Watchmen: I Can't Decide Whether You Should Live or Die

For all the old school Usenetters.

This is not a review.

I expecting Tatum O'Neil to show up and take Rorschach out on a date.

Here there be spoilers.






Okay, I don't mean to be a spoilsport, but in the comic book, Roschach mails his journal to the New Frontiersman. That means the magazine could be located anywhere from Walla Walla, Washington to Kalamazoo. Here, he drops it in the slot of the magazine office, presumably on his way out of town. As in New York. As in the place Ozy just obliterated. As in all those guys at the magazine and that building and the journal? All gone. I'm just sayin'.

I was impressed by the soundtrack. You never hear Leonard Cohen's version of his own "Hallelujah." I mean, John Cale stole the song from him, you usually haer Jeff Buckley's version of Cohen cover, though I'm sure Cohen's attitude is that if John Cale wants to make him a few million clams, let him. I was happy to hear the Cohen original, though, I do wonder how many people were thinking, "What did those bastards do to Jeff Buckley's song?"

I was also mildly amused to see "All Along the Watch Tower" used, and I wondered if that was related to its Battlestar Galactica usage.

I had some problems with the pacing and camera usage, myself. I suspect it's down to this: the director did the same thing he did with 300. He used the comic book as a storyboard. It doesn't work. It doesn't work because a comic book might look like a story board, but it is really its own thing. It is trying to tell a story by itself. A storyboard is just giving a fleeting indication of what the visual might look like for the tenth of a second it is on screen. The difference? When someone shoots at Veidt in the comic book, the comic panel can be as confusing or detailed as Moore and Gibbon want, because the reader can just bloody well stare at it to his heart's content. On the screen it goes away. And if you try and put it in slow motion, it just looks mannered rather than impressive. The Matrix managed to do something a bit different, but it worked there. It was just off here. I was not impressed by the fights here. In particular the fight at the end and the death of the Comedian lasted too damn long.


Also, for once, I think IMAX does a disservice to the flick. The aspect ratio in IMAX is around 1.85:1, but it the regular theater it's 2.35:1, which is a fairly radical difference, and I want to see what it is. I think the fights might look better. Also, Malin Akerman is a beautiful woman, but she's not particularly voluptuous, and her skinny little butt in the nude scenes wasn't flattered by IMAX.

The ending makes a certain amount of sense in blaming Dr. Manhattan instead of some alien quid, especially since the Black Freighter and text sequences have been excised, so instead of being sort of fairly foreshadowed, it would come out of nowhere.