscled, masked guy, who is basically insane, called Rorschach (how do you perceive him, good or bad? ooooh), played expertly by Jackie Earle Haley who was oh so great/creepy in Little Children. Rounding out the cast we have a guy who is an expert in technology named Owly Mc Owlerson, the token babe who is just trying to live up to her mom’s legacy, and The Smartest Man in the World. I didn’t make that title up, Matthew Goode is Adrian Veidt / Ozymandias, the guy who smartly commercialized his super-exploits, and his comrades for a hefty profit, making him an eccentric billionaire.
All the rest of the story doesn’t really matter, it’s just background stuff. This movie is about these characters, the Watchmen, and what they do to survive in an increasingly immoral and scary world. One particualarly horrifying sequence is when Rorschach explains why he doesn’t let criminals live: He discovers a child murderer/rapist who has burned alive a five year old girl, and then feeds the rest of her to his dogs. Holy shit! I guess that would make me rexamine the way I treat criminals too, if I was an insane masked man. This episode really sticks with you; it’s one of many images from the film that are so disturbing and powerful fully realized on the big screen that they’re hard to forget.
You can’t talk about this movie without mentioning Zack Snyder, the guy who made every teenage boy’s favorite movie, 300 in 2006. He’s really done a fantastic job here. From start to finish, the movie looks and feels like a graphic novel– intense, slow at parts, a healthy sprinkling of ultraviolence, but hey, that’s true to the source. There’s cussing, nudity, etc; the movie is definitely a hard R, so don’t take your kids to see this movie, there were a few tykes in the audience at my showing and I was a litttttttle bit surprised by that.
Anyways, Snyder deserves a lot of credit for taking a project that had been in development forevor and finally getting the damn thing out the door in the form of a nice crowd-pleasing summer flick. The movie does run a little long at 2:45, but who cares, just don’t go see a 10 pm show. They were pretty faithful to the original material, save for the whole sub-comic about the pirates, but that’s going to be a separate DVD, and they put the little black kid and his friendly newspaper friend in the movie anyways. Oh, and they changed the ending. Whatever.
None of it could be possible without the cut and paste skills of David Hayter and Alex Tse who took Alan Moore’s source material and edited the shit out of it while maintaining the same themes and the soul of the comic. Bravo guys. Didn’t really miss much of what was cut out, and hopefully the film will draw in new readers to the novel, but who reads now anyways, except you, who is reading this right now? Ahem.
Can’t forget about the music. The soundtrack is classic period rock, and it’s freakin’ awesome. Must get it.
My only real complaint, and it’s a minor one at that is they added about 75 extra shots of blue penis that were never in the graphic novel to being with; so if Snyder is using the source material as his storyboard, like he claims, then why change that of all things? Eh, whatever. Not a huge deal. (get it?)
If you’re looking for a good way to have your mind blown in around 3 hours, then I’d recommend you get your butt to the theatron before this one goes away, but, it did make $55 million on its opening weekend, so it might stick around some.
Go see it. Or better yet, read the book, then see it.
Grade: A-
Graphic Novel Grade: A
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