The Great Geek Manual

Movie: Watchmen

Taglines: Justice is coming to all of us. No matter what we do.

Rating: Rated R for… being the Watchmen
Release: March 6, 2009
Running Time: 163 minutes
Starring: Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode, Jackie Earle Haley, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, & Patrick Wilson… IMDB listing

Verdict:
Loyal Watchmen fans will not be disappointed. Director Zack Snyder has beautifully translated Alan Moore’s masterpiece into one hell of a movie. Despite having trimmed some of the tongue-in-cheek subplots, the compacted but largely undiluted storyline retains all of its punch, sacrificing only length and a little of the characters’ grit.

Audience:
Moore fans will love this film, either because it’s so true to the comics… orrr because they’ll have such a good time picking apart all the subtle ways it differs from the comics. Action fans will also love this film for the the excessive violence and rivers of gore it retained from the original story, even though most Bruce Willis/Steven Segul loyalists will likely find themselves checking their watches about halfway through due to the amount of backstory the film packs.

Ladies, if you haven’t read the comic and you don’t count yourself a geek, you’re in for a royal snore fest. This is one hardcore guy movie.

NOT SUITABLE FOR CHILDREN. Buckets of blood and a glowing blue penis make this a very adult film.

Synopsis:
Watchmen is set in an alternate 1985 in which masked vigilantes have fought on the streets alongside the police and brought the Vietnam war to a stop, only to be reviled by the public and outlawed by the government. The world stands on the brink of nuclear annihilation as tensions between the U.S. and Soviet Russia escalate, and one of the world’s best known and most morally ambivalent heroes, the Comedian, is murdered in his apartment. While the rest of the world dismisses the death, Rorschach, the Comedian’s former teammate is determined to exact vengeance for the death, and, convinced that the death is only the first in an attempt to exterminate the masked heroes of the past, he doggedly pursues leads in order to find the mysterious killer, only to uncover a larger plot.

Review:
Superb. Riveting. Gripping. Fantastic. What adjective do I start with? When I stood up at the credits to leave the theater, my first thought was that the film was way shorter than I had expected it to be, only to look down at my watch and realize that, yes, I had in fact been sitting in the same spot for near three hours, counting the previews. And, in my opinion, that’s precisely the way a person should feel when they leave a theater.

There were a hundred wonderful things about this film, and I could discuss it all day, but here are the highlights.

• Because of time constraints, the film’s characters are not as well developed or gritty as their comic origins. However, like J.K. Simmons in the role of J. Jonah Jameson, Jackie Earle Haley seemed born to play Rorschach, and really, wasn’t that the role we were all most worried about?
• Despite the fears of fans concerning the extent to which the ending of the film would be changed, I might not have even noticed the alteration the first time through if I hadn’t read about them advance.
• The Dr. Manhattan costume and special effect were not cheesy in the least. All the CG relating to his role was smoothly done… though his penis does get a lot more screen time than I had expected.
• Violence? Nudity? Gore? It’s all still in there, folks. I’ve never seen so much in one film before. It’s there, and it’s uncensored, and god help me, I loved it! Batman, eat your heart out! This is how a comic book film should go.
• While the film’s subplots were trimmed to short things up, rest easy. The story lost none of its impact in translation from comic to silver screen.

All that being said, I’m not sure how people who haven’t read the Watchmen comics are going to react to this film. Constantine, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and V for Vendetta were all fairly fast-moving, linear stories. Watchmen, on the other hand, includes a great deal of backstory, all told through flashbacks that I can’t help but think most audiences aren’t going to care about. Watchmen works too hard doing justice to its comic forerunner to really be taken as action film on its own merits. Therein lies its Achilles heel.

After every comic geek on the planet has rushed to see Watchmen in the first week of its release who will watch the Watchmen?

More Information:
Check out Watchmen Trailers & Video Clips
David Hayter explains why the ending of Watchmen is different because of 9/11
Geek Tyrant’s review of the Watchmen film
Watchmen character profiles at NBC