Being a massive fan of the comic by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, I recall being properly stoked on the lead up to the release of this movie back in the day. I the event, I was disappointed in some aspects but basically thought it to be a decent effort overall. Having seen it a couple of times since, and most latterly in the Ultimate Director's Cut, my feelings haven't changed, although certain things which bothered me at first don't so much now. It hardly needs stating but the original comic was an incredible bit of work and was sort of a development on the basic idea Alan Moore tried out in the earlier Marvelman from the marvellous British Warrior magazine, which existed in the early 80's. That idea of course was to device a strip which deconstructed the superhero idea and played it straight. It's a good idea of course, because it allows us to do that thing we all enjoy - i.e. Having our cake and eating it. By that, I mean it treated the material deadly seriously and poked fun at the ridiculous aspects of it, while still essentially delivering a superhero story in doing so. Watchmen was the last word in this kind of thing and it is a colossal and complex bit of work.
Set in an alternate reality of 1985, it looks at the history of the various costumed avengers who fought crime in New York City and brings things up-t-o-date via the unexpected emergence of the superman and how this happening changed the course of history, in direct comparison to our own. There's a lot more to it than that but that's a sort of bare bones outline of the thing. The first thing I have to say is that, as far as I'm concerned, this is a very honourable attempt at adapting a bit of work which was always hitherto considered unfilmable. They don't deviant from the story very much up until a significant change towards the end and there is a real attempt to capture the look of the comic. This is worthy of praise because if they hadn't done this, there would be a lot of criticism. I guess though, one of the thing which this adaption made abundantly clear to me was that what is written on the comic page - no matter how well written - doesn't always translate on the screen as successfully. To this end, much of the dialogue seems a bit stiff and the character of Rorschach is even more egregious in that he is given a ludicrous hard-boiled voice, which felt very misguided. A film such as Sin City achieves this dialogue transition much more successfully in that it is a highly stylised bit of work with no accent on realism whatsoever. Watchmen has the trickier task of presenting something fantastic, yet grounded in dramatic reality and the film never truly nails this. It feels like there's a fair bit of good quality surface but the nuances are often buried in the mix.
The Rorschach character loses a dynamic in the film, with Jackie Earle Haley not exactly putting in a bad performance but the character struggles to resonate, like on the page. Dr. Manhattan comes off worse, with some distracting CGI used where a more minimalistic approach would have worked far better - Billy Crudup does try to inject an otherworldly element to him, yet Crudup often plays the character less like he is detached from reality and more like he is detached from his brain. Much better was Patrick Wilson as Nite Owl II and Jeffrey Dean Morgan as The Comedian, while Malin Akerman is a devastatingly beautiful Silk Spectre II. On a final note, I wouldn't really recommend the Ultimate Cut, as the Black Freighter sections didn't really add up to an awful lot, when you take into account the three-an-a-half-hour run-time these additions result in. Overall, this is certainly a good version of this material but it does, once more, illustrate that excellence in comics cannot be so easily replicated on film, even with admirable attention to detail.
Set in an alternate reality of 1985, it looks at the history of the various costumed avengers who fought crime in New York City and brings things up-t-o-date via the unexpected emergence of the superman and how this happening changed the course of history, in direct comparison to our own. There's a lot more to it than that but that's a sort of bare bones outline of the thing. The first thing I have to say is that, as far as I'm concerned, this is a very honourable attempt at adapting a bit of work which was always hitherto considered unfilmable. They don't deviant from the story very much up until a significant change towards the end and there is a real attempt to capture the look of the comic. This is worthy of praise because if they hadn't done this, there would be a lot of criticism. I guess though, one of the thing which this adaption made abundantly clear to me was that what is written on the comic page - no matter how well written - doesn't always translate on the screen as successfully. To this end, much of the dialogue seems a bit stiff and the character of Rorschach is even more egregious in that he is given a ludicrous hard-boiled voice, which felt very misguided. A film such as Sin City achieves this dialogue transition much more successfully in that it is a highly stylised bit of work with no accent on realism whatsoever. Watchmen has the trickier task of presenting something fantastic, yet grounded in dramatic reality and the film never truly nails this. It feels like there's a fair bit of good quality surface but the nuances are often buried in the mix.
The Rorschach character loses a dynamic in the film, with Jackie Earle Haley not exactly putting in a bad performance but the character struggles to resonate, like on the page. Dr. Manhattan comes off worse, with some distracting CGI used where a more minimalistic approach would have worked far better - Billy Crudup does try to inject an otherworldly element to him, yet Crudup often plays the character less like he is detached from reality and more like he is detached from his brain. Much better was Patrick Wilson as Nite Owl II and Jeffrey Dean Morgan as The Comedian, while Malin Akerman is a devastatingly beautiful Silk Spectre II. On a final note, I wouldn't really recommend the Ultimate Cut, as the Black Freighter sections didn't really add up to an awful lot, when you take into account the three-an-a-half-hour run-time these additions result in. Overall, this is certainly a good version of this material but it does, once more, illustrate that excellence in comics cannot be so easily replicated on film, even with admirable attention to detail.