Watchmen review

Fresh out of a 9.20 Watchmen screening.This review will run as it pleases with little consideration if any of the ranting makes sense or not,and will potentially contain spoilers.

Things I liked about it.Having read the graphic novel in its entirety merely two days ago,I still have a pretty clear memory of it.Not to say I understood it,or you know,loved it to bits or anything,just that I can recall.And the film is pretty much a straight-up adaptation,nearly panel to panel and is almost too neatly and perfectly fixed in its compulsive commitment to detail.Nearly all of the film's dialogue is a direct lift,and the film's plot is decisively true to the book (with few harmless additions).Patrick Wilson has a paunch as Nite-Owl,young and old Rorschach has orange hair and dirty freckles,Moloch is thrown into a fridge,Jon speaks monotonously,close to nothing is compromised.This slavish loyalty to its source is where the film finds all its best strengths-the graphic novel,I feel,was built on a very solid story that must've been carefully thought out and perfected before a single line or sketch made the page-as a result the film has an equally firm grip on its story,was visually very powerful and the cautiousness in selecting to include which scenes meant that any bit of trimming would've created loopholes,so the 3 hour running time feels utterly innocuous.To me at least,I heard plenty grumbling on the way out the cinema about how it ran too long.Time was given to the side characters and they were slightly tweaked with or ommited completely (Tales of the Black Freighter will appear as a separate project starring Gerard Butler),I love how they made the psychiatrist less gullable and showed glimpses of parents and old lovers,all these things somehow layered into a story was light and fluid despite the weight of all those details.The sequence over the opening credits did an excellent job of summarising what was about to come ahead.Jackie Earle Haley gives Rorschach a new complexity I never imagined possible,and his character's unmasking was the biggest highlight for me.The ending of the graphic novel which I didn't like,was made tolerable thanks to a bit of argument and conflict,hence disposing the novel's "Everything's Ok,let's shut up" attitude in its conclusion.

Things I didn't like.Matthew Goode's meant to play the smartest man on Earth and a physically undefiable character,but he looks like a wimp and speaks like a librarian.The action didn't really do it for me,everytime someone launched a punch there was an artificial KAPOW BAM PRAK (EXCLAMATION MARKS ! ! !) sound that made it puckish and fake,all this stupid American wannabe-kungfu made more irritating with constant slow-mo and showy violence (bone-cracking noises as joints snapped open+gushing of blood all around) it all seemed so damn tactless.I didn't like the choice of songs,Hallelujah for the creepily-porny Nite Owl-Silk Spectre sex scene was almost criminally cheesy,and too often the grandiose sound of pianos or violins rose to occasion that after a point it lost its effect.One major problem was that I don't think I would've understood much anything if I hadn't read the novel beforehand,so many terms and names were thrown around and taken for granted and there would've been a whole list of What was that and Why did this happen-and I would'nt have been able to appreciated the film's attention to detail and 3 hours of not getting it would've definitely been troubling.In a way this was also good thing,it wasn't self indulgently announcing this and that and explaining every single bit,that would've been hell.The prosthetic face objects and muddy make-up,and the loud song played at the end.The cast,as a team-were most of the time expresionless or defacating emotions as if being ruled by a diagram,and Mars looked like a 2-D computer game.

So.I would say it was a positive experience as a whole,and definitely something you watch in a theatre.

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