Watchmen
by dmkemick
So I literally just got home from seeing Watchmen and I figured it’d be best to put my thoughts down now. The movie is one of the best representations of a book or comic series that I’ve ever seen. In order to justify that they take their time with it and it clocks in at just under 3 hours including previews and such, but they utilize the time well. Some of the most interesting aspects of the original comic to me were the historical elements behind the Watchmen group, and from the beginning the movie does its best to describe as much of that back-story as you need. The only negative about that is if you’re unfamiliar with the story it might seem to skip around a lot.
I suppose my only other criticism about the movie would be that it spends a lot of time focusing on the setup, the backstory, the “why,” and less attention is paid to the “what.” Some of the bigger setpieces in the graphic novel seem to fly by in the movie, but that’s more than likely just a result of the different narration formats. When reading a comic or novel it might take you a whole day before you get through one plot line and in a movie it’s forced down to 20 minutes.
Rorschach, my favorite character in Watchmen, was executed perfectly. In fact, the actor (Jackie Earle Haley) even looks like him almost identically. They take their time and slowly develop his character by letting bits of pieces of his past and “prior work” slip, and by the end I think that even without reading Watchmen you’d get a good idea about Rorschach on the whole. As always it’s really difficult to write about the plot much without heading into spoiler territory, so if it seems as though I’m dancing around the main subject here it’s because I am. Just know that the characters in the movie are faithfully developed to their full potential, as was with the graphic novel (particularly Rorshach and The Comedian).
It’s not a movie I’d recommend taking your kids to see, at all. There’s a reason they gave it an R rating – plenty of violence which nearly ushers a Saw movie to mind, and so when I noticed that there were a couple of kids in the audience I couldn’t help but cringe a bit. It’s a superhero movie, yes, but not like you’ve probably seen before. It’s gritty, realistic, and fantastic. If you have any interest at all in the work of Alan Moore (V for Vendetta, From Hell) and especially if you’ve read and enjoyed Watchmen, I’d say you have to go see the movie.
In fact you probably already have, so I hope it was well-received.
