Well, it’s Pagliacci in the comic, too.
I wish the movie would’ve been edited to reflect the passage of time that the comic covered. For instance, Nite Owl and SS doze off by the pool at Ozymandias’s place. Rorschach’s psych eval takes place over a few days. These all could have been implied with just a few more seconds of editing. The movie wouldn’t have been any longer, but it would’ve allowed the material to breath.
I liked the movie, but I think it hit the major plot points while missing some of the theme. The book has a lot of violence, yes, but it’s presented so as to highlight its ugly brutality and pointlessness. On the other hand, the movie is full of splatterporn, lovingly zooming in on every drop of blood and piece of bone. The violence isn’t supposed to be cool, it’s supposed to be terrible and ominous.
The ending was not as bad as I thought it might be, but not enough time was given for it to have enough weight. It’s pretty much, oh look at this crater, let’s go to Antarctica! Plus, with no piles of bodies everywhere it’s much too sanitary. Ozy claims to feel all the deaths he caused, but when those mountains of corpses aren’t shown it doesn’t really mean anything to the audience.
A really minor thing that took me out of the film a little and was completely unnecessary: Night Owl II’s goggles. How the hell, even in a world with Manhattan-tech distributed all around (not that that was made especially clear), can they have apparently a real-time link with some supercomputer that can identify people by analyzing images of their fingertips, and project the info again real time into the goggles? That would be quite a trick these days! Plus, even Veidt’s computer interface didn’t seem much more advanced than some 286 type thing. I’ve always seen Night Owl’s gadgets as ingenious low-tech solutions, not as some ‘indistinguishable from magic’ type of deal…
Also, regarding Ozymandias, I think part of the problem is that we don’t really see him with his ‘mask’ – his public persona – on; I can only remember the interview pretty much at the start. I don’t think painting him as somewhat removed in private is all that far off mark.
Probably more like a 68000 type thing, to be precise. 
It looked about right.
Derleth, about the Rorschach killing;
He found the clothing ( teddy bear panties, by the looks of them) in the stove, in the disused dressmaker’s shop where subject was living. That matters a little. Rorschach, in the comic, actually feels the stove before he checks it, to boot—one would guess that it was warm, but it’s not said specifically.
Most people, perhaps, would be reluctant to act on “flimsy” evidence, but Rorschach is not “most people.” He’s already an experienced vigilante. I don’t know how much experience he has with identifying human body parts by sight, as he doesn’t say, though I’d guess it’s more than mine. We’re also limited to the fact that we, the readers, only see about five panels of the dogs gnawing the bones. We obviously can’t see everything he’d be seeing at the moment, and there’s a gap in the narrative afterwards. We don’t know if there were other bones lying around, or if he checked the dogs’ innards for other parts, or looked for teeth in the stove, or if he went out to race slot cars until the guy got back, or what. But you’re looking at the situation and the character with no regards to the context, even to the limitations of the medium, which means you’re making your own assumptions, already.
And…of course the book was better at establishing his character. It’s a book. 
There’s a hell of a lot more detail and depth you can go into, at a fairly leisurely pace. In a movie, you don’t always have that luxury—but you usually can do some things better than a book, like portraying emotion, or action, and giving it a harder impact than you could with text or still images.
So, sometimes, that’s just what you end up having to use in in-depth exposition’s place. Obviously, with varying results.
Heh. I knew that nit wouldn’t go unpicked.
By the way, has anybody checked out the motion comics? I just saw the first episode, and I think they’re awesome – to the graphic novel what an audio book is to a regular novel.
Also, I just now learned that there’s a Watchmen prequel game coming out (The End is Nigh)? Not sure how to feel about that…
Horrified. The answer is horrified.
I guess it’s a decent enough movie if you read and watched the book, or are into massively graphic violence. Personally, I thought it was just…disgusting. One of the grossest things I’ve ever seen, and I’m the kind of person who’ll pick maggots out of an oozing wound with one hand and eat rice with the other. They could have easily made the thing less of a bladder buster by cutting out roughly half an hour of blood splatter, compound fractures, and boobies. (I got nothing against boobies, but they hold absolutely zero interest for me at all and prolonging the sex scene did nothing to advance the story. It was nothing but blatant “distract guys with boobies and thigh-high boots.”)
All in all, I haven’t read the books, and if the movie is at all faithful to the books, I’m glad I never wasted my time in that particular pursuit. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen a superhero treatment where I came away without the tiniest inkling of what people see in the franchise. There’s nothing likeable in any of these people, except maybe the owl guy, and he’s merely inoffensive.
Maybe the appeal would be clearer if they hadn’t tried to shove so much into one movie, I don’t know.
I downloaded the game onto my xbox this morning. I’ll report back if I get a chance to play it.
I got distracted and tuned out there for a sec. I was thinking of boobies and thigh-high boots…
re: (Squid, the bar cutting scene, and the kiddie rapist)
The Squid thing always just seemed meh. In fact, I think Moore acknowledges taking it from The Outer Limits. I liked this solution better. Manhattan was already a source of fear. Why not use him as the villain? Seems more direct and plausible.
The bar cutting scene. In the comic, it seems like the just cut the guy’s throat, but still left him in the way. Here, they sawed his arms off. That scene always seemed poorly executed.
The Kiddie rapist. I loved the vengeance, but the handcuff,hacksaw, and fire thing always seemed like a Bond villain. I like that Rorschach just went apeshit and hacked the dude to pieces. Seems much more violent and psychopathic. The scene always played like someone flipped a switch turning Kovacs into Rohrschach. I had no problem with the scene. I was talking more about the response.
One thing that WAS missing from the scene was the “closed my eyes” dialogue. I would have loved to have seen the screen go black, hear Rorschach’s hrrm, had him open his eyes and see the world through his mask. Missed opportunity.
This is the problem with anyone doing Watchmen. We the diehards have probably directed this film in our heads dozens of times.
But speaking of Rorschach’s famous hrrm, I was surprised (pleasantly so) that it was executed in such an understated manner.
Well, in the book they used an arc-welder to cut the lock. The reason to cut the first goon’s throat is so he won’t struggle and get in the way, and there was a comment to the effect of the arc welder partly cooking the corpse. The movie went with an angle-grinder instead, and I can understand the decision.
The cleaver and spray of blood (and psychological transformation) was the result of book-Rorschach killing the kidnapper’s dogs, but I guess graphically killing a child-killer is more acceptable to an audience than graphically killing a German shepherd.
Overall, I’m reasonably satisfied, though I can see the limitations imposed by the medium.
Any adaptation necessarily gives rise to a host of difficult choices and questions for those steering the project. How to balance fidelity to the source with the reality that adaptation from one medium to another necessarily involves some changes, alterations and new creative choices? How to translate from the grammar and understood conventions of the source medium to the different grammar and conventions of the new medium?
In trying to bring Watchmen to the big screen, I think Snyder and his team faced a great many tough decisions and creative challenges, and that the process of adaptation was uniquely problematic because the source material is so dense, so brilliant, so layered and so different from anything else.
I think they created a movie that was about as good as it was ever going to be. In the long term, I doubt it will be seen as a great film, but I think it will be regarded as a great adaptation and a high water-mark in many ways - certainly in terms of visual fidelity to a graphic novel. One can debate whether this is such a laudable goal, but given that it was such a large part of Snyder’s ambition, one has to say he and the hundreds of key people working on the movie did an amazing job.
I think there were always going to be two major problems with this project.
The first is that Watchmen is just too dense to be squeezed into a single movie. As many have said, the movie could have been a mini-series of 12 hour-long episodes and still not managed to fit everything in, even without the Black Freighter! The density does not arise from the main real-time story in the book, starting with the death of the Comedian and ending with the climactic confrontation between Rorschach and Dr M. That story could quite easily have been accommodated within a single movie. The density arises from all the backstory, all the layering, all the details that have to be sketched in to fully understand that story and the characters involved.
The second is that there were always going to be at least three different audiences: the fans who know this ‘sacred’ graphic novel very well and want to see it done perfectly or not at all; those who have no prior knowledge and don’t want to have to read the GN to enjoy the film; and those who know a little about it, because they are regular movie-goers and have seen some of the trailers and advance hype and have maybe flicked through the GN, and who are just curious to see what all the fuss is about. There was no way for Snyder to produce one film that would satisfy all three.
I enjoyed the movie very much, precisely because so much love and attention was lavished on the visuals in every single scene, without exception. I appreciated the scale of the ambition, and the monumental effort that has been made to ‘film the unfilmable’ and tell the story in a way that is as self-sufficient as possible, and yet faithful to what the creators tried to create. That the film could have been better is true. That it could have been a million times worse is also true, and more significant to me. It’s flawed, but it’s still a glorious achievement and a great credit to all involved.
Amen, brother. When I left the theater, my first comment was “It was faithful.” It felt like faint praise at the time, but really that’s a big accomplishment.
That said, I would again strongly recommend checking out the Watchmen Motion Comics. I got it on iTunes but I think they can be found on YouTube and elsewhere. They are as close as you can get to what a Watchmen mini-series might have been like, and they include the Black Freighter too. The motion comics provide the emotional wallop the film lacked. But of course it’s just basically just a slightly-animated audio book with music, so there’s not much to screw up.
It’s a Mac SE/30 which of course makes Ozy Steve Jobs!
I agree that it’s remarkably good in the respect of being loyal to the source material, and as close to as good as can be expected in that regard. But it does fall somewhat short of it’s potential as an effective film - some of the acting is great but some of the acting is not - and whether it’s the directing, or the dialogue, or the editing, or something else, the film feels a little emotionally empty. The tone is also uneven, although this can partly be blamed on the dissonance of having adult themes in a super hero story. And overall it holds one’s attention but fails to be truly engaging.
I’ve never read the GN and probably never will, not to my tastes, but I thought the movie was good. Lots of things blowing up and fighting, plenty of nudity and sex. I especially like the way the actress playing Silk Spectre two really showed her body in the second sex scene – very nice, had a Skinamax feel to it.
Plus the movie was nice and complex, plenty of gray areas, very little black and white. It was nice to see varying levels of goodness and badness in a superhero movie.
I think the movie was about an hour too long. Should have cut out some backstory, let it run about two hours. Every time we went to backstory, the movie kinda dragged. If they’d cut out the whole “comedian rapes SS” plotlline (the scene was clumsily handled, anyway, I had no idea why the Comedian raped SS) the movie would have saved a lot of time and been just as good.
Did anybody else think “The Watchmen” and “The Incredibles” had very similar plots to start off with: retired superheroes, not loved so much anymore, and someone is killing them?
She was hot and he was a violent amoral jerk. This ain’t calculus. At last movie-SS got in a much better (though no less futile) defense than book-SS.
I’m in the third group. I had never read the book, but I loved the trailer. And I knew, before I had ever heard anything about it, that Moore was going to remove his name from it. Because Alan Moore has apparently hated every film made of his work. He hated “From Hell”. He hated “V For Vendetta”. Oh, and he hates “Watchman”. Big surprise. I judge a movie on whether or not it works as a movie. I don’t like this anywhere near as much as “V For Vendetta”. But the director took more liberties with that film, and - having read the book after seeing the film - improved it. Sorry Moore fan-boys, but Lewis Prothero’s doll collection was just stupid and would have turned the film into an unintentional comedy.
I know Synder has a bunch of extra material ready to go for a “director’s cut”. Given that a huge amount of this film was shot on a green screen, he may well have shot a lot of dialog that was never intended to be used in the theatrical release. They could finish those lines and make a five hour, two-part “Ultimate” version of the film that will make all the Moore fans happy.
I just came back from seeing it in IMAX with Mama Zappa.
I loved it! I was worried about the actors signed up to play Ozymandias and Laurie, but I have no complaints. Yes, it was a tad rushed, and skipped over some subtleties from the GN, but it’s a movie. Even with the cuts it was a long one, but it didn’t feel long while I watched it.
Some subtleties were kept, or re-imagined nicely, IMO. Did anyone else notice the way Jackie Kennedy was looking at Doctor Manhattan in the opening credit sequence? OMG, get a room!
I thought the movie was well done, but how in the heck did this movie squeak by with an R rating? Lots of graphic bloody messy violence - in a “real life” context, tons of male nudity, two sex scenes one of them with porn level explicitness. I liked the scene a lot (I’ll be in my bunk), but if that’s an R movie, where’s the line for NC-17? R rating means better acting? Cooler airplanes? Less subtle music? Real boobs? (Malin, sweetie, don’t change a thing!)
There were several places I had to look away. Wow, that’s one violent flick. But good. Jack Earle Haley did an amazing job as Rorschach.
I’m glad we saw it in IMAX, I could catch little details running by in some scenes. There’s a Millennium cosmetics ad on a billboard on one of the buildings near the construction site at the end of the movie. Nice touch.
So TypoBob says check it out.
Just saw it- enjoyed it. I thought that replacing the squid with the threat of Dr. Manhattan was a good thing, as I never really cared for the squid in the graphic novel. Having Dr. M be the sword left hanging over Earth’s collective head was a tighter way to resolve everything- it explains why Dr. M leaves, and doesn’t bring in incredible advances in teleportation and genetics and telepathy. It also requires a smaller conspiracy, which is easier for Veidt to clean up.
Rorschach was perfect- dead on. Equally good was Nite-owl. He came across as a schlub… until he was in the costume, and you realized just how big he really was.
One thing that I wish had been left on the cutting room floor- Bubastis. There was no reason for that cat to be in the movie at all- my wife, who has yet to read the graphic novel, was completely confused.
Which reminds me – the Comedian’s rape of SS1 was described as “attempted” in this thread, but we are given to understand that
SS2 is the Comedian’s child. The Comedian’s rape of SS1 has been described as “attempted” in this thread a couple of times. And from what I saw of the movie, Tab A did not go into Slot B. So how did SS1 get pregnant by the Comedian? Are we to understand that she went back to her rapist and said, “Let’s finish this thing?” Seems highly unlikely. Or was the rape non-attempted? I’m confused.
I haven’t seen the movie yet. But in the comics, yes Sally falls in love with the Comedian after the attempted rape. There’s a very important exchange between Laurie and him
“You raped my mother!”
“Only once!”
Meaning, that all the other sex was consensual.
And an overhead argument between Sally and Laurie’s stepdad
'He didn’t understand. And I just couldn’t sustain it - the anger."
On Mars Doc says ‘And your mother chose to love a man she had every reason to hate.’ or somesuch.
After being confronted with ‘I know who my dad is!’ Sally cries and kisses the Comedian’s picture.
Some years after the attempted rape, SS1 had consensual sex with The Comedian during a short-lived relationship. This is explained in the book at some length, with SS1 trying to explain to the other person concerned how this could have come about. However, it is only briefly referred to in the film, and I can understand people being confused by this.