Yesterday afternoon I was dragged to see Watchmen, and I’m glad I was. I had no desire to see it, because the trailer didn’t do anything for me, but I enjoyed the movie much more than I’d expected. The last 20-25 minutes were a letdown, but otherwise I was totally pulled in.
Watchmen is an adapation of a 12-part comic book series that came out in 1986-87 and was eventually collected into a graphic novel. I’d long heard of it but had never read it, which is weird, because it came out during my comic-book-reading heyday. I guess I was more interested in classic DC Comics characters at the time and wasn’t interested in reading something so dark and adult.
What I really enjoyed about Watchmen is how it both honors and subverts classic comic book tropes and history. (I guess you could say it deconstructs them.) Woven throughout the story are references to a classic 1940s superhero team, which seems loosely based on the Justice Society of America, precursor to the more famous Justice League of America. The heroes experience a postwar fall from grace, parallelling America’s deteriorating view of itself from the end of World War II through the 1970s and 1980s. Watching the movie, I liked how we got a sense of history and continuity — some larger reality out there of which we only see pieces.
Film adaptations rarely live up to the original source material — they always compress it. So I’m interested in reading the graphic novel now, in order to experience the whole thing.
And what of the huge glowing uncut blue shlong?
I figured it would be too obvious to comment on. But Halloween will be interesting this year.
(BTW, it was uncut? How could you tell? I didn’t notice, and I saw it in IMAX.)
I didn’t even notice, and coming from me, that’s saying something. But then again, I’m not into hentai.
I highly recommend the book. It is excellent, but of course, anything by Alan Moore is excellent. You might also try V For Vendetta and From Hell. Ignore the movies, though. Watchmen is the first movie of one his works that is actually good.
The one caveat is that if you though the ending of the movie was a let down, you might not like the ending of the book. I’ll not spoil it, but the ending of the movie was IMO much better and made a hell of a lot more sense.