WATCHMANS
I have now ... seen ... Watchmen. [I thank you in advance for your accolades in re: my avoidance of the obvious joke.]

It's been about, uh, 12 years or so? since I last read the book, so the most I had going into it was a vague glimmer of some of the characters and plot. I have to confess, I'm just not a big Alan Moore fan. I've read quite a lot of his work and I can appreciate why people like it, I guess it's just not quite my thing. I vaguely recollect liking Watchmen more than most of his other stuff, though, so I was keen to see what they'd do to it on teh big screen.



So yeah. First off, it turns out I'm also not a big fan of Zack Snyder. Again, I'm not really faulting his artistic vision, it's just not really my bag of beans. His directing style pulls me out of the movie with some frequency, and I guess I have a preference for subtle directing that leaves me fully immersed.

With those caveats, I felt the movie was basically a good ride, though I wish I'd been drunk when I was watching it so the things that bugged me wouldn't have bugged me as much. Like for instance, sacrificing time that could have been spent on character development for LARGE HUGE BUCKETS OF BLOOD. Buckets o' Blood is fine for a horror movie, but in something like Watchmen that has a lot of little detail going on, the blood kind of, ha ha, drowns it out.

The love story was fairly boring and felt obligatory.

The ending was a huge crock of shit, made moreso by the way American politics has trended post-9/11. We were all New Yorkers for about five minutes, and then all the red staters went back to hating New York like they always had, and saying shit about blowing up San Francisco because of all them libruls and faggots, etc. So the idea that a vague threat (one that was a scapegoat to begin with) which mysteriously never attacks again will somehow hold the whole world together in peace and love and hippies due solely to their fear of Vague Threat (especially after you've just spent a couple of hours talking about how human nature is evil and brutal and violent and selfish), it fails to fly.

Some of the makeup design was bafflingly bad, given how many dollars they had to stuff inside those latex pieces. Silk Spectre didn't look like an old woman, or even an old woman who'd had a lot of plastic surgery. She looked like a young woman with a huge amount of latex prosthetics glued to her face.

So. What did I like about the movie?

I like things that show super heroes getting old. I like the admission of the passage of time that typically gets left out of comics. Some (though not all) of the costuming was perfect 80s, including the stuff they usually miss, like the hairstyles.

I thought the CGI on Dr. Manhattan was a great use of working the weaknesses of a medium to your advantage. So the uncanny valley hasn't been successfully bridged yet? No problem! This guy's supposed to flip your "not quite human" switch.

I really, really dug Rorschach's character. I thought he was extremely well-done, conveying the right amount of crazy to keep you repulsed, while still managing to draw some empathy as well. My thought when he was screaming at Dr. Manhattan to just do it? The guy wants to die. He's tired of this and he just wants to die.

Blah. Okay. I have that "done typing" feeling coming over me, so I think I shall cease with my blathering and leave it at that.