Watchmen. [SPOILERS!]

[The Grim Squeaker]

Time for a review thread. Prescreenings are fun :D.

First of all: This really is "Watchmen: The movie version". Not a different version, not an update, not "based on Watchmen", this is a lot closer to "Sin City" in terms of framing copied from the comic and it being mainly material from the comic (with various cuts, and a few new jokes and material).
It's not as good as the comic, nowhere near as good, detailed, intricate, etc' (but that's a given). It's also far less "deep", less of a "Gritty" look behind Superheroes and more of a "superhero/comic book" movie (the cheorography of the fight scenes, especially the last one is less "Watchmen" and more "300/Sin City", aka lots of wire-fu and humans weighing as much as a bowling pin).

Oh, the most important point of all: They did not ruin the movie. And it has all of the really important elements, most importantly of all - the ending. And The Line. The "35 minutes" line. (Yeah, no more giant squid monster. So what?).

A lot of the scenes are really reduced by the overall lack of subtlety, there's a certain feeling of "pornography" in the gratuitousness of the sex, blood, violence and bones snapping (Moore would burst a vein if he hadn't already done so). The scene with Rorsrach's flashback is much, much worse. From "Fuck... Dang" to "Yeah, so? Dang this is a crappy adaption of the scene".
Ozymandias is much less interesting, less sympathetic, and looks like a sharpened blackened condom. (and "Karnak" is waaaay overdone, the only thing missing is the lake of lava).
Going along with the "more of a comic book movie", don't expect Nite Owl to show his age or the classic scene with him trying to fit the suit on, such subtleties are unneeded for "Watchmen! Now with Kung POW Action!".
The music is sometimes a bit much, but "The times they are a'changing" works well (The opening credits are GREAT, don't miss them!), "All along the watchtower" continues it's streak from BSG to be a really awesome penultimate song, and "March of the Valkyries" has its best appearance in a movie ever. (Manhatten, Vietnam and lots of exploding).
Speaking of Manhatten, he's just less...."good" than the comic version - the SFX are great (though I dislike the skin pores), and the glass structure looks AMAZING, but his character and behavior are too compressed. (Although the full flashbacks were maintained along with many others, a thing which is to bee very highly commended to "300 Zack Snyder - director of Watchmen").
Speaking of the director - too much "Slow motion - snap to movement, then back to slow mo". Waaaaay too much, especially in the begginning where's it's too gratious. And speaking yet again of the beginning - it's too heavy of flashbacks, the issue of Silk's father isn't so much foreshadowed as blared out loudly roughly 7 or so times.

Overall? It's an excellent adaption, and might have been better with a little more subtlety, a little less teenage crowd attempts at pandering, but the cuts were good and done very well overall (it still clocks in at 3 hours). Definetly a good movie, and i'll probably buy the dvd if only for the awesome looking "Tales of the black freighter mini-movie". I just might have enjoyed it more if I didn't know Watchmen damn near by heart already, it felt either like seeing a movie adaption, or an inferior movie version in damn near almost every screen. (Though there were some good changes, the jokes, the New Frontiersman, this and that).

Feel free to lambast me for missing details, I'm writing this after a sleepless night. :).

(Oh and my recommendation? Go see it. Seriously, even if you're not a fan of the comic. Which you should read, after the movie ;)).

[The Minx]

Sorry, a bit off topic here, but I ran into this on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmen_(film)

Billy Crudup as Dr. Jon Osterman / Doctor Manhattan:[14] A superhero with genuine powers who works for the U.S. government. The role was once pursued by actor Keanu Reeves,[15] but the actor abandoned his pursuit when the studio held up the project over budget concerns.[3] As well as playing Osterman in flashback as a human, for his post-accident scenes as Dr. Manhattan, Crudup is replaced in the film with a motion-capture CG version of himself. During filming, Crudup acted opposite his co-stars, wearing a white suit covered in blue LEDs, so he would give off an otherworldly glow in real life, just as the computer-generated Manhattan does in the movie. Crudup had to keep thinking of the character in the comic, because he felt ridiculous in the suit.[8] Crudup deemed it fortunate he did not have to wear prosthetics or fit into a rubber costume like the other actors though, and would remind them of this when they made jokes about his appearance.[5] Snyder chose not to electronically alter Crudup's voice for Manhattan, explaining the character "would try and put everyone as much at ease as he could, instead of having a robotic voice that I think would feel off-putting".[16]

Emphasis mine. Thank the FSM that didn't fly.

[Cynical Cat]

Saw it in IMAX. A very good, but not perfect version of The Watchman. Full points to Snyder for pulling it off. I won't bore you with nitpicks.


Two points:

I happen to like Snyders slow-mo normal speed snap backs much better than the lightning fast cuts and jittery cams that so many other directors use.

The choice of using a montage of events leading up to the present during the title sequence was excellent. It tells the alternate history in an interesting way right up front without wasting any screen time.

[Dark Silver]

Had seen it myself Saturday night, or was it sunday?

May have been sunday. I liked it. As others have said, not a perfect retelling of the graphic novel, but it was very well done.

Rorsache was done perfectly by his actor, and stole the movie in my opinion.

[Cynical Cat]

Jackie Earl Haley was perfectly cast as Rorshach and he did hit it out of the park. Patrick Wilson as Nite Owl II was also damn good, but the part isn't as magnetic as the fucked up Rorshach.

[The Cleric]

I, and my friend who had also read the comic, enjoyed it greatly. My other friend who had not was bored out of his skull. It was about as good as you could make a single movie adaptation. I would have preferred a Kill Bill treatment, with 2 separate 2 hour movies both to break up the "sitting in a theater seat for 3 hours" and to fit in a little more characterization for some of the main characters (Ozymandias felt less human than Manhattan in the film).

[General Havoc]

Extremely long though it was, I saw the movie on Saturday and thought it was a tour-de-force. It wasn't perfect, I thought Ozymandias was a little too soporific and Nite Owl II had a few ??? moments, but Rorshach was absolutely pitch-perfect. I'm serious. Jackie Earl Haley was Rorshach, no less so than Robert Downey Jr. was Tony Stark in Iron Man. He was memorizing, and I agree that he stole the show. Dr. Manhattan and the Comedian were both brilliant as well.

I agree with Cynical cat on the fight style. The slow-fast oscillation can be overdone, for sure (I thought 300 overused it), but it's miles being the hand-cam impossible-to-follow-the-action crap that a lot of modern movies (*Cough* Transformers) use. When the characters in Watchmen fought, I could see and follow the movements and the action. That alone made it better than about half of the "action" pictures of the last five years.

And that title sequence... it was my favorite part of the movie, and set to a great piece of music no less. I loved it, but then I'm a sucker for allohistory in general. I thought some of the tableaux (Andy Warhol!) were inspired genius.

Overall, I give it 8.5/10. It was a little too long, it followed the novels a little too literally, and I had some nagging problems with the portrayal of Ozymandias, as well as a few twitches of ham-acting from Nite Owl and Silk Spectre, but all things considered I thought it was an excellent film, and worthy of its source.

How often can we say that about a graphic novel adaptation?

[Charon]

The title sequence was brilliant. It set the stage perfectly for the alternate history so people wouldn't spend half of the movie going "What? Huh? When did that happen?" And since it was during the opening sequence no time from the movie was actually lost.

Overall I thought it was very well done. I have a few quibbles about scenes that were changed or lines that were taken out or moved around but those are overall minor points. My biggest disappointment in this department was at the end, when Adrian and Dr. Manhattan are speaking after everything has happened and Adrian asks Dr. Manhattan if he did the right thing in the end and Dr. Manhattan tells him that nothing ever ends. It was a GREAT line that was especially poetic for when it happened and who it happened between, and giving it to Sally to say to Nite Owl II just really deadened it.

The characterization was amazingly well done. Hell when the Psychiatrist showed up I actually looked at my friend and said "Holy shit, it's actually him!" In my opinion however Dr. Manhattan was the weakest of the characters in the movie. To me he displayed far too much emotion (scary thought, I know) and I at least didn't really get that sense of otherworldliness about him nearly as strong. His scene on Mars almost seemed to be more of a flashback than him simply experiencing all of it at the same time, and several of his comments dealing with his perception of time are cut out completely so in the end I guess he feels far more human than he should for me. But it was still overall very well done with Dr. Manhattan.

Stayed pretty much true to the book, brilliantly well done characterization on pretty much all fronts, and I do not mourn the loss of the squid. That was always somewhat of a sticky point for me anyway and my real fear going into the movie was that they were going to involve Dr. Manhattan directly in Adrian's plot which would have just... killed everything ever.

[LadyTevar]

Finally got to see the movie myself.

Good adaptation, I had very little problem with the changes. I'm glad the Squid was gone. Manhattan is a better 'threat'.

The flashbacks were well-handled, placed in a manner that made them seem natural, that people really would be thinking about those things at that time.

The music rocked. Although when "All Along the Watchtower" started playing I couldn't help laughing. Last night was nBSG's finale, which uses a variation of the song, so the placement was just hilarious to me.
So was the placement of "Halleluah", with the fire-control accident.

But it was the SuperHero moments that made the film for me. Rorschrach's monkey-like climbing. Silk Specter and Nite Owl against the street gang. The fight against Ozmandius. It had all the feats of strength any comic should have, and did it beautifully.

I give the film A+

[Nightswift]

The title sequence was brilliant. It set the stage perfectly for the alternate history so people wouldn't spend half of the movie going "What? Huh? When did that happen?" And since it was during the opening sequence no time from the movie was actually lost.

I was so grateful for that title sequence. It was very well done.
I haven't read the comic, but I really did enjoy the movie. There were only one or two parts where my friends and I went "Wait...what?"...

One of which was when the Silk Spectre wanted to be dropped into the burning building. To do what exactly? To tell the people to get by the window (which they were already doing) so she could open it. Dodging all the flaming boards and putting herself in all this danger was pointless if all they were going to do was pull the ship up to the window anyway. Ah well, maybe I was just reading too much into it.

Still a really great movie.