Don't be confused, dear reader. The Cap'n wasn't really planning on watching the Watchmen (as I'd said in an earlier post*) but these things happen.
It was a friend's birthday and he really wanted to see it. He allegedly had passes but not enough for everybody and they didn't pan out anyway but hey we're already there so I might as well see it, right?
"Cap'n!"
Yes?
"Enough of this bull-puckey! Tell us what you thought already!"
What's bull-puckey?
"Don't try to distract me! Review the damn movie already!"
Very well. So the first thing you should know is that I didn't hate the movie. It wasn't some kind of travesty or the sort of movie that climbs out of your tv and takes a steaming dump on the living room carpet. It was watchable and for a nigh-three hour running time, it went by pretty quickly.
Before you start slapping that on the dvd cover with a byline attributing that to yr Cap'n, understand that the above paragraph is almost exactly how I felt about 300 when I watched it. I haven't watched 300 since.
In fact, the only Zack Snyder movie I've watched again was Dawn of the Dead, which I feel is an interesting - if flawed - "alternate universe" take on Romero's film. His other movies, both comic book adaptations, were acceptable but not particularly great movies that did some interesting work and didn't make me angry for spending time with them.
To no one's surprise, Rorschach was my favorite part of the movie. Jackie Earle Haley will make an interesting Freddy Krueger in that Nightmare on Elm Street remake I'm not interested in. He was fun with the mask and surprisingly more interesting without it. Strangely, when Rorschach disappears for a good stretch of the middle of the film, I didn't find myself wondering where he was, but it was nice to get him back when we did.
Everyone else was... meh? Nobody did anything really heinous (unless you count the makeup department's work on "old" Silk Spectre and Richard Nixon... eegah!) but they didn't make much of an impression either. Admittedly, once you see the "blue wang of doom", it's hard not to notice it in the many, many, MANY full frontal Doctor Manhattan scenes. More amusing, actually, were the periodic sequences where Manhattan has shorts on, as though the MPAA said "enough blue wang is enough!"
More than anything, the thing that stands out is Snyder's curious music cues. It's not that some of them were in the book and some weren't, it's more about how overwhelmingly they're mixed in the soundtrack. Aside from a little-too-on-the-nose muzak version of "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" playing in Veidt towers, all of the songs get "Full On Front Channel" treatment, drowning out voices and background ambiance. Only Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'" really resonates from a clever opening credits montage.
On the other hand, I'll probably never be able to hear Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" without visions of Super-hero softcore porn in my mind. I'm pretty sure the graphic violence earned Watchmen the "R" rating, so the graphic sex scene is there for... I don't know.
So I guess that I didn't "get" it, since I didn't love the movie or whatever the screenwriter's rationale was. It's not all that hard to follow and condenses what it needs to condense and makes some things a little more obvious than the book, and I guess I'm "meh" about the Squid replacement. Without Tales of the Black Freighter, an argument could be made that it "fits" this version of the film.
All in all, I'm not going to rush out and buy the Super Deluxe Ten Disc Blu Ray Complete Director's Cut with 40 Minutes of Footage and Under the Hood and Tales of the Black Freighter Re-Inserted. Three hours was enough the first time. And I haven't even seen 300 since the first time. That doesn't bode well for Watchmen. But I might watch Dawn of the Dead another time. If nothing else, the first ten minutes are crackerjack.
* I've yet to move it from the old blog to this one, so you'll have to take my word for it until I do.
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