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Watchmen -- worth watching

Posted by Bill McNeal (A) on March 19, 2009 at 18:33:02

Well, finally went to see Watchmen, and while I can carp about lots of things, overall I found it quite worth watching.

Certainly I would’ve preferred using the opening straight from the graphic novel and not go for the let’s-layout-the-framework-of-the-alternate-history approach used in the film. But it quickly got better for me, peaking with the use of the Koyaanisqatsi music during one of the best visual sequences. (Valley had to be the putrid sequence of Night Owl finally getting it up to the Cohen Hallelujah…… really poor choice).

I was kind of amazed at the matching of actors & sets to the original comic work. Can’t imagine how they did it. Awfully difficult to do in my opinion.

Re the ultra violence, I don’t really know what to say. I can certainly see Tinear’s point. Heck, I stopped reading Harlan Coben due to my disgust at his over-use of written descriptions of horrible acts. On the other hand, decades ago I used to prattle on about movies & TV showing people getting shot & falling down, no blood or anything messy, which at the time I believed led people to think it was just practically convenient to shoot something bothering them. I still believe it would be morally worth showing some of the usually rotten, traumatic effects on relatives & friends of gunned-down victims. But here in America we don’t go there much.

But there’d have been no way of getting around the comic-book violence featured in Alan Moore’s works like V for Vendetta and From Hell (the first of these I thought flopped as a flick, the second I rather enjoyed even though the film version was wildly different from the original). Believe me, the filmed version of Rorschach axing the child-killers head may have seemed over the top, but it’s a quite softened version of what Rorschach does to him in the graphic novel.

While I think the original work was even more thought-provoking, I think the film did reasonably well in this regard. As an example, it got me thinking about Timothy McVeigh, who went for the body count in his quest to set the world straight. An aside here: I recently read that McVeigh enjoyed Gore Vidal’s work and began corresponding with Vidal after his arrest. If I recall correctly, Vidal wasn’t all that pleased with the situation but did maintain some contact w/McVeigh. I believe a play was written about this by (of all people) the gay writer Edmund White.

Anyhow, enough random thoughts about this. I would say, though, that this is a movie worth seeing, that I did not find it overly long or boring. It’s probably best seen after the book, but I don’t know this for certain.

And the guy playing Rorschach was just incredible in his few non-masked scenes.

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Kimber Kable

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