Review: Watchmen Movie (2009) 5 Stars
Watchmen is a masterpiece. It is a psychological action thriller mystery that focuses on the human condition. What is good and evil? How deep are the shades of gray? What is morality? How sick and twisted is humanity? But how unique is the miracle of life? What is the absurdity of life? Do the ends justify the means?
All of these issues- and more- are explored in this movie (almost 3 hours). The movie’s style, directing, acting, CGI, and soundtrack are all top notch.
It’s dark (real dark), gloomy, gritty, graphic, haunting, sad, hopeless, and pretty much is mind-blowing and will leave you speechless. You will be immersed in this alternate reality (it’s 1985, and Richard Nixon is still president, and the world is at the brink of World War III, none of the costumed “heroes” are simple or perfect- they are all flawed and REAL).
The drama, tension, and suspense is high, even though I have read the 12-issue comic book series countless times since I was only 9 years old. I can quote the 12 Watchmen comics, and even though I am well versed and attached to that work of art (considered The Holy Grail of comic books) I was happy that the ending changed a bit, and didn’t really care about a few very small scenes that were left out. Some things were added that I really enjoyed, such as “cameo” appearances by JFK, Nixon and Kissinger in the war room, Andy Warhol, Lee Iacoca, Fidel Castro, Nikita Khrushchev, and other hidden gems.
Watchmen is one of the best movies I’ve ever seen, and not just in the super-hero genre. Many cliches are broken in this film (the comic itself deconstructed the whole genre), and it felt innovative although the story and dialogue itself is almost 23 years old.
I give this movie 5 stars and a 10/10 rating.
Out of fairness I will post the opinions of my fellow movie goers, I went with my mother, my wife, and CCB3. CCB3 also overheard the remarks of two teenagers in the bathroom:
They said they wanted a sequel, and RORSCHACH RULED.
My wife thought it was a great movie, and that was probably an understatement. During the movie, she got very angry and sad when Rorschach fought the police, and laughed at Night Owl’s lack of woman skills with the Silk Spectre II. She also was scared/revolted by the Comedian’s rape scene, the prison scenes, alley fight scene, and more. She disliked The Comedian- big time. She was into it the whole time, and had no issues following it. Post movie, she didn’t say much because she out of breath and it was a breath-taking visual and engrossing story. Question she asked after the movie: Will there be a sequel?
CCB3 liked it, and he’s hard to impress. He said that he’s usually put off by “stylish” movies, but this was not overdone. He followed the storyline with no problems, and understood what the characters represented. Questions asked after the movie: Why does Dr. Manhattan see the world like he does? Do I believe in Dr. Manhattan’s world view? Was Silk Spectre II correct in her argument on Mars? How did the comic differ from the movie?
I thought the movie really hit my mother the right way- during the movie she was reacting the way I expected her to depending on the scene. She was kind of speechless after the movie, but she usually talks a mile a minute after seeing movies with me. So I thought maybe she too was drained by how dark the movie was. She mentioned that Dr. Manhattan reminded her of Reed Richards from The Fantastic Four at the beginning, felt bad for Rorschach, and loved the soundtrack (of course). Questions asked after the movie: Did Silk Spectre I know that Silk Spectre II was a costumed hero? What type of cat was Bubastis? Why did Rorschach wear the mask?
But then she said something that got past by Yar’s Revenge defense shield: “You know, people really have to read the comics to understand that movie.”
[Deleted 3 paragraphs of ranting.]
ANYWAY, I read the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes today, and I see Watchmen has a 64% approval rating. The bad reviews are WAY OFF and SKEWED.
That being said, I can understand critics whining about flashbacks and backstory: they lack the mental capacity to follow a deep movie. Critics who bring up Spider-Man, X-Men, and Dark Knight just show how ignorant they are about what Watchmen is all about. Critics blasting the director (Zack Snyder, 300) for being too pretentious just offend me. Message board freaks that complain about scenes and music selection are hypocrites: they are the same people that gave a fan produced Watchmen movie on YouTube 5 stars. I probably would get a heart attack if I read all the crap that these people are typing about the MASTERPIECE.
I guess my mother was right after all- there are people out there that need the security of “knowing the backstory”. My grandmother said the same thing to me after she saw Dark Knight, which explains why I did not invite her to see Watchmen. Another authority figure I know also said “knowing the comics” was required to see Dark Knight.
I mean, yeah, it’s COOL that I can answer questions about Watchmen to my family and friends. It’s AWESOME that I was tuned into the subtle changes and background stuff in the scenes. It was a unique experience (with Sin City) that a comic book movie could be made with such a profound respect for the source material. Yeah, it helps to assist with questions and interpretations, because this movie is DEEP, and if you never read the book it’s worth seeing multiple times to catch everything (everything I read the BOOK, I get something new, and I read once a year!) But…was it NECESSARY that I have read it?
I just don’t get it. I think older people are intimidated when it comes to movies based on comic books. They think they need to read hundreds of issues or something. They over think.
The irony about that statement with Watchmen is that Watchmen was not a continuing series- it just lasted 1 year, and was a self-contained 12-issue limited series, with a beginning and end. The movie WAS the “origin” and had the necessary backstory. There are no prequels, and no sequels. Watchmen was not serialized like Superman.
I’m glad CCB3 overheard the teens in the restroom saying how they really dug the movie and Rorschach in particular. I have a feeling the MESSAGE of Watchmen WILL be passed on to a new generation.
P.S.
Tony Vahl and I always wondered how Ozymandias’ TV screen scene would be handled in the movie. I’m sure he was as thrilled as I was. I saw a clip from the movie 1984, and a bunch of other Easter eggs on that viewscreen. Oh, as I said last year, Obama = Ozymandias. Let’s just hope for the bright future.
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Ive never read the watchmen comics, although its got a good cult reputation.
If your saying that this is a 5 star movie to even those who have not read the comic ill give it a look.
downloading Once upon a time in the west while listening to vintage hendrie( also downloaded ) as I write this.
Awesome!!
Glad you enjoyed it. Glad Zack Snyder pulled it off!
TV screens — heheh. That was great. I was thrilled to see it, the way it was in the comic. Awesome moment.
I think Ozy may have had the Spice channel on one of those screens. He really was taking it all in, all at once! Good, bad, ugly, indifferent.
Those screens, for me, have become such a symbol for what we have right now with the Internet. The contradictory messages we can take in within a few minutes … I’m sure it would be an intellectual high for Ozy.
There is no squid, that means there’s no island for the Comedian to stumble upon. So how does he figure out what’s going on so he can have his nervous breakdown with Molloch and give Ozy a reason to kill him?
The music choices in some scenes are very ridiculous. 99 Luftballons playing when Silk Spectre sees Nite Owl, I’m Your Boogie Man during the riot scene, and Sounds of Silence at the funeral all had me laughing. They seem so bizarre, it’s hard not to laugh. I wasn’t the only person either. I think the part that really upset him was when I was laughing when they played “Hallelujah” during the sex scene.
This was the most slowly paced and boring movie I have seen in a long time.
I fell asleep twice.
It was good. Not mind-blowingly “Whoa!” like Iron Man or the Dark Knight, but not bad either. I’d rather that they had Chuthlu at the end as well, but I can live with the movie ending.
I think my friend’s whore mumbled something about falling asleep. That I noticed, about 5 people just up and left the theater about halfway through, and another guy in front of us started texting like mad at about the 2/3rds mark.
why they decided to make Rorschach ten years younger in the movie than he was in the graphic novel is beyond me
thought they could do better with Ozymandias. For someone who is at the peak of human physical prowess, he was pretty skinny.
Random thoughts:
- The soundtrack was a bit distracting. The songs were great, but at some points they took away from the film a bit. The Dylan in the opening credits was a brilliant move, while Cohen’s Hallelujah in the sex scene and All Along the Watchtower in the Antarctica scene were a bit off imo.
- Rorschach will be the new Heath-Joker this Halloween; brilliant performance, and they got the casting there spot on
- Not too big a fan of some of the plot changes.
- Not sure how this will look to casual movie fans unfamiliar with the graphic novel, though the people I watched it (who hadn’t read the novel) with enjoyed it, but I figure most fans of the graphic novel will like it. It’s a very deep film, but it is pretty long (necessary due to the story, I suppose), and the pacing is slow in some points, but overall I thought it was pretty good. It’s a movie that requires thought, which you don’t really see in most superhero movies
The two romantic leads, Nite Owl II and Silk Spectre II, were played by less than stellar actors. I felt they were reciting lines by memory.
did the graphic novel have the little ‘outer limits’ scene on the TV screen for a moment too?
I kinda hated it.
Most scenes were over-sensationalized and the story structure lacked focus, making the characters wholly uninteresting.
Even Rorschach was overdone, which I didn't think was possible. He wasn't disturbing or crazy or broken. He was just another badass vigilante who loved being a badass vigilante. Eff that.
Nearly every part was played by Roger Badactor. Most scenes were so strictly adherent to the source material that they just forgot to make it compelling or emotionally real in any way.
Just because your movie is set in 1985 doesn't mean you hire a makeup artist from 1985. Enough with the fake oldified rubber faces. The scene with two bad actresses the same age calling each other mother & daughter was a joke.
You know what it needed? More slow-mo and ham-fisted anthems shoved down my throat.
never thought being faithful to source material could be a creative strait-jacket – but Zack Snyder found a way.
Did he direct that movie or just distribute Gibbons art to the cinematographers?
The one thing that irked me more than anything was the fact that the called themselves the Watchmen.
Oh, that and the fact that Nite Owl II wasn’t chubby.
they showed Nixon way too much.
With a movie like this, you have to grade it on two separate curves: its worth as an adaptation, and its worth as a movie in its own right. As an adaptation, it was nearly flawless. As a movie, not so much.
“99 Luftballons” is in keeping with the times, but it was not in keeping with the tone the previous scenes had set. I found it jarring. I also thought “All Along the Watchtower,” much as I adore the song, was not the right one for Rorschach and Nite-Owl’s approach. Some may charge that the lyrics are thematically fitting, but the fact is that film is a medium that tells its story through pictures and sound. For that set of images, Hendrix did not sound right.
he new ending does invalidate most of the point of The Black Freighter
Carla Gugino overacted to an almost parodic degree. Every time she was on screen, I cringed.
The amped up fight choreography and gore didn’t add anything, and may have actually been detrimental.
Um… I thought it was pure rubbish.
It was like… hmm. If the book is… a book, then the movie is just the first page.
Not a great analogy, even an awful one, but I’m trying to say it lacked depth and subtlety. But I suppose that was always going to happen because it’s not a very long graphic novel. That said…
I disliked all the characters. Rorschach was far too emotional, his voice too gravelly and over the top. Manhattan too humanized, Laurie too boring, Veidt a stereotype.
The action was far too over the top, the brilliance of the fork scene at the end in the book replaced with wham-pow slow mo nonsense in the vein of every other superhero film ever. Sticking the cleaver into a guys head? Dan snapping an arm backwards? Both the violence and the sex scene were heavily overdone.
The soundtrack was appalling throughout, especially Halleujah.
The little easter egg bits just don’t work on film. An example… the ‘Obsolete Models A Specialty’ sign outside Mason’s garage. In the comic, you can notice it out of the corner of your eye, the film just hones in on it and sets it in your face. Little things like this lose all subtlety.
The ending doesn’t really hold up, some stuff felt horribly forced in, and some of the changes seem stupid now.
I really didn’t think I’d dislike it this much, I thought it would be a decent stab, but I just left the cinema thinking ‘Nope’ with My Chemical Romance ringing in my ears. The overall feel is of a director who didn’t really ‘get’ the book, which, honestly, didn’t have to be made into a film.
It could have been a lot worse, I suppose, but Watchmen remains the greatest comic book ever. And in my opinion, the Dark Knight stands unrivaled as the best superhero movie ever.
Yes, the comic had the Outer Limits on television.
Despite trying to stick close to the book, Snyder obviously has no idea what the story is about and so the entire thing falls flat on it’s face.
Alan Moore was pretty smart to take his name off this movie.
I just got back from a matinee with my wife and 20 year old son.
It was…pretty bad.
When we left the theater, I actually apologized to my wife and son. My wife said, “It would have been a good movie if it was done by someone else.”
I couldn’t disagree.
My son wondered what was up with the ‘Skinemax’ scene.
I didn’t really have an answer for that.
A lot of the other theater goers looked relieved that it was over.
Has anybody noticed that the first dialogue part of Rorschach was a little simplistic and comic booky? It didn’t quite fit in a screenplay..
This movie sucked. It felt like some fan made it. With college actors.
I was SO disappointed by the movie. Alan Moore was right!
One of the biggest things I hated about the movie was Manhattan’s voice.
I am SO pissed that this movie sucked.
Did everybody think that Doctor Manhattan was portrayed right? He seemed very unaffected by killing people, or, whether the earth was destroyed or not.
Ultimately this film proves that what Moore attempted with Watchmen – a read of the proto-fascism of comic book superhero/vigilantes – has failed.
For here we have the stylised sex and violence getting laughs and the main character seems to be Rorschach.
Ozymandias is hinted at being gay twice for a cheap joke.
Why Silk Spectre should feel any love for Eddie Blake gets drowned out in a weird way – in fact none of the female characters are really of any note.
The deaths of the ‘minor characters’ have little or no resonance.
Really it becomes just another superhero film, complete with ultraviolence and pornsex and ultimately meaningless.
I was taken by how dated the costumes were, in that they were old school, and bulky. And the Comedian really brought home a 50’s feel to the super hero days that the Watchmen operated in, even if it was the 60’s. I got a quaintness feel to the atmosphere, like “the League of EG”. You compare it to Marvel movies, and Marvel puts you in the present really easily. With this adaption, you could easily think this was a coloured B+W movie.
Alan Moore was right!
The first flaw I noticed was the dialog. Although most of it was taken directly from the comic, line for line, it felt too stilted. There were too many one-liners. The dialog works in the comic, as well as the motion comic, but in the film, it didn’t seem like people were actually saying things that normal people would say, or how people would say it.
The next thing I noticed was the acting. Some of the actors really didn’t act well. I think the actors for the characters was done extremely well, but I just don’t feel the timing was right on the delivery for their lines. I especially didn’t like the speech style given to Rorschach (the voice was right, just not the timing or flow), or to Doctor Manhattan (when I read the comic, I had a booming voice in mind. While I like the angle the director wanted to take [that Manhattan was disconnected from the world, so his voice should be small, quiet, and calm), I just don’t think that it worked. Also, a minor thing, I didn’t like Ozymandias’ build. In the comic, he was in perfect physical shape, but I felt in the film he was too thin. Plus, when was it revealed the Comedian was from the South?
Also, I hated the actor that played Nixon. The actor was almost doing a spoof of him. I mean, what was with his nose?
The film also went overboard on the violence. Scenes such as the alley fight and the Rorschach flashback come to mind. Now, obviously the comic was violent, and any adaption should have a great deal of violence, but was bones popping through the skin really necessary?
And as real as the characters were portrayed in the comic (only one person had powers), I felt the characters were too strong in the film. Each hero had too much strength. It disconnected them from the real world.
Overall, the film just felt like a caricature of the comic. Most of the roles were played to extremes; the film almost felt like a parody.
It’s hard for me to decide what I didn’t like about the film; it was just the entire film altogether.
I know why this movie didn’t work.
It’s because of the age of the comic, and the fact that it IS so loved and regarded as the greatest comic ever.
Because it’s been 20+ years since it came out, people have an idea of who the characters are. The comic has been immortalized. Ever since the movie was announced, people have had expectations of what the movie should be like. Expectations that are almost impossible to achieve.
This film was killed by its own merits.
I was rather upset they messed up the Robert Redford for President joke at the end.
Reagan running against an incumbent Nixon doesn’t make much sense.
I was surprised they put in Ozy’s lynx hybrid. It was obviously fake and it offered nothing to Ozy’s character like it did in the book.
What upset me the most, and is 90 percent of the reason why I do not like this movie, is because they changed the ending. Actually, I might have been OK with changing the ending if it weren’t such an absurd premise
No “Like my father and Harry Truman”? For shame!
Is it me, or did Jon’s schlong change sizes? When it first appeared, it was the proverbial baby’s arm holding an apple. Later on, it’s shrunk to more manageable size.
Also, he doesn’t seem to have much sack.
I have some qualms about Nite Owl.
the acting was very flat. no offense to them but these guys are bush league actors.
not enough implication’s of rorschach’s sexuality (i personally think he was in the closet)
Well, I’m glad everyone enjoyed the film. According to wired.com, the movie has already made $120 million and should easily turn a profit. It will have a good run through May, there’s a limited release Director’s Cut coming in July, and those DVD sales … Mmmmm. Can you smellalalalalal…?
I hope to see the sleepers, the mad texters, and the relieved at the Director’s Cut showing this summer. I’m certain I will see them there.
The only person I know will not be there this summer is Alan Moore himself!
I don’t think anyone who posted here really read the entire Trade Paperback or understood it if they did.
i’m sure most people weren’t too crazy about having some blue naked guy’s schlong flapping in the breeze
Truthfully, I didn’t even notice.
Guess I’m str8.
Just came back from watching it, and I have to say the experience was like the first time I read Watchmen. Literaly, as I walked out of the theater and outside I had to take a couple of minutes just to digest everything. Strangely, however, it was the first time in a long time that things looked very clear. Furthermore, I had a ton of existential questions from the movie. Is that who we really want to protect us? Are we monsters? Or are we miracles?
Though there were a couple of things cut and altered, didn’t change my enjoyment of the film whatsoever. I still feel that it was faithful to the source material. Furthermore, it crystalized my sentiments for certain characters. Dan Drieberg has been and now will forever be my favorite character from Watchmen.
Loved the opening, as it depicted a couple of things you only read about in the book, like Mothman going crazy or the Silouette’s lesbian relationship (her kiss with her lover and their subsequent murders resonated with me a lot.)
Oh yeah, what I think the film did better with than the book was the fight scenes. So exciting and action packed. Never imagined Rosrcrach fighting like that.
this movie was just like Star Wars Episode I:The Phantom Menace.Half the theater,including me,walked out in the middle of the movie.
the film didn’t even have Rorschach’s sugar cubes.
Guess what I saw this weekend?
Yup, Watchmen.
I went with my daughter and her boyfriend.
I don’t think that Adrian’ plan would have worked because the U.S. and Russia would have found something else to argue about. And the actor that played Adrian was gay…he is too much of a brainy person to take seriously.
And what? Dr. Manhattan is God now looking down upon us?
Rorschach I guess I liked because he was a good guy, although they never explained how his mask moved like that.
They never explained the super-powers of the Owl guy and the girl though.
Speaking of which, the only reason why they even had that romance was for the gratuitous sex scene.
The special effects were good, though, especially Mars, where I guess Dr. Manhattan made that thing because he was a watchmaker.
drop dead