Worthless and Weak

So I went and saw Watchmen (the movie) today, and here is my review:

Watchmen, based on the Graphic novel of the same name by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, is the story of a group of superheros in an alternate history 1985. It opens as one of them, the Comedian, is murdered in his New York apartment. Another superhero, Rorschach, investigates, leading him to believe that somebody is trying to kill all superheros.

I'm not going to try to explain and summarize the whole plot, as others have done that much better than I could, and the plot is both really really complicated and not that important. What is much more important is the portrayal of the characters, and of the world itself.

On this front, the movie succeeds. Even though each hero is obviously not both athletically fit to the point of being superhuman (any one of them could easily be and an Olympic level athlete), but quite intelligent as well, they all have giant flaws. Nite Owl is an impotent retiree who, not being a superhero anymore, doesn't seem to have much meaning in his life. The Silk Spectre was pushed into the superhero life, never wanted it for herself, her boyfriend, Dr. Manhattan, is the only one with actual superpowers, (he has the ability to bend matter to his will), but he is barely human anymore, just going through the motions. Rorschach is borderline insane, and the Comedian was a misanthropic killer, viewing the whole world as one giant joke.

Everything I've said so far could be written about the book. The movie keeps incredibly close to the source material, where, for the first 10 minutes or so, I recognized almost every line. This didn't work, many of the lines that worked in the book weren't the best fit for the movie.

The opening sequence was done especially well, managing to reduce a giant back-story to five minutes of photos, which I think would give a newcomer to the story a good idea of what was going on.

What really didn't work about the movie is that it stayed so true to the book, that it just wasn't necessary. Some of the fight scenes were pretty good, but really, those were just about the only thing that you got from the movie but not from the book.

That being said, it was enjoyable, and didn't seem like 2 hours, 40 minutes. Worthwhile to see, but read the book first.

Labels: comics, Movie reviews