WATCHMEN - Movie Discussion and Grading (SPOILERS)

[Small White Car]

Also, Rorschach didn't have the whole truth yet when he dropped off his journal. He didn't have any information in there one way or another as to what Dr. Manhattan and Ozymandias were really up to.

I've thought about this more since yesterday, and I agree. With the information in the book, a reader would conclude that Rorschach was closing in on Dr. Manhattan's "evil plan" and went to Antarctica to stop him, and failed trying.

So his journal only adds to the lie that he wanted to expose. It reinforces the lie!

So no, I don't see it as some sort of victory for Rorschach. It's just one last posthumous kick-to-the-guts for the guy.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

How about Rorshach making some imposible jumps and Molochs freaky ears...

Rorshach does struggle with those jumps. He does things that are ridiculous in the comic, too - they just don't look as obviously so in a drawing as they do when an actor is showing doing them live. I'm thinking of that grappling-gun stunt of his to get into Blake's apartment - it's absurd as rendered in the comic, but it's so typically comic book action that people don't see that.

The human race couldn't produce Batman, but that doesn't stop us all from buying the conceit that he's "non-super-powered," after all.

Moloch's ears are pointed in the book - at least in the movie they're "freaky-looking" enough to suggest either deformity or plastic surgery as opposed to Gibbons's Dracula-rendered version.

 

[CaptainCanada]

Even if they decided to publish the journal, the newspaper in question is a white nationalist tabloid; no one would believe them.

 

[Ethros]

I never read reviews of films like this before I see them anymore, as with the big SF movies like this I'm going to see them anyway, so I'll make my own mind up
(ie. Wolverine, Star Trek, T4, Transformers 2)

But now I've seen it I've skimmed a few reviews and it reminds me why I don't bother. One complains that it is "a bit boring" as its too faithful to the comic... so if it's too faithful you criticizse it, and if it's not 100% faithful you go fucking mental


I'll definitely be going again sometime in the next couple of days. And I feel like buying some of the merchandise too. The "Film Companion" and "Art of the Film" books look pretty cool, and after spying the action figures, me want! And the thing with that is once I buy one (gotta be Rorshach) I'll have to buy the whole set


Also just wanna say how much I loved the Dr Manhattens flashbacks montage, the whole out of sequence "It's May 1962, etc" was just brilliant.
And I was also glad of the mature way they handled his big blue dick. I thought maybe we'd have him in his undies the whole time, or only from-the-waist-up shots. But no, it was "yeah he's naked. So what?"

 

[TheBrew]

Two more comments:

This movie rocks in IMAX!

The soundtrack is awesome. I own a few of the songs, but I bought it anyways.

 

[Small White Car]

But now I've seen it I've skimmed a few reviews and it reminds me why I don't bother. One complains that it is "a bit boring" as its too faithful to the comic... so if it's too faithful you criticizse it, and if it's not 100% faithful you go fucking mental

Really? Do you have a name for this mystery crtic that does this?

Because I think you just got confused and thought all reviews are written by the same person. Actually, they're all writen by different people! (True fact!)

If I'm wrong, I'd love to know who, exactly, you're talking about.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Even if they decided to publish the journal, the newspaper in question is a white nationalist tabloid; no one would believe them.

Some people will. Rorshach might have.

"Mainstream," conventional folks won't. This is, I think, part of Moore's whole point-of-view in telling this story.

Does the truth make any difference if it's only recognized - or suspected, at any rate - by whackos and outsiders and people whose "filters" for what can or ought to be believed are broken?

There are aspects to this story, either in the novel or the movie, that are truly perverse and funny and truly funny in perverse ways. This is one of them.

 

[Ethros]

er, what? I never said anything of the sort

 

[Bad Bishop]

Incidentally, there were a couple of sociopathic jerks in the theater. They cheered and laughed when The Comedian was brutally assaulting Sally Jupiter. Did anyone else witness such a reaction to events in the film?

I will be honest and say that yes i thought that part was hilarious. I laughed out loud when he smashed her into the pool table. At this point i had figured out that everything was supposed to be comic-book and it was funny that the Comedian in his old age can withstand his head smashing through various objects like tables, glass, countertops etc (not pavement apparently) but in her prime Sally Jupiter is brought to her knees and defeated by a couple punches and a pool table?

It's not that simple. Blake entered the room and Sally protested. She made the mistake of trying to reason with Blake. And then she was clearly unprepared for the sheer savagery of his assault. That's why she was quickly subdued.

If you liked the assault of Sally Jupiter then you probably loved it when Blake murdered the young Vietnamese girl.

 

[TedShatner10]

I found Watchmen solid and competent, but somewhat boring and souless, perhaps likely more so to anybody not acquainted to the source material. I found President Nixon a complete parody and his prosthetic nose very distracting, the guy playing Henry Kissinger was more convincing. Silk Spectre II and Nite Owl II were the most "straight" characters as in the graphic novel, so they were of course rather less interesting than the Comedian and Rorschach. I liked Ozy more than I expected and he kinda of channelled Tony Blair.

Dr. Manhattan was pitch perfect, while the production values were top draw, with the sets and props being spot on (in addition to the period music). I prefer Iron Man though, much more its own movie rather than a compressed copy.

C+

 

[Small White Car]

er, what? I never said anything of the sort

I used the 'quote' button. It tends to be pretty accurate.

 

[Ethros]

Yes but what you said made no sense. You seemed to have assumed something I didn't mean

 

[DarthPipes]

The funny thing with Rorshach is that he's the only one who tries to do the right thing at the end (although it wasn't the smart thing) and gets killed because of it. The most likely thing I can see out of the New Frontiersman story is there being a rise of Rorshach-like vigilantes, one more fanactical than the other.

 

[Small White Car]

Yes but what you said made no sense. You seemed to have assumed something I didn't mean

You said that someone critisized it for being too faithful. Then you said that that person goes mental if they stray too much.

I simply asked who you're talking about.

 

[Ethros]

Well its an example. Some people just want to criticize things no matter what. So they say its too faithful and therefore bad. Yet they would also no doubt say if it were not faithful that it was bad for being so.
I'm bored of this now anyway, so end of

 

[Rincewiend]

Yes but what you said made no sense. You seemed to have assumed something I didn't mean

You said that someone critisized it for being too faithful. Then you said that that person goes mental if they stray too much.

I simply asked who you're talking about.

I think he meant it in a general sense, not a specific person...
Same was true with the LOTR movies...

 

[Gojirob]

I've been wondering this for years--what is the meaning of Rorschach removing his 'face' right before he is killed? It almost has to mean something.

With all this talk about how Watchmen is such an antecedent to so many other works, I remembered one piece that may have presaged the finale. Moore might have known of it, though I would never say he lifted it, barring his saying that he did.

In Marvel 1st What If series, Gwen Stacy is saved when Peter dives for her and then takes the impact of the water himself, mouth-to-mouth doing the rest. A confrontation with Harry and Norman leads to Norman finally getting professional help. Gwen and Pete marry, but as the ceremony is concluded, Jameson bursts in with police escorts to arrest Peter. In his last paranoid gasp as the Goblin, Norman mailed Jameson his journal spilling everything. Peter is put on the run, unable to see Gwen or May, who had that fabled heart attack upon hearing her nephew's ID.

I can't recall any other works using the 'mailed post-mortem expose' before that, though I wouldn't be surprised if they existed.

 

[Aragorn]

I'm a Marvel... and I'm a DC: Wolverine and Rorschach

 

[The Borgified Corpse]

But if fanboys still hate the film after going and seeing it, they can all line up and suck my dick.

Don't invite your enemies to suck your dick. They may use teeth!

But it's a peace bought at the cost of thousands or millions of lives, and a fragile one resting on a foundation of lies and misunderstandings. I'm not so sure that's a better place.

Still better than all-out war. Was it based on a lie? Yes. But sometimes that's worth it. When it comes to the survival of the species, you can't dick around with morality. A handful of cities and a few million lives is a small price tag to avert a nuclear holocaust.

Perhaps. Personally, I'm of the opinion that if we can't avert mutually assured destruction with our eyes wide open, we don't deserve to survive.

Great scene not in the book: The Comedian on the grassy knoll, firing the shots that kill President Kennedy.

That was cool. At the same time, it's kinda weird since that's something that also happened in our universe. What does that say? That Edward Blake still shot President Kennedy in our universe but just never became the Comedian?

(Plus, as every Red Dwarf fan knows, President Kennedy shot himself.)

As for those who still think Watchmen is "unfilmable" because a few details had to be exorcised... Isn't that the same for nearly every literary adaptation? What makes Watchmen so different? Of course not every little nuance is going to be there on the screen. It's like same with every translation from book to film. That doesn't mean it's "unfilmable" (surely by that definition every book is?). There's a reason why the book is still there at the end of the day. No film could capture every little detail of a book, no matter how lightweight or dense. As Snyder puts it, his adaptation is like a teaser for the book. Hopefully it will cause those who have not read the book discover it for themselves after watching this movie. I think the film version of Watchmen does that.

It's not unfilmable because so much of its detail had to be cut. It's unfilmable because, when you strip away that detail, there's nothing left worth filming. It's like looking at a black & white photograph of a Jackson Pollack painting. You can still see the general shape but it's only a pale copy of the original. The movie has no reason to exist because the graphic novel did it right the first time. I don't even feel that the actors are adding any extra life to their characters that wasn't already there in the book.

 

[hyzmarca]

How do you mean? More blood than a nuclear holocaust? Short of a run-in with a black hole, that doesn't seem possible.

I think that the holocaust from a gradual escalation of tension will be less devastating than the all-out retaliation with everything one side has that will happen when the truth gets out.

I really don't think "the truth getting out" would have that kind of effect. Regardless of who did it or why, the people of earth now know what its like to have cities wiped out in massive explosions, and they want no part of it.

Also, Rorschach didn't have the whole truth yet when he dropped off his journal. He didn't have any information in there one way or another as to what Dr. Manhattan and Ozymandias were really up to.

You have too much faith in humanity. The whole plot is a band-aid, nothing more, placed on top of a deep wound that is infected with necrotizing fasciitis. In ten or twenty years, even if the truth never comes out, people will realize with Dr. Manhatten is nowhere to be found. And, in the meantime, they'll be working on ever more powerful weapons in the hope of building a bomb that's big enough to slay a living god. That arsenal of new and more powerful superweapons is going to be pointed somewhere, once people realize that Dr. Manhatten will probably never return.

Maybe they'll push massive ammounts of funds space colonziation so that not all of their eggs are in one basket. It makes sense when facing a being that could probably wipe out entire planets with a wave of it's arm. And then you've just got interplanetary tensions instead of internetional ones, which will inevitably rise to war.

Maybe they'll encounter alien life but the experience will be tinted by an extreme xenophobia inspired by Veidt's plot and lead to an even worse conflict.

Dr. Manhatten claimed to not be able to change human nature, and perhaps that is true. Is it any likely a mere mortal would be able to do the same?

Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Nothing ever ends, certainly not greed, anger, arrogance, and fear, the things that drive all human conflict.


The movie itself suffered from bad pacing. This could have been handled in editing. As a whole, the movie would work better if many of the scenes, particularly the flashbacks, were reordered to produce a more consistant build up.