On Friday I bought my first laptop ever (an HP G50-215CA for portable recording, getting tracks of people performing on their very own couches), and saw Watchmen with friends at the excellent Elgin Street Diner.
I am currently in the process of partitioning the laptop's hard drive so I can have a go at installing XP as a second operating system so I can get rid of Vista, because Vista absolutely isn't what I want on it. Midway through that process.
I had the best Philly cheese steak in town before Watchmen (I should probably have wrung the grease out of it before I started eating, as the grease seemed to actually be soaking into my skin and not wiping off), and then chatted about video games through the decades with a friend of a friend until it started. Watchmen was delightful for anyone who has always wanted the world to enjoy the graphic novel, but knew many people wouldn't read it. It's got way too much stuff in it for one movie, which means your head is packed full about halfway through. I didn't care, though.
As with V For Vendetta, I think anyone still complaining over the changes made from the book is being a little mean-spirited. That something like this came out of Hollywood is astounding. It really seems to take people from outside America to have (and create an artistic vision sharing) an objective, outsider's viewpoint on that country.
I love Rorschach in the book and in the movie. Unthinking, driven bravery, and fatal-flaw integrity with no fear of acting or being a bit insane, but having feelings underneath it all. No ability to compromise, really. No ability to look after himself or find joy in life. I liked the fact that the movie looked so very much like the book, yet enough changes to story and dialogue were occasionally made that it wasn't just watching a well-known story unfold. You had to watch to see how Snyder's take on the film unfolded. I've never seen a "superhero movie" with so much violence and nudity, and all done in a different way. In Watchmen if a superhero is going to beat some people up, you are going to clearly see that those people have been badly hurt (i.e. they will not just shake their heads with birds chirping, temporarily stunned, nor will they camera cut away from them quickly so we can forget they were there, once we've seen them get knocked over). To do otherwise is to make the violence cartoony and not show its consequences. In Watchmen, you have to decide to like or dislike the people who are hurting other human beings and maybe getting off on it a bit, and quite realistically, it's a bit hard to like people who hurt other people, especially if they're into it.
Now, the superhero movie bar has once again been raised. All the people clamoring (for some reason) to make Ghostrider II, Avengers, Spider-man 4, X-Men Origins:Cannonball and so on will have to live with the fact that this movie, which to all intents and purposes is just another example of a superhero movie, just "has more stuff" in it than anything yet made in that genre. It's full of thoughts and thought-provoking things. Unless some honest work is done on superhero movies in future, they will all inevitably seem laughably empty by comparison. In this movie the costumes were cool, the action was there, the music was great, the effects were effective, the dialogue was fun and perfect, the human interactions were deeply everyday, the politics were paranoid, the violence was properly troubling, the romance and sex, along with the growing apart of a couple, were there and were graphic and uncomfortably real to see on the big screen... in other words, like the book, the idea behind Watchmen is "Yeah, but what if we throroughly explored the idea of superheroes actually being REAL, instead of just putting together a movie designed to make them cool, and what if we tackled the "difficult questions" about them head on instead of glossing over all of that?"
The Watchmen movie: full to bursting with stuff. I could have lived without about an hour's combined screen time of computer-generated glowing blue penis, but hey...
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