I saw it yesterday, and I enjoyed it. The only part of the comic/graphic novel I’ve read was the scene in Ozy’s ‘lair’ at the end and it confused me out of context. That’s okay though.

What a LOT of people seem to be forgetting – when they criticize it for being ‘too serious’ by cutting out some jokes, or ‘too silly’ because of things like “I’m Your Boogie Man” playing while the Comedian assaults protesters – is that this was a comic book movie. The original, from what I’ve since learned, is full of parody and irony, and even a little old fashioned comic book goofiness.

The movie may not have preserved it in the exact same way as the comic (I find it mildly ironic that the movie being too much straight from the comic is also a complaint in a separate breath) – I think that it captured enough of it for a good movie.

As someone with limited knowledge of the original story… there’s only ONE thing that left me going “Wait, what?” and that was Ozy’s lynx thing. It just shows up in the last section of the movie, is disintegrated, and that’s it. No explanation, nothing. I think a “space squid” would have been an even further “wtf” step into absurdity if it had been put into the end of the film (which was made to apparently be decently gritty-realistic).

Ozy’s line change (from “Republic serial villain” to “comic book villain”) worked for me. It did not detract from the moment. It isn’t like he stopped to wait for the laugh track, or winked at the camera. He continued on to explain HOW he was different from the moustache twirling villain, who typically tells the good guy his plans before carrying them out. I have to tell you that “Republic serial villain” to a standard movie-goer… would probably translate somehow to “Star Wars” – and still wouldn’t make any sense. A little self-mocking is good for a story, and I felt Ozy delivered that line well. I grinned a little, but given the drama of the scene, it didn’t get the laugh it might’ve if placed otherwise. In that, I have to second “not mike carlin” – it would have been ambiguous and detracting for me as a casual viewer had it been left as the original line.

I had no trouble with the flashbacks, and I understood that they were giving me story that otherwise I wouldn’t get. Story that fleshed out WHO these characters were, or what made them who they are now. The insult from Hooded Justice to the Comedian? I honestly can’t remember what it was. If I were reading a comic and it were obscure, then maybe the explanation (which comes later on Mars?) would be necessary – I am more likely to recall little things like that in reading than in viewing. In the movie… a guy is raping a girl, teammate comes in. He could have said “You fucking bastard” for all I know. An insult is mandatory in that situation. I don’t remember it, so it couldn’t have been obscure enough to be confusing.

The electric cars/obsolete models thing…

I guess that was one of the places in the movie where I caught a LOT more metaphor than people who want to focus on “no electric cars til the end!” When current Nite Owl left Hollis’s place – Hollis being the original and all – the sign had a lot more impact. The sign wasn’t about -cars- there. That sign was about the Masks. The old ones, the new ones – because they were no longer welcome in their world. Etc, etc. A brainer person could turn that aspect alone into an essay of gigantic proportions.

Easter Egg Time:

http://fullbodytransplant.wordpress.com/2009/03/11/watchmen-easter-egg/

Word.

The answer to that is that Rorshach’s mask looks TOTALLY FREAKING COOL when it’s really moving. So for that, and for unexpected bonuses like the opening credit montage and Jackie Earl Haley, I consider it ticket money well spent, and I’ll probably go again so I can watch it in Imax.

I felt that “Sounds Of Silence” was a weird choice for the Comedian’s funeral.

Yeah, same when I saw it. That ridiculous use of a fractured piece Mozart’s Requiem also got a lot of laughter, but that might have been Snyder’s intention.

But all I could think of when I saw Nite Owl II on screen for the first time was “Fletch lives?” He grew on me, gradually, but STILL.

It just didn’t click for me as an adaptation, and it wasn’t for fanboyish reasons. It didn’t work for me as a MOVIE; I would’ve forgiven it a lot if it’d just been well-constructed. But the ‘nuclear scare’ tension simply didn’t get communicated to the point of saying “This is a civilization on the brink of total self-annihilation”, which I think is really key to the feel of Watchmen. That, and Malin whatserface was turrible.

Gus Van Sant’s Psycho. It wasn’t an adaptation, it was a remake. A pointless, empty remake.

Funny enough, that was how I explained my reaction to a friend. This wasn’t an adaptation, it was a shot-by-shot remake of another film.

You’re at the beach watching as the sun goes down and strikes the glistening sea just so; the image itself is enough to make you believe in a higher power. You take a picture of the sunset.

Days or even years later you look at the picture you took of that sunset and are reminded of how glorious that sunset was, and though the picture captures the vision of what you saw, it doesn’t capture the essence. To somebody who wasn’t there, they may look at the picture and say, “Oh that’s beautiful,” but to you it’s just a picture of something infinitely more beautiful.

Gus Van Sant’s Psycho. It wasn’t an adaptation, it was a remake. A pointless, empty remake.

Snyder replaced most of the big themes, dilemmas, ironies, etc. with his passion for lurid slomo sex and violence. I knew things would go wrong when the movie “faithfully” cut Dr. Manhattan’s interview with Laurie/Dan fight scene, which upstaged the interview instead of played off the strange parallels in the situations.

I don’t expect the director’s cut to fix stuff like this (and most of the other stuff everyone else has pointed out). I think the best possible adaptation of Watchmen would be in 12 (TV?) episodes, maybe one hour each, and not by Zack Snyder, who fails to grasp the material. And this would still not be a “perfect” adaptation, but it would have a better shot.