Editor's note: Sorry that there hasn't been much content lately, unfortunately life has been getting in the way of my writing and the site doesn't draw enough revenue (read: any revenue) to allow me to find time. Hopefully new reviews will pop up soon, but for now, here is an old review I did for Watchmen. ENJOY!
Wally's Journal
March 8, 2009
The expectation of uproarious applause would have been preposterous at this point. We have just witnessed a film that has been stewing in the minds of the comic book reading public since 1986. When the lights came on in the theater and I go to work the next day, coworkers will scream,"Should I go see this?" and I'll whisper, "No."
"Watchmen" is based on a one shot comic published by DC Comics and written by Allen Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons in response to DC acquiring the rights to another companies characters; however since many of the characters didn't make it past the ending of the story arc Moore was tasked with creating new ones.
This is why most "mainstream" comic fans may not know about these characters, because they aren't the standard Superman, Batman, Spider-man or any other character they may have heard of.
The question becomes at this point, should you care if you didn't know the source material? Well, yes, but please wait for a rental or at least go read the graphic novel.
The story and the characters are there, but all in all the movie just doesn't work. Now this isn't to say that the movie doesn't do anything right. I absolutely loved every second that Rorschach played by Jackie Earle Haley was on screen. He was this movies "Marv" from "Sin City" in that I wished that the movie would have been focused or even paired down to feature him more. He was visually interesting, layered as a character and quotable to boot. The fact of the matter is that if this was Rorschach: The Motion Picture, I might have enjoyed it more.
While watching the film I felt like I was watching the deleted scenes reel on the DVD. So many scenes that just didn't work, were too long, or didn't serve any aspect of the main story were left in that I felt pity on the poor editor who had to have been conditioned to leave things in just because the director liked that part of the comic.
Over the course of the almost three hour picture I walked out appreciating "Sin City" even more because despite the dead on accuracy of the graphic novel, it still made cuts to the more expendable parts of the stories. These cuts gave the movie a quick pace and retained the integrity and heart of the original while the hardcore fans didn't even notice. "Watchmen" is the anti-thesis of this. It had a truckload of material culled directly from the books and it suffered because of it.
Perfect examples of this will require spoiling moments of the movie, so if you plan on testing your tolerance for filler, please discontinue reading.
Case in point: When the Superman-esque Dr. Manhattan needs to have a heart to heart with Sally Jupiter on Mars (you read that right), we spend a ridiculous amount of time just sight-seeing. Now, the movie was shot beautifully. Everything looks amazing and the visuals are almost enough to watch the film; however we just wasted five minutes on what is essentially a conversation that could have been summed up with a few sentences and it broke up the flow of the impending climax of the movie.
This isn't an isolated case either. As Ang Lee's "Hulk" focused too much on making everything "arty" in a movie that movie-goers wanted to just see things go "boom", Zach Snider decides to err on the framing, blocking and lighting of the shots to pay too much attention to how things flow. There are gratuitous love scenes, flashbacks that do not serve the story, and even a fight scene that was thrown in that did nothing more than raise the gore quotient, making some scenes seem like they were from one of the "Saw" movies and not from a DC Comics property.
Also worth noting was the horrible music choices as well. I know that they were probably chosen to set you in the right time frame of the movie (it was supposed to be set in 1985) it didn't work. We literally go from a sad score from a funeral scene to an abrupt flashback blaring at 400 times the volume of the previous scene, "I'm Your Boogie Man" by KC and the Sunshine Band and then back the the funeral score again.
In all, it wasn't the worst comic book movie that I've ever seen as that pleasure goes to the abysmal "Batman and Robin". When I liked the movie, I REALLY liked the movie, but I think that out of the two hours and forty five minutes I was in that theater I only got about an hours worth of entertainment. I just wished that Snider would have delivered a better movie without pandering to his fanboy urge to get every last panel of the books on film. Not even Sam Jackson with an eyepatch could have saved this movie.
2 1/2 Blood Stained Smiley Faces out of 5
