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three or four times and you've had an artistic experience far greater than the film itself. That combination, in the trailer, of the ominous God-like opaque blue figure, with the futuristic music and that amazing crystalline world forming..... well, the film pales before those images wedded to that sound.
For the rest, you've seen it all before, but not this long-winded or full-of-itself. Billy Crudup shows why stardom has eluded him: he's perfect to portray a sexless, bloodless Superthing. There are some disturbing thoughts hidden in the quagmire of millions of wasted dollars of Fx, too. A woman born of a rape--- well, not only is she glad to have been given life but so is the victim to have been so gifted! Ah, there's always a silver lining.
I'll leave out the fact that human life is casually destroyed by the heroes of the film, as well as the Superthing, as if we were all just numbers to be calculated up.
Okay, how about eye-candy? This is the type of film that wherein the women are all brassy, hard-boiled, air-brushed, and totally devoid of any softness. The superhero male allowed to be attracted to women is-- hasn't this become the icon of Modern Man, at least to Hollywood?--- a middle-aged guy, not unattractive and buff to the max yet he acts more self-conscious, more boyish than Jimmy Stewart at his most awkward.
What a pile of stinking manure this is. I'd like to say the Fx made it all worthwhile but it didn't. Ah, but the trailer is wonderful!
Follow Ups:
I have seen the trailer... read the book... not sure I want to see the movie. I thought the book was interesting, but no masterpiece as it is purported to be.
I do think your review/reaction is not that different than what is intended. The heroes are all deeply flawed... sadists... and their time is passed. Their powers are (generally) all in the realm of what is possible (well not Dr Manhattan, but perhaps the point there is, if there is a God, maybe he is not that interested in us either). The only character I did like was Rorschach, "evil" as he was, and I think I would like to see Jackie Earle Hailey play him (but am probably better off watching Breaking Away for the 100th time :-).
While I have mixed feelings about the Watchmen based on a muddled plot, erratic pacing and really BAD make-up in places, apparently you weren't even viewing the same movie. Here is just one example of where you missed what was going on:
> > > "A woman born of a rape--- well, not only is she glad to have been given life but so is the victim to have been so gifted!" < < <
First of all, while I'll agree that the plot point involving Silk Spectre II being the daughter of the Comedian is muddled, the film is clear in the point that NO RAPE actually occurred. It was stopped. The only problem I had with that was that 1) Silk Spectre (Sally Jupiter) was supposed to be a super heroine and yet she posed very little resistance to the brutish Comedian's attempted rape and actually had to be rescued, and 2) she apparently fell in and out of love with her attacker (at some point, later on, off screen) resulting in their having super-daughter, after which she abruptly left him for someone else and in a painfully obvious plot device never told her daughter (Silk Spectre II; Laurie Jupiter) after she was grown.
So, there was no woman born of rape in the movie; I'd have to reread the graphic novel to determine if this was substantially altered, but a rape would've been easier to communicate even though it would've left the Comedian non-rehabilitatable from a cinematic standpoint.
Also, IMO you're reading just a little too much into the sexual awkwardness of Night Owl II...
> > > "a middle-aged guy, not unattractive and buff to the max yet he acts more self-conscious, more boyish than Jimmy Stewart at his most awkward." < < <
This is almost a Clark Kent pastiche, more true to the comic-book tradition than Hollywood, even though it was consummated in a somewhat traditional Hollywood fashion in keeping with the film's "R" rating. It was very appropriate considering the material.
Anyone familiar with the comics of the 1940's should see this just for the nostalgic homage to bygone characters done with an alternative universe twist. For instance, Silk Spectre II is based on Fox's 1940's character Phantom Lady and the supporting character Hooded Justice is loosely based upon the 40's MLJ character Hangman; some of this is touched upon in the link below.
As far as glorifying gore, I saw less gut-wrenching stuff than in many other action movies. Of course Watchmen has a more fantasy based, alternative universe feel than most reality based dramas and action pictures, but I've seen far worse films depicting gore (Natural Born Killers, for example).
If you want to see some REAL gore, look at some vintage WWII Timely (Marvel) comic book covers from the 1940's; they'll curl your Shirley Temple hair doo, dude! :o)
AuPh
It was a rape that was interrupted or would have been consummated. Even worse, the woman then went on to have a relationship with the would-be-rapist: that in itself is a two-fold rape. In keeping with the plot (unbelievable as it is), it is a Stockholm Syndrome situation. On the other hand, it is a "rape" of the viewer, repeating as it does the "women like to be raped---- they ask for it." I thought you'd be more sensitive.
As far as downplaying the violence.... SPOILER: you didn't happen to see that a young girl was attacked, dismembered, and fed to dogs? Or that the perp was hit repeatedly in the head with a meat cleaver? I'd mention many other scenes, i.e. one of bone protruding from flesh after a karate blow, but you'd just say, "I've seen worse!"
You may have seen worse but hardly in a film where a "hero" does it. In your own example, Woody Harrelson's character is a worthless serial killer. We aren't meant to identify with him, he isn't portrayed as some vigilante, dispensing "tough" justice.
In a film where there is vicious violence meted out both from the Just and the Criminal, who cares about either? That's a moral (or should I say, "amoral") problem with much modern film: if both are scum bags, then there is no friction, there is just blood, gore, and violence.
One excellent example: Sin City, which BTW, is a great film, well paced and ground breaking.
AuPh
beat a woman half to death and attempt to rape her?
We can both agree that The Comedian is not especially heroic and that his behavior is far from admirable. You certainly have the right to loathe the character even though he died early on, but to be fair, in the flashbacks he didn't beat Silk Spectre half to death even if that was your impression. We should try to keep in mind that even though The Comedian is a cigar chomping lout he is just one character in a story that isn't centered on any one character. Note: This is a plot driven rather than character driven film.Speaking generally, there is uglier violence in Sin City and a lot more of it, and the violence is often justifiably dispensed by a protagonist hero. As for violence against women there is plenty of that in Sin City as well, but women frequently give as good as they get (much of the violence is dispensed by women), but there are also scenes of psychotic killers who enjoy torturing victims. In Watchmen most of the heroes are in fact heroic albeit flawed and the violence less demented or grisly.
As far as calling Sin City a bloodbath, well, you do have a point, but it is also a moody, noirish tale that is extremely well told in chapters that can be woven together in an infinite number of ways; it is deserving of the high praise it has received. Even if Sin City isn't your cuppa-tea (as Watchmen obviously isn't) it's still a bona fide classic of the genre.
AuPh
Edits: 03/11/09 03/11/09
Which might just make them more realistic.
We live in a world where a country has prisoners sent halfway round he world so its leader can claim truthfully his military don't hang people by their wrists and slash their genitals with razorblades.
A world where rape is used as part of war or was it just genocide?
At the moment there is a plague of mutilations of kangaroos going on around Perth.
Soldiers here in Queensland have been prosecuted for torturing kittens.
It's a sick old world.
okay?
I'd take a different tack: it is works such as "Watchmen" that inoculate regular, sensitive people into thinking that viciousness is "human."
I guess, Dave, it all comes down to how cynical one is and whether or not one finds entertainment in a film (and if it's not entertainment, what is it? an intellectual exercsise? Please!) that glorifies violence.
You may not find it shocking that a mainstream film argues that purposefully killing millions of one's own people is a good deterrent to global war but I am more than glad to say I am.
Watchmen doesn't glorify anything. Watchmen basically asks a few simple questions. 1. if people dressed up in costumes and fought crime in the real world what would these people be like? answer mostly psychopaths with extreme points of views be them liberal or conservative.
2. What would happen if superman were real? answer, he wouldn't be saving Lois Lane every week or fighting Lex Luther. He would have a profound socialogical and political impact. the movie doesn't glorify anything. It examines the comic book genre and mythologies from a view point that marked a revolution in comic books.
Since I never read the source material, I did not think in these terms. But as a sort of meta-comic, placing traditional comic book characters in the gritty real world, it becomes more interesting conceptually.
I guess that my main problem with the plot is that it turns on the decision of Dr. Manhattan. And his final decision is based on a rather trite high school biology factoid. It just seemed to me that such an advanced being would not equate "improbable" with "miraculous."
Humanity.
Not particularly profound things, mind you, but it does have pretensions.
It doesn't glorify any of the things you claim it glorifies.
d
I mean... come on!
"The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
And, remember I haven't seen the film yet, that the trashing of the veneer goodness of a self appointed elite of those who would "protect" us, but who are actually at least as vicious as the "baddies (compare Rambo), would not be seen as glorification.
Opinions vary.
It is a juvenile desire for no restraint, no rules. But, unlike the other films, this one has great pretensions of seriousness. It makes grand political points, argues the great issue of the day, nuclear armament and its use.
... if it were still the 1950s.
But then that is possibly the time that ALL comic books/graphic novels are set in.
...could be the Roman coliseum for our age, and a quickening towards de-evolution.Just as too much pepper desensitizes the palete, you become what you eat.
Edits: 03/10/09
http://www.mrqe.com/movies/m100028539
thanks
Phil
I'd rather not feed the banal media anyway.
.
...and interesting take from from movie critic (and he *is* a critic, not a reviewer) Andrew O'Hehir, whose normal beat is foreign and independent films at Salon.com (Beyond The Multiplex blog):
Despite expecting to dislike Watchmen (in fact prepared to write a pan), and while acknowledging that director Zack Snyder is one of the "least talents" associated with it over the years, O'Hehir found himself "...shocked to be writing this, given the number of screenwriters, directors and studios this adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' ground-breaking 1986 anti-superhero comic series has gone through, but "Watchmen" is absolutely devastating. Dense, intense, tragic and visionary, this is the kind of movie that keeps setting off bombs in your brain hours after you've seen it. After coming out of the theater, I wandered the frozen streets of Manhattan watching passersby and wondering which was the real city, the apparently peaceful one I inhabit now or the one that faces Armageddon at the mid-'80s height of the Cold War in the Moore-Gibbons universe. If I could have gone back inside and watched the movie all over again, I'd have done it."
He goes on: "Zack Snyder (of "300" and the 2004 "Dawn of the Dead" remake) reveals himself here as a filmmaker of mightily impressive range and control. For my money, "Watchmen" way out-darks "The Dark Knight," and immediately leaps near the top of the list of apocalyptic pop-culture operas, alongside "Blade Runner" and the first "Matrix" movie (which are obvious influences). My instinct is that this may be too gloomy, grinding and un-cathartic a film to provide a Bat-scale global payday, and to his immense credit, Snyder has insisted he won't be involved with any sequel."
I've not seen Watchmen, but I will see it on the big screen and make up my own mind. I generally respect O'Hehir's take on films.
Complete review at Salon via link:
ghoul would find this film entertaining. Or someone so inured to torture, gore, and human suffering and death that its glorification pleases them.
As it is done in many movies like a movie I despise: Total Recall. This was very much a dark, dystopian movie which showed the country and heroes out of control. I too went to this movie expecting to not like it. I am not a fanboy nor even heard of Watchmen. I picked up the book and really didn't like it too much. I thought the movie was excellent and very dense. Much of the brutality comes from the source which is graphic novel stuff made into real life action much like 300 (a movie I didn't like much) made itself seem like a pornography of violence. But the violence was sporadic here and not the central thing. The story hinged on the dual events of an actual world with superheroes and the impending doom of the world.
NT
and if it is unrelentingly evil, a reviewer is lacking to not mention it. If it were a WWII film showing how the Holocaust was an unfortunate but necessary Nazi strategy, should a reviewer ignore that criminal and abominable assertion?
Or should we just turn off our brains and rate films on how wonderful the Fx are, nowadays?
You compare Watchmen to a movie that justifies the Holocaust.
I'm afraid I don't see all this horrid evil that so offends you. I don't think of myself as a "ghoul," nor do I consider the reasonably high percentage of critics that liked this movie (> 50%) to be "ghouls."
A bunch of people died. Just like the TV show 24, where people die every week. But in reality, nobody is really dead.
I thought this was minor entertainment, with a lot of flaws, but overall I enjoyed many aspects.
If character flaws in the "heroes" offend you, sorry, I found those interesting. If the final choice offends you, sorry, I thought it was the only reasonable choice under the admittedly artificial circumstances.
I walked out completely unoffended morally.
Cold blooded murder of criminals, torturing them before the execution?
Let's not be coy about this. When this novel was penned, the right was screaming about Law and Order and films like Dirty Harry and Death Wish fed a vigilanteism that repulsed less reactionary members of society.
These "heroes" aren't content to stop crime, hold criminals for police. They want to kill them, period. SPOILER
How much fun you must have had watching the heroes go into that alley, luring those gang members whom they then beat senseless, with many being killed (more than a few were viciously kicked or struck after they'd lost consciousness or were helpless after suffering paralyzing blows).
And I suppose you thrilled to the repeated meat cleaver strikes into the head of the immobilized child killer, shown in lurid graphic detail.
You may be in some sort of denial about the level and frequency of violence in the film.
Perhaps you enjoyed the fact that 7 million or so New Yorkers were vaporized, as well as the countless other millions of East coast city dwellers, in order to preemptively stop a larger possible exchange? Ah, the doctrine of preemption at its best! I especially liked the fact that those heroes left standing at the end all thought it was a pretty good idea, too.
The level of the depiction of violence, the fact that some of the worst is meted out by "heroes" and then the ultimate carnage involving millions of victims, calculated as if they were some sort of wooden chess pieces----- well, friendo, that's shocking to anyone that hasn't become a robot himself, who hasn't played so many computerized war games that they think death is some sort of electronic make believe.
This is a sick movie. Period.
This is how the world should work. This is my vision of a utopian world.
I am nothing but a murderous robot, and I love death. Preferably violent and unjustified.
I think you've gone off the deep end. It's a comic book movie. I think you should get really pissed off over something real, not a dumb fantasy movie.
Perhaps you yourself are a movie-hating ghoul/robot.
of serious discussion as any art genre.
Loaf And Death?
;-)
"The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
everyone and his brother will see it.
Hell, even Ebert, who neglects to analyze the film, seemed hypnotized by it and can't wait to have the experience, again!
I'm sure a lot of wonderful people make great livings on Fx but it seems like such a dehumanization of film.
Just asking...
Sermon on the Cross is pretty good, too.
.
"This is the type of film that wherein the women are all brassy, hard-boiled, air-brushed, and totally devoid of any softness."
I'm sold on it already and will pre-order the Blu-Ray immediately.
Best Regards,
Chris redmond.
... escpecially from our best known two reviewers on the ABC.
Neither of them are graphic novel fans, both are over 60 and both, with slight reservations, thought it a good film.
One of the "heroes" brutally--- and very graphically--- beats one of his fellow female super-heroes and then rapes her.
Another "hero" (oh, perhaps it's the same lovable one) grabs a man's fingers, twisting them to make him give information. After he gets it, he breaks a few more, with a laugh.
In yet another gratuitously sadistic scene, we have a hero not once but multiple times drive a butcher blade into a bound man's head. No, the camera doesn't pan away. We see it go in, come out, and re-enter various times.
This is Dirty Harry with Fx, though Harry wasn't as ambitious an effort.
It beats me why so many people put such faith not to mention money into advanced CGI fx.
It's not real.
It doesn't look real.
It doesn't have to.
Who cares?
Bring back Harryhausen!
have to do with my point?
Those Tom And Jerry Shows have a lot to answer for!
I am guessing that part of it is that superheroes are not so super.
Edits: 03/08/09
bad or worse than the criminals---- what's the point of the entire exercise?
There are bad guys, they are caught, tried, and punished (almost always by excruciating, prolonged death) by "heroes" that visibly ENJOY the work. And then, the topper: complicity in humanity's greatest possible crime.
It may be that a sick society enjoys sickness but not recognizing it for what it is--- that's terrifying.
bleep
I heard there's plenty of smurf cock to look at if you like that kind of superthing.
-Tom §.
d
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