Watchmen Review – It’s Great

Mel and I caught the midnight show of Watchmen last night.  I bought our tickets online — cineplex.com lets you do this with no processing fee and you can print your own ticket to directly bypass the line — and we got there a few hours early, filled iPod ready for the wait time.  There was already about a hundred people in front of us at that point.  The wait was annoying because sitting crosslegged on the floor sucked, and standing sucked.  You’d think they’d figure out some sort of “take a number” thing so people could do other things (like buy concession and play their video games, making them money?) while waiting for a show.

Anyway, we ended up getting great seats anyway, right in the middle, a bit closer than I’d like but not too bad.

Short review:  I loved it.

Longer review:

Director Zack Snyder has made a movie for fans of the original graphic novel.  He’s crafted it probably as well as it possibly could be, and as true to the source material as can be, sacrificing very little from the standard big-budget action hero requirements.  The changes and cuts were all — with one possible exception I’ll note in the spoilers section — needed to fit such a dense narrative into a movie, even one that’s nearly three hours long.

SPOILERS BEGIN 

The characterizations are bang-on for every single one of them.  Rorschach is exactly the type of focused psychopathic hero he should be, Nite Owl is quite possibly the best nerd-superhero representation ever, Silk Spectre is not just gorgeous but believable and not at all whiny despite having to deliver a lot of “woe is me” lines about her upbringing and past.

Dr. Manhattan is perfect.  He’s as distant and inhuman, yet strangely endearing as I’d imagined him from the comics.  A bang-on creation that everyone working on the film, including Billy Crudup who provided the performance for him, should be tremendously proud of.

The Comedian is incredible.  Sure, he’s a scumbag killer (her0) seemingly without morals, but he’s realistically and almost sympathetically portrayed.  This is important, as I don’t think you’re supposed to accept his moral lapses, you’re just supposed to understand (some of) them in a sick sort of way.  I also can’t believe he looks as huge in the movie as he is in the comic.  Great costuming helped, I’m sure.

The only change that might not have been necessary was the removal of the “engineered alien squid” attack from the ending, but I can see how the one they chose is easier for an unfamiliar audience to get.  It requires less exposition, for sure.

Oh, and I do have one small complaint — some of the makeup used to make people look older, especially the “Nixon” stuff was pretty bad, snapping my “suspenders of disbelief”.  It didn’t look like “Old Nixon” but like “some guy in makeup made to look like Old Nixon”.

What Snyder has done here isn’t just rescue a movie adaptation from the Hollywood “LOTS OF EXPLOSIONS LITTLE INTELLIGENCE” treatment — the script he was provided was modern-day, set in Iraq, had a happy ending, and left itself open for a sequel! — but has actually done the impossible and filmed the “unfilmable” story.

And he did it because he’s a fan.  From what I’ve read, he was originally going to pass on the film because of his love for the source and belief it couldn’t be done right.  But after reading the (TERRIBLE) script he accepted only because he knew he’d be the only one who would do it right.  His first action after accepting was to throw away the script and write a new one based as accurately on the source as possible.  Apparently the studio was really unhappy but after his success with “300″ he was able to get it done.

But this isn’t just a fan service movie.  I don’t believe it’s “just great if you’ve read the original” though that will probably help.  I think this is a great movie period.  Dense, complicated, long, yes.  But great.

I don’t think everyone will agree though.  We saw one moviegoer throw the double-middle-fingers to the screen as he walked out.  I think he didn’t get it, but Mel thinks he was offended by seeing so much blue-superhero-penis.  I guess we’ll never know.

I’m now firmly a Zack Snyder fan.  Years ago when reading Frank Miller’s “300″ I thought it would make a perfect film, but never ever thought it could possibly be done faithfully.  Hollywood would have just taken the original true story and done their own (crappy) telling of it.  Snyder did Miller’s vision and did it well.

Now he’s done even better for the “unfilmable” Watchmen.  It’s going to take a real stinker for me to not have faith in him in the future.

5/5.