Watchmen

[Rorschach]

Has anyone seen the movie yet? If so, what did you think?

I've read the comics and even though, as with most adaptations, the source is always better than the film I thought the movie was very well done. I really enjoyed the cinematography, even if they did change the ending a lil


Thoughts?

[the Empress]

I've seen it . . . I thought it was interesting and I loved the soundtrack. Rorschach was particularly well-played . . . but the film seemed a little in love with itself in places, with some of the cinematography being fairly predictable, e.g.

Spoiler: show

the blood under the bathroom door in the prison - really just needed the flush, the blood made it a predictable sequence. Also the 'assassin', it was obvious that he was planted (target selection, the hand over his mouth clearly cupping it rather than preventing him from biting down)

I know loads of people will disagree with me though. My brother's really into the comics and felt it portrayed them well.

[James.C.]

yeah, saw it last night, thought it was pretty awesome. Far too much man-buttocks in it for me.

[Abserdman]

I saw it last night and it was awesome! Slightly gory though (Yes, I'm going to cut your hands off with an angle grinder...). I haven't read the book so I can't say how it compares.

[Hennessy]

I watched it last night and there was some puff sitting right behind me gasping and moaning every time it was a little bit gory, fairly ruined the best bits of the film.

[Aureliano]

Great, laid-back pacing from the very beginning, and yes, some beautiful eye-candy cinematography. The acting was decent throughout, and whatever qualms I might have had with plot/actors soon went away when I realised that this was no Spiderman 3.

Snyder is clearly a big fanboy, but that in itself does not prevent a lot of movies based on cult source material from being flushed down the proverbial toilet. In that respect, it reminded me a lot of something like Peter Jackson's LOTR productions, where there's fantastic material to work with and the final cut has so much more detail than you could have hoped for. You might not agree with every scene choice or song used for the soundtrack, but all in all it's a very solid package. Needless to say, I'm looking forward to DVD extras and the Black Freighter animated short.

Oh and Rorschach really does steal the show...

[James.C.]

I watched it last night and there was some puff sitting right behind me gasping and moaning every time it was a little bit gory, fairly ruined the best bits of the film.

i had someone doing that behind me, can't remember if there was anyone else sitting on the same row as me and my friend though, was bloody irritating.

[Haunted]

Snyder really was the perfect director for this movie. Been an avid fan of his since Dawn of the Dead.

The film was very faithful to the source material with the odd alteration here or there to make it more palatable to today's audience. What really surprised me was how good the ending the film went with; it was much better than the comic. I never really liked squidy, and this ending was so much more believable.

[Delts]

I enjoyed it but I felt the pace was a bit slow going. Soundtrack was awesome and almost stole the show bar the gore.

[Ruru Hedgehog]

I really didn't like it.
I felt it didn't accommodate well for people who were new to the Watchmen universe, and it just ended up being a mix of The Avengers and Sin City.
Maybe I was approaching it the wrong way and I might enjoy it if I saw it again, but first impressions did not go well on me.

[Jormungand]

It had some serious pacing issues, but thematically it was all there. I also think it was way too violent - I don't mean in a kind of 'think of the children' moral guardian way, but in that it was redundant and sometimes undermined the film. The scene mentioned above with the toilet is a good example; I thought they were going to leave it unstated as intentional bathos and juxtaposition to the eagerness to show violence elsewhere in the film, but I suppose I expected too much there.

It had an absolutely fantastic opening scene though. Especially with the implication that the gunman on the grassy knoll was the Comedian. And the flower-in-the-rifle subversion. The ending was also much more plausible to me. Odd that those are both members of the few 'new bits' not virtually identical to the graphic novel, and yet were very good.

Acting was good, especially Rorschach's actor with the mask off. I think Dr Manhattan's wang probably could have got its own credit though...

As far as influences, Sin City is later than Watchmen and is part of the 'darker and edgier' movement comic books underwent as a result of the release of Watchmen (along with other seminal works like The Killing Joke.) Part of the reason I think the film is less effective is simply because we're more used to this kind of perspective thanks to films like The Dark Knight. The Avengers I can't comment on because I haven't seen it, but I'll take your word for it.

As for watching it again, I know plenty of people who recommend reading each of the 12 comics that make up the miniseries at the rate of one a day tops to let it sink in... so it's not surprising that it's been called unfilmable and a single viewing is pretty incomprehensible. It certainly gels with my findings which is that the film has generally been better received on average by those familiar, if not necessarily fans, of the source material.

[Cain]

Like everything else, Watchmen is better with facebook http://www.psychicsquid.com/

Edward Blake is no longer online.

Janey Slater has added cancer to her interests

[the Empress]

Acting was good, especially Rorschach's actor with the mask off. I think Dr Manhattan's wang probably could have got its own credit though...

lol, this crossed my mind too. You know you're a god if pants are optional.

[Ipsos Custodes]

I really didn't like it.
I felt it didn't accommodate well for people who were new to the Watchmen universe, and it just ended up being a mix of The Avengers and Sin City.
Maybe I was approaching it the wrong way and I might enjoy it if I saw it again, but first impressions did not go well on me.

It was a one-off miniseries, so there really isn't much of a universe to speak out outside what you saw in the film. The series gives impression of a long history in comics without actually having one at all. The film actually managed to cover an impressive amount of details relating to the characters' backstories, and that of the world around them.

[Ruru Hedgehog]

I really didn't like it.
I felt it didn't accommodate well for people who were new to the Watchmen universe, and it just ended up being a mix of The Avengers and Sin City.
Maybe I was approaching it the wrong way and I might enjoy it if I saw it again, but first impressions did not go well on me.

It was a one-off miniseries, so there really isn't much of a universe to speak out outside what you saw in the film. The series gives impression of a long history in comics without actually having one at all. The film actually managed to cover an impressive amount of details relating to the characters' backstories, and that of the world around them.

Even so... I'm sure I wasn't the only left confused.
There was alot going on from the very start that could have been better paced. I mean, I do rememeber the end of it, once I had a vague idea of who was who and what the hell was going on, and that was fairly interesting...
But I noticed that it slowed down towards the end, and was way too quick at the beginning to manage to have a fair idea of what the rest of the story was to entail...

[David Bean]

I very much enjoyed this film, and would like to see it again. I think what fascinated me most of all was the realism of its presentation of an alternative history, most of which could very well have happened.

All right, so you can forget about Dr Manhattan, and Nixon would never have been elected to more than two terms never mind how successfully Vietnam had gone, but the idea of ordinary people deciding for themselves to become 'superheroes' might very well have happened. I was confused at first because, knowing nothing else about the universe it was set in, I didn't realise that the only real superhero - as in the only one with superhuman powers - was Manhattan; Rorschach's mask was explained as a new material derived as an offshoot of Manhattan's research, and even Ozymandias is just a man who happens to be highly intelligent and a skilled fighter. I watched a fake documentary set in the late '70s of a Watchmen world, and they explained that the original Minutemen began with Hooded Justice, who inspired so many others to follow him. If Hooded Justice had been real, who's to say that we mightn't have ended up with Watchmen-style superheroes - that we might not even have them today?

I can just picture a world where some of today's top fighters - guys like Anderson Silva and Fedor Emmelianenko, and perhaps even some of the great names of the past, like Bruce Lee and the Gracie family - had eschewed martial arts, and become masked vigilante crime-fighters instead.

In fact, who's to say it couldn't happen yet?

[Hennessy]

I very much enjoyed this film, and would like to see it again. I think what fascinated me most of all was the realism of its presentation of an alternative history, most of which could very well have happened.

All right, so you can forget about Dr Manhattan, and Nixon would never have been elected to more than two terms never mind how successfully Vietnam had gone, but the idea of ordinary people deciding for themselves to become 'superheroes' might very well have happened. I was confused at first because, knowing nothing else about the universe it was set in, I didn't realise that the only real superhero - as in the only one with superhuman powers - was Manhattan; Rorschach's mask was explained as a new material derived as an offshoot of Manhattan's research, and even Ozymandias is just a man who happens to be highly intelligent and a skilled fighter. I watched a fake documentary set in the late '70s of a Watchmen world, and they explained that the original Minutemen began with Hooded Justice, who inspired so many others to follow him. If Hooded Justice had been real, who's to say that we mightn't have ended up with Watchmen-style superheroes - that we might not even have them today?

I can just picture a world where some of today's top fighters - guys like Anderson Silva and Fedor Emmelianenko, and perhaps even some of the great names of the past, like Bruce Lee and the Gracie family - had eschewed martial arts, and become masked vigilante crime-fighters instead.

In fact, who's to say it couldn't happen yet?

I take it you're being sarcastic or you're still in a dreamy post-movie state. The idea is lamentably ridiculous but I shall indulge in it for just a while. The problem with Bruce Lee or others taking up the mantle of crime-fighting is that staple of all other genres of movie that is always sadly absent from high-flying kung-fu or superhero movies, why here's one now



Invented way back when, the gun effectively rules out all kind of machismo posturing and martial-art tomfoolery, by virtue of a simple mechanism that uses the aptly named gunpowder to propel metal missiles at an opponent with the click of a trigger. Some early examples of the gun overruling the bullshit mysticism of superhuman powers are at the Battle of Omdurman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Omdurman) or the turn of the century Boxer Rebellion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxer_rebellion), where it went single-handed against legions of magically empowered Chinese martial artists and wholeheartedly disproved the theory that incantations or invoking your magical "chi" power can provide a shield against a small lead bullet travelling a thousand yards a second.

Technology 1-0 Magic Superhuman Prowess.

In fact, to take it further, my favourite normal "hero" of childhood was Indiana Jones, muchly because when faced with a local village martial artist he promptly shot the guy dead, utilising superior reflexes in his thumb and forefinger over years of ardouos training and sacrifice. The reason, I suppose, that guns are often left out of movies where ordinary people get superhuman powers that don't include being utterly invulnerable, is because of this famous scene, and because legions of sweaty pasty-faced fanboys with waistlines to match their average IQ would like to believe they too can become some sort of Bruce Lee-esque killing machine. If only they could lay off the pies. And do some exercise. And if magic existed. And if they were chosen to recieve this superhuman goodness over millions of other human beings in better shape with less bizarre porn files and actual jobs. Witness:(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_kid)

So the whole thing is quite ridiculous, and unworthy of further comment. Apart from the Watchmen movie was good, and INDY FUCKING ROCKS MAN YEAH!

[the Empress]

but the idea of ordinary people deciding for themselves to become 'superheroes' might very well have happened.

Have you seen 'Mystery Men'? It's brilliant, including 'The Shoveller' (he has a shovel) and 'The Blue Raja' (he throws cultery). Eddie Izzard's in it too, so bonus.

[Edit] Trailer, just 'cos. http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi3706979097/

[Hennessy]

but the idea of ordinary people deciding for themselves to become 'superheroes' might very well have happened.

Have you seen 'Mystery Men'? It's brilliant, including 'The Shoveller' (he has a shovel) and 'The Blue Raja' (he throws cultery). Eddie Izzard's in it too, so bonus.

[Edit] Trailer, just 'cos. http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi3706979097/

Yes and it got 5.8/10 on imdb, so it's not "brilliant", it's pretty naff, as the score by your peers indicates.

[the Empress]

[post 2 as I accidently deleted myself] I like it. My 'peers' don't dictate to me. If you don't like it, fine.