Watchmen

Never has my fullpost tag been more useful than for the discussion of media. I can go into all the spoilers I want while sparing the reader from them by encasing them in the fullpost tag. :) So by all means, read this topical article if you've yet to see the movie, but click the title if you've already seen it.

I went to see the movie yesterday because I finally had some free time from all of my piling-up stuffs and I also had some enthusiastically-frustrated pals across the country who wanted to discuss the movie with me but were not able to because, duh, I'd not seen it yet. So I went to go see it. And ... ? Long story short, I have a ton of complaints about the film, but they're pretty much a labor of love, i.e. I'm frustrated because I goddamn love the film a bunch and will buy it the day it comes out on DVD. Amazing film.

I will keep things very succinct for now. Ask me to explain points you're interested to hear more about.

Plot: I enjoyed the plot overall up until the final 20 minutes or so of the film. (Minus the overabundant sex scenes, I'd say the film's plot really never went south until we were headed to Antarctica. Mutant pseudo-egyptian-deity white tiger? Karnak? On and on it goes.) I really feel that one specific character (Dr. Manhattan) ruined the plot for me in a lot of ways, but ignoring that, it was great fun.

Characters: Good GOD do I love Rorschach! Amazing. He was truly, truly the spitting image of a bonafide sociopath with a good heart. I think our society (especially our medical community!) is all too eager to rule out the existence of such a persona, but I think it's possible to be both sociopathic and a good man, and Rorschach really exemplified that. His paranoia, his disregard for the notion of "sanctity of life," just ... ALL of it! The diary! The mask! The everything. Good God was he awesome.

I was fascinated by Dr. Manhattan, but I found his godlike powers to be a real killjoy. He was tied to almost every single plot hole and deus ex machina event I can point to in the film. And sadly, there were too goddamn many of those. :\

As for the other characters, meh? They weren't nearly as interesting. Silk Spectre II followed in Silk Spectre I's whorish footsteps, Nite Owl II was the token geek (like Billy from Power Rangers), the Comedian was an interesting character but so detestable you can't really bring yourself to say "I like him," and quite frankly Ozymandias was not explored in nearly as much detail as I would have liked given his ultimate role in the plot. I mean ... for Christ's sake, I didn't know until after I'd come home from the film and gone on Wikipedia that he was the son of Nazis and that he was (effectively) the Aryan wunderkind whom Hitler had been so desperate to create. Knowing that would have been REALLY NICE because it would have fleshed out his character a whole bunch. I would have noticed his Aryan features more (blonde hair, blue eyes, fair skin) and it would have had a lot to say about his (so to speak) "inherited guilt" for the crimes his parents and their peers had wrought against humanity. It would have given us so much more understanding of his "ends-justify-the-means" mentality. I mean, he really was like your perfect Aryan hero-villain: he wants what's best for the world, but good God are is means horrific.

Music: I liked it a lot. As I discussed with Jay already, I'm such an ignoramus that I didn't know that the opening credits' song was a famous Bob Dylan song from the 1960s. I thought it was an original creation for the film made to sound like it belonged to that period in time. -.- I also didn't realize until the end of the film that much of the songs were penned by Philip Glass, which explains in large part why I really liked them and also why they were so very repetitive :) lol.

Cinematography: excellent. I completely DO NOT UNDERSTAND the negative critics' opinions on this one. They accuse the use of one camera of being cheap and poor and this and that, but I couldn't disagree more. A, it really did give us a sense of peering down into "one frame," one frame in motion, which is like staring into a comic book in the world of Harry Potter, where people can move around inside their fixed frames. B, I didn't actually notice this at all during the film: it wasn't until I came home that I learned about the use of the single camera for much of the film. C, the angles they chose were outstanding. Yes, they were obviously informed by Alan Moore's & (I forget his name)'s original comic, but still: great, great angles.

Special Effects: for a superhero movie, these were appropriately balanced. Some of the effects felt like they were just for the sake of having over-the-top CG, like Dr. Manhattan's Martian clock-spindle-space station-hovercraft thing made out of glass, and some of them felt rather out of place, like Ozymandias' Matrix-style dodging of the bullets inside the Veidt HQ building which was distracting specifically because it looked so unreal, but I actually didn't mind Dr. Manhattan's look and I LOVED Rorschach's mask, which looked GENUINELY REAL!! Never did I think to myself, "oh, that's CGI." ALWAYS did I think, "He's really wearing a fabric mask with who-knows-what-its-made-of & always-moving-around ink." Very nice.

In brief, my complaints with the film are as follows:
1. Rorschach's death. I now know that it's in the comic too, but maaaaaaaaan! >_< I also understand that it's what he would have wanted, rather than being coddled by the others, but still!

2. the too-frequent and too-excessive gore. Sometimes it drove the plot (like the sickening scene in which they showed the dogs fighting over the little girl's leg, with some of the sinews still attached but otherwise stripped to the bone with the little-child-shoe still dangling from the foot), but other times it just felt like it was gore for gore's sake (like the scene where the fatass gets his arms buzzsawed off. A, it was a lame excuse of the writer(s) to say that midget was so impatient he'd do this to the guy (WHY NOT JUST USE A KNIFE TO CUT THE FABRIC? ALL THE WHILE THREATENING TO AMPUTATE RORSCHACH WITH THE BUZZSAW SHOULD HE OUTSTRETCH HIS HANDS ONCE AGAIN TO GRAB YOU?), but more importantly, B, the cameraman was only too delighted to focus on the fat man's gushing stubby arms and his grotesque body as it was pushed over and fell to the ground. Clearly they relished in the gore in this scene, and to me that's really off-putting. The funny thing is, I know, that my favorite character of the film, Rorschach, was linked to pretty much every gory scene in the film. lol @ how I love the man while hating the gore around him, I guess.

3. the all-too-frequent and all-too-excessive sex scenes. I honestly felt that many of the scenes were softcore pornography. Two specific ones which I felt were slipped-in porn were the one where Dr. Manhattan x2 is bringing Silk Spectre II to orgasm, and the one where Nite Owl II is bang-bang-bang banging his pelvis into Silk Spectre II's as the cameraman focuses on her breasts and orgasming mouth.

4. the plot holes introduced by Dr. Manhattan, period.

5. the plot holes introduced by Ozymandias' being the smartest man alive. Doesn't mean he's omnipotent. Does mean he should be smarter than me or Alan Moore. Therein lies the rub, I know: Alan Moore can never, ever pen a plan as would the world's smartest man.


In brief, my plusses about the film are:
1. RORSCHACH! :D

2. I loved the nod to Rorschach in the end, how is bloodstain on the Antarctic snow was in itself a Rorschach inkblot. VERY NICE TOUCH!

3. Loved the take on normal people as superheroes. I mean, they're not completely normal by any means, but they're like Batman, not like Superman, with the exception of one walking, talking deus ex machina. :\

4. Loved Alan Moore's talent, as shown in V for Vendetta, for delivering heroes/villains who are neither entirely good nor evil but are a realistic, human mix of both. You detest the Comedian, but you also do pity him. And like Jon says at the end of the film, "I neither condone nor condemn your actions" (or something like that) with regards to Ozymandias's plan. It was very nice to have a "villain" who is actually still a genuine superhero with mankind's interests at heart, but who is just going about in a really appalling way. It was also nice to have him intelligently observe that, yes indeed mankind is perhaps hardwired to be combattive against a common enemy, and will always create a common enemy for itself if there is none normally to be found, and so the only way to avert nuclear holocaust is to get the post-nuclear world to unite against a single, common enemy. Very good.

Anyway, I keep saying "in brief, in brief" but this is huge, so ... I'll stop here for now. :)

OVERALL: 8.5/10 (final), 9.5/10 (prior to the final 20 minutes)