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WATCHMEN - Movie Discussion and Grading (SPOILERS)

Grade the movie


  • Total voters
    291
The attempts to recreate actual historical figures - even the brief profile image of Kennedy shaking Manhattan's hand - fall flat. I got the sense that the filmmakers figure that most of their audience just doesn't remember these people well enough to notice how bad the impersonations are.
I thought they weren't really trying to impersonate them so much as make them caricatures of the actual people.
 
Back from seeing Watchmen...
Both me and my brother liked it...
Neither of us read the original comic/graphic novel...
I think the premise of Super Heroes being human was spoofed a bit in Mystery Men...
I would give it a 8 or 9 out of 10...
 
Awesome!
The story flows perfectly, the imagery is rich, the music is awesome - All Along The Watchtower, Hallelujah, Everybody Wants to Rule the World (lol!!!!)...
Aye the music was great. I nearly came when 99 Luft Balons (99 Red Balloons) came on. Love that song! :D
 
I enjoyed it. I've been to much shorter movies which seemed much longer.

Great use of the source materials. Few if any slow parts. Great use of music to set the timeframe.

Great acting, too. I had heard Akerman had done a bad job but I thought she did quite well. Hot too.

(she's no Gugino though)
 
Why should the other countries care about trying to "make America a better place" when it was their "imperialist weapon" that did all the damage?

They don't.

They care about cooperating in an attempt to find some protection against Dr. Manhattan - who destroyed cities in many nations, not just New York.

Osterman is the only character in the movie who really believes that he's not God, you see. Even the others who claim otherwise treat him as if he is. And each of the Watchmen has his/her own distinct concept of what "God" is or ought to be, just as they each have starkly different concepts of what matters in the name of justice.

That may be true, but for me I just couldn't buy that Manhattan would be perceived as a continual threat, in the way an alien invasion from out of nowhere would.

Why would the materialization of a giant alien squid out of nowhere - a now dead squid, by the by - be perceived as a "continual threat?"

Manhattan works because he's real to people - he's a individual entity, human enough to be apparently motivated by anger and outrage and pettiness, and people who think about him at all have doubtless been scared shitless by the whole notion for decades now. Manhattan is God, and now he's had enough of us. :)

I loved Dan's line - "People will behave as long as they think Jon's watching" - even though it was a bit on-the-nose.
 
They don't.

They care about cooperating in an attempt to find some protection against Dr. Manhattan - who destroyed cities in many nations, not just New York.

Osterman is the only character in the movie who really believes that he's not God, you see. Even the others who claim otherwise treat him as if he is. And each of the Watchmen has his/her own distinct concept of what "God" is or ought to be, just as they each have starkly different concepts of what matters in the name of justice.

That may be true, but for me I just couldn't buy that Manhattan would be perceived as a continual threat, in the way an alien invasion from out of nowhere would.

Why would the materialization of a giant alien squid out of nowhere - a now dead squid, by the by - be perceived as a "continual threat?"

Manhattan works because he's real to people - he's a individual entity, human enough to be apparently motivated by anger and outrage and pettiness, and people who think about him at all have doubtless been scared shitless by the whole notion for decades now. Manhattan is God, and now he's had enough of us. :)

They also make a point of saying at the end that things will likely stay 'peaceful' because they think Manhattan is still watcing.
 
B. I liked Wilson as Dreiberg, Laurie's body :) and the alternative history stuff (the violence was strong but mostly fitting), but it was just too packed. Rorschach's monotonous pessimism didn't work as well onscreen, nor did Manhattan reminiscing about time (that sequence didn't seem necessary-it's OK to not explain everything). Nite Owl & Rorscach having a friendship always seemed weird; how they figured Veidt was involved was rushed, and so was Manhattan returning to humanity. The biggest problem, aside from too many characters, was that they didn't emphasize the possibility of World War III and so the picture of Veidt was also less than the admiring comic book version.
 
Oh, this apparently is some of you:

Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. Ah. Oh. He. He. Ah-ha. Ha. Hoo. He. Ha. Ah-ha...

...and I thought my jokes were bad.

Buckely is a hack.

------

I thought the new ending worked much better just because we've seen how a devastating attack on NY already changed the world: it made it more unstable. In (I hate to use this term) a "post 9-11 world", the original ending just wouldn't be credible. The only thing I think was a substantial improvement over the novel. Everything else was equally or slightly less awesome.
 
So nobody else thought made this too much of a superhero movie? I get that there was a lot of cool stuff in it, but to me they glamorized these characters so much that it missed the point of the book entirely.
I don't think they glamorized the characters at all. Manhattan doesn't care about humanity. Rorschach was willing to start a global war so he didn't have to tell a lie. The Comedian turns Jack Bauer's excesses up to 11, especially during the "police strike" and informant-in-the-bar scenes.

Where was the glamorization?
 
They also make a point of saying at the end that things will likely stay 'peaceful' because they think Manhattan is still watcing.

Yes, I loved that. People will behave "as long as they think Jon is watching."

As long as God is watching...

I don't think they glamourized the characters in any way. The closest thing to that, perhaps, is that Dan really seems to grow a bit heroic in a very straight-ahead, square-jawed way when he puts on the costume. That and Goode's interpretation of Veidt are two cases where the actors put something more into the characters than exists in the book - by interpretation and performance, rather than padding out the parts.

It's been years since I last read the novel, and I just now finished browsing through it - I was curious about how much of the dialogue that seemed to "humanize" Manhattan during the Mars sequence with Laurie was added by the writers to make him into a more conventionally understandable character. I was shocked - nary a word, really. In fact, Moore goes on a bit further than the screenwriters did to extend Manhattan's recognition of Laurie's uniqueness into a revelation that all life on Earth matters because it's a "thermodynamic miracle."
 
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