Watchmen

(Note: I’ve never read the original graphic novel, so I can only judge the film on its own merits.)

First, a tangent: Chuck and I randomly decided to catch the midnight showing of Watchmen rather than simply purchase tickets for Friday.  Being that we’re pretty far from the college, it turns out that they hadn’t sold out of tickets.  In fact, when we returned to the theater after wasting a few hours in wait, there were still people buying tickets.  We finally let out right at 3am.  I don’t know whose crazy business decision it was to stay open and keep staff until past 3am for a single screen.  I mean, unless it’s a Friday or Saturday night, final showings are usually around 10:40pm, letting out around 1-ish.  That’s an extra 2 hours they had to pay staff!

It’s no secret that I’m no fan of director Zack Snyder’s previous work 300.  It was just a bunch of naked dudes screaming and yelling.  With no background on Watchmen, my only expectation/hope coming in was that it would be better than 300.

Watchmen was a stellar and tight effort.  There’s a small core cast, and there’s enough time spent on them individually and in pairs that you get a feel for the character and their chemistry amongst each other.  There are several extended vignettes for a handful of the characters that further delve into their backgrounds, but not all of the represented characters are given that same treatment.

Those who come looking for a wham-bam action flick will be disappointed…to a certain degree.  The story unfolds slowly and meticulously.  The plot itself is more akin to a mystery, but the significant focus is on exploring the characters.  How do certain people react to bad situations?  To distant partners, to break-ups?  To professional obligations?  To being “fresh meat” in a prison?  To the generational misunderstandings between parent and child?  To convincing people that contributing to the greater good means “cracking a few eggs to make an omelette?”  To impending global thermonuclear warfare?  That said, the action presented is intensely brutal with just the right amount of editing.  Cuts are made to make sure the composition remains dramatic, but the camera can, at times, be unflinching in presenting grotesque scenes.

I have a few technical issues with some of the effects work, notably the obvious wire-work assisting Rorschach’s prowling and the odd lack of shadow when compositing CG characters.

There is a tremendous focus on using 1970′s/1980′s media to date the setting.  There is plenty of TV-watching and perhaps overly prominent use of licensed songs.

Those looking for another dose of superhero action will be sorely disappointed; this film’s strongly in the drama category.  It’s a cerebral, meta take on masked crusaders as real people and something I will highly recommend.

After the movie Chuck told me about how things played out in the original book.  It seems to me it was a very wise decision to adjust the focus, trim down the cast, and avoid a likely awkward deus ex machina plot device that would make an already long movie quite clumsy.  I just ordered the book off of Amazon (on sale for $10.99!), so maybe I’ll have a different take on it after I’ve read the source material.  Chuck said that though he prefers the way things are handled in the book, as a stand-alone work, the film was great.