Watchmen
Ok, ok, ok, it took me till yesterday to see it, but I’ve been #$# swamped trying to figure out how to get the Operative and a bunch of other guys off a spaceship (i.e., working on book three). Anyway, I loved it. Sure, it wasn’t as good as the graphic novel—how could it have been?—but this will be the definitive film version; there’ll be no remake decades from now while our kids’ kids tease us for our questionable fashionable choices. Others have dealt with the big picture; I’m going to tell you the details I appreciated the most:
1. The fight between the Comedian and Ozymondias: finally we get to see the WHOLE FUCKING THING.
2. The credit-sequence in general, and the bit where the Comedian blows away JFK in particular.
3. The capturing of that paranoid, Cold War feel. Charlie Jane Anders over at io9 had a great piece on this, btw.
4. And speaking of. . love the Doctor Strangelove war-room. That #$# ruled. And it makes us realize, too, that the one thing the original war-room lacked was . . . Nixon.
5. Snyder kept Bubastis the Technicolor Lynx!!! And wasted him too. Alright.
6. Rorschach. They had so much less time/bandwidth to develop him here, but they kept those prison scenes, so it’s okay by me.
7. The ending. I’d love to have been a fly in the wall during the script rewrites on this one, while they specced out the budget for 20,000 tons of squid, and their ability to reach an audience beyond the fanboys . . . . and considered that the only way to make it work would be to simultaneously pump airborne LSD into the movie theaters. Maybe they should have gone for it, but I can see why they didn’t. Framing Dr. Manhattan was an elegant solution. It wasn’t the optimal one, but like I said, that would have involved acid.
Anyway. It’ll be interesting to see how the movie does this weekend. The smart money is saying it won’t have staying power, in spite of David Hayter’s desperate plea for the faithful to get in there and do their duty to Moore and country. I know I’ll be back in that theater, though. This one rocked.
