Watchmen

 

Watchmen - the unfilmable story is just that and even if you enjoy this movie you must agree because, this isn't Watchmen.  Sure the characters are all there and a lot of the dialog is unchanged but what's been rewritten, what's been changed to fit the self imposed movie time restrictions, makes this another hollywood adaptation failure.  Two things sink this movie: 1) For some ungodly reason they thought this story could be told in a little less than 3 hrs.  The result of this is an incredibly cramped story with many of the characters stories cut short, or cut all together (newstand characters not welcome untill SPOILER: they are seen in the NY explosion with no explaination as to why they are important). The ending is what suffers most from this lack of proper length as it seems like it was changed because they didnt want to dedicate the time to explaining the more complicated one from Moore's novel.  2) Ozymandias:  In order to get his ending to make some sense this character was warped and rearranged and his background story was completely missing. 

Some other things that didn't help:

- Rorschach's voice: you do sort of get used to it as the movie progresses but when you first hear him you expect "I am Batman" to be right around the bend.  Remember when you finally saw the face that went along with James Earl Jones' powerful, imposing Darth Vader voice?

- Do you really need to slow down every fight scene Zach?  And adding a blood splatter to every possible scene gets to be a bit much.

- This one bothers me a lot because it is so unnecessary (might have something to do with the Snyder film making flaw in the previous point): Rorschach's reason for becoming what he has is unacceptably altered for seemingly no other reason than to add another brutal scene and epic blood splatter.  SPOILER:  One of the greastest parts of Watchmen (the novel) is Rorschach giving the little girl's killer his options then setting his house ablaze: brilliant writing like "Shouldn’t bother trying to saw through handcuffs. Never make it in time" replaced by a meat clever to the head.  Yeah, Zach, great job, that little extra blood was much better than a fire (HEAVY SARCASM: a fire? who wants that? more blood is what we need, 300 gallons already is not enough) coupled with great Rorschach dialog.  Man, this completely useless change pisses me off.

- SPOILER: Hollis Mason is seen once then never mentioned again.  That ridiculous "NOOOOO" scene from Dan you saw in the commercials was for Rorschach and not Hollis, which would have made much more sense.  If you have to add a ridiculous hackneyed "NOOOO" scene at least put in the proper moment.

There are some things to enjoy:

- The Comedian: his character is handled properly throughout and the lines and other bits added for the movie land effectively

- The opening montage: loved this, the series of clips are priceless

- Vietnam

- Thought they did a fine job with Dr. Manhattan (at least till the end debacle) and Night Owl (at least till the end debacle)

- Laurie was really f'n hot

- Everything looked right visually (except maybe Nixon's nose)

 

Terry Gilliam signed on to make this film in the 80s but lacked the funding.  In 1996, when the rights to the story changed hands, Gilliam was asked if he was still interested in the project to which he responded, "I think it's going to be impossible to make as a film, unless you make it three and a half hours long, which most people aren't going to want"

My point in adding this bit of backstory is that I agree with Gilliam that it would have to be a long film and disagree with that being something people wouldn't want.  Had this been handled like say, the Lord of the Rings, this could have been a monster two or three part series of films that told the entire story the correct way.  You would think with the success of the Rings films such a concept would have been at least considered.  Come to think of it, an HBO mini series may have been the better option because then it could be made long enough to tell the entire story (without needing to release pieces like Black Freighter separately) and then divided into sections.  Anyway you slice it, Watchmen can't be told in 2 hrs and 40 min and it hasn't been here.