Watchmen Review
by Zoe Blade (zoeb AT bytenoise DOT co DOT uk)March 8th, 2009
Film: Watchmen
Year: 2009
Rating: 4/5
Summary: Stylised and glossy, a faithful adaptation, but incoherent.
Watchmen is a comic book written by Alan Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons in the eighties. Twenty years later, it was finally adapted into a movie. I'll try to briefly summarise whether you'll like the film or not based on whether you've read the book or not.
If you've read the comic book, then the film adaptation of Watchmen is slightly less camp and slightly more violent. Very little was made up for the film, making it quite a faithful adaptation, but some parts were told out of order, and a lot - mostly character development and the unease of the people - was missed out from the theatrical cut. Hopefully the full version, to be released on video, rectifies most of the omissions. The only thing you really need to know about the adaptation is this: if you liked the book, you will probably like the film. If not, then not.
If you haven't read the book, then you're probably going to be confused for most of the movie. A lot of things are shown that don't make sense without knowledge of their context or backstory. For a very minor example, there was an advert for Millennium near the end of the film, which is pointless without reading the internal office memo about the product, showing what its marketing says about the mindset of the people and of one of the main characters. There are many more prominent examples of things that make sense in the original comic but don't in the film.
As the book was split up into twelve different chapters, each one with its distinct tone and sometimes even its own narrator, it seems curious that the film's director didn't keep the order of events intact or make the chapter breaks more obvious. Simply fading to black at the appropriate points would probably have gone a long way to helping the film look like several coherent stories instead of one big incoherent mess.
If you've read the comic, and you think it would be neat to see it come to life, then you'll probably like this film. If you haven't read the comic, it'll probably look like an incoherent mess, but a fun incoherent mess nevertheless.
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
