WATCHMEN - Movie Discussion and Grading (SPOILERS)

I thought he was channeling Chevy Chase in Vacation.

I enjoyed the film - B+

 

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...

 

Aye the music was great. I nearly came when 99 Luft Balons (99 Red Balloons) came on. Love that song!

 

people were laughing at the use of Hallelujah over the soft porn at the showing I went to.

 

Hallelujah? Hallelujah?!

That's fucking terrible.

 

Oh, this apparently is some of you:

 

^So, criticizing a film...is a bad thing?

 

I thought that was meant to be funny (I can't imagine why you'd use it in that context otherwise).

 

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.

 

Why the fuck would you turn the dream into a comedy sequence? That doesn't make sense in any context.

 

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

 

Further proof, were it needed, that Tim Buckley is not, never was and won't ever be even vaguely amusing.

 

Well, if you haven't seen it and pretending you have, yes
It makes one look a fool

 

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.

 

Buckely is a hack.

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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.

 

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?

 

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."