Movie: The Watchmen
Mar. 15th, 2009 06:45 pmSummary: Great movie. Irresponsibly bad metadata.
Omaha and I went to see The Watchmen movie last Friday and, I have to say, it was remarkably honest to the comic book and didn't sacrifice too much to get its point across. A lot of the actors seemed to think that being in a comic book meant they didn't have to invest much energy into it, and I thought Malin Ackerman and Matthew Goode were weak as the Silk Spectre and Ozymandias, but all in all the film was an amazing movie that did a better job of hewing to its original material than many a comic book adaptation.
I did kinda miss the squid, though.
This film deserved more than an R rating. It should have been NC-17. My reaction to the level of gore, violence, and sex in it was simply this: no responsible parent would let a child under the age of 16 watch that movie. I could not believe that there were two adolescent boys in the theater with no adult supervision, and later learned that of Yamaraashi-chan's friends, one has already seen it-- with her father, no less!-- and one was scheduled to go see it this weekend with her friends. It was true to the book, and the book was a masterpiece of its time with its remarkable re-intepretation of the superhero myth, but the book's reinterpretation took a cold, hard look at the passion and necessary violence that emerges when vigilantism tries to deal with the nastiest corners of our society.
The other problem with the film is the advertising: it presents The Watchmen as a superhero movie, but it's a superhero movie only superficially. This ain't The X-Men or Spider-Man. The Watchmen is an exegesis on what it means to be a hero, the limits of heroism, and the kind of personal toll trying to be a hero, some kind of ur-role model, has on the psyches of the people who play that game. It's very talky, and there's more depth to it than most people are going to want in a superhero flick. Okay, yeah, you get to watch some fight scenes, some of them more than a little amazing, but you also get to watch the best-trained warriors on the planet just beat the snot out of people who've got little to no hope of defeating them, which is not really what you go to a superhero movie to see. The fights are all one-sided; it's the ideas thrown around, and not the bodies, that made Watchmen interesting. (Well, okay, the love scene is an equal match of bodies, but that's, er, well, okay.)
If you're an adult and you love comics, go see it. If you're a parent, leave the kids at home.
Omaha and I went to see The Watchmen movie last Friday and, I have to say, it was remarkably honest to the comic book and didn't sacrifice too much to get its point across. A lot of the actors seemed to think that being in a comic book meant they didn't have to invest much energy into it, and I thought Malin Ackerman and Matthew Goode were weak as the Silk Spectre and Ozymandias, but all in all the film was an amazing movie that did a better job of hewing to its original material than many a comic book adaptation.
I did kinda miss the squid, though.
This film deserved more than an R rating. It should have been NC-17. My reaction to the level of gore, violence, and sex in it was simply this: no responsible parent would let a child under the age of 16 watch that movie. I could not believe that there were two adolescent boys in the theater with no adult supervision, and later learned that of Yamaraashi-chan's friends, one has already seen it-- with her father, no less!-- and one was scheduled to go see it this weekend with her friends. It was true to the book, and the book was a masterpiece of its time with its remarkable re-intepretation of the superhero myth, but the book's reinterpretation took a cold, hard look at the passion and necessary violence that emerges when vigilantism tries to deal with the nastiest corners of our society.
The other problem with the film is the advertising: it presents The Watchmen as a superhero movie, but it's a superhero movie only superficially. This ain't The X-Men or Spider-Man. The Watchmen is an exegesis on what it means to be a hero, the limits of heroism, and the kind of personal toll trying to be a hero, some kind of ur-role model, has on the psyches of the people who play that game. It's very talky, and there's more depth to it than most people are going to want in a superhero flick. Okay, yeah, you get to watch some fight scenes, some of them more than a little amazing, but you also get to watch the best-trained warriors on the planet just beat the snot out of people who've got little to no hope of defeating them, which is not really what you go to a superhero movie to see. The fights are all one-sided; it's the ideas thrown around, and not the bodies, that made Watchmen interesting. (Well, okay, the love scene is an equal match of bodies, but that's, er, well, okay.)
If you're an adult and you love comics, go see it. If you're a parent, leave the kids at home.
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