Thursday, February 26, 2009

Who Just Watched the Watchmen?

Attended the press screening of Watchmen last night. I've been waiting twenty years for this film so I deliberately kept my expectations low in order to prevent myself going beserk with an automatic weapon if the film turned out to be rubbish.

Good news. I didn't kill anyone.

The film's pretty faithful to the comic. Yeah, they've had to ditch subplots and secondary characters which in turn means they've had to tinker with the main plot slightly to accomodate these changes but it's still Watchmen. A streamlined, or diluted if one were being unkind, version of Moore's story to be sure but at least Hollywood didn't turn it into Batman and Robin.

Of course it's also very obviously a Zack Snyder film. There's lots of slo-mo and both the action and the gore have been amped up just to remind people that he directed 300 and The Dawn of the Dead remake. The fight scenes are full of wire-fu and at one point become so OTT they make The Matrix look like cinema verite. Whilst the graphic nature of the many maimings and killings had the audience alternating between wincing and applauding. And my friend who blagged me my ticket for the screening was practically traumatised by a gruesome setpiece during the prison scenes.

There's about a million other points I could make about the film but the short version is that while the film isn't perfect it's about as good a Hollywood adap as we could expect. And as such it's well worth a look.

5 comments:

Gary said...

You, sir, are a jammy bastard.

Mind you, sounds much like what I'm expecting so that isn't too bad.

Stuart Young said...

Actually, I'm pissed off that I didn't get to see the press screening of Tales of the Black Freighter and Under the Hood.

Or am I just being greedy?

Anonymous said...

Word is, there are supposed to be two different DVD releases with additional footage that didn't make it into the cinema release. I guess the original cut was about 3.5 hours.

Stuart Young said...

Oo, even more footage for me to go, "That bit wasn't in the comic. That bit was. That bit wasn't. That bit was ... " over.

Chris said...

Hark at 'im, going to press screenings...

Well, I thought the original book was okay - From Hell and V for Vendetta are still my favourite Moore stories.