WATCHMEN (2009)
Few things in the world are more satisfying than a fully realized film adaptation of a literary pièce de résistance.
WATCHMEN is one of those.
After years of roadblocks and missed opportunities, Zack Snyder has delivered Alan Moore's magnum opus to the big screen in sparkling fashion. Though WATCHMEN is not without Snyder's trademark masturbatory cinematography and cheesily edited action scenes, WATCHMEN offers up a shimmering and shrewd story that pays great respect to the infinitely dignified graphic novel to which it's based.
While WATCHMEN might be touted as a fanboy's film in its impudent panel-by-panel, line-for-line re-creation of the comics, its devotion to the source material is certainly not cause for complaint. Snyder's meticulous imagining of the characters, settings, and themes is more than enough to please not only the most hardened comic book fans but also those who went to see WATCHMEN looking for a little more brains than beauty.
Audiences going into WATCHMEN expecting a Herculean, 117 minute brainfart like 300 should rethink what they're in for. WATCHMEN chronicles vigilante crime-fighters who face a murder-mystery amidst the backdrop of the nuclear paranoia of the Cold War without using huge CGI set pieces with super-villains dressed up like robotic cephalopods. There's moral ambiguity, political commentary, social upheaval, and some good ol' high-school-level man-versus-man struggle. It's deep stuff in a genre full of pedestrian superficiality.
Apart from a laughingly embarrassing sex scene in an Owlship, a Richard Nixon who seems to be suffering from bloating of the face (and apparently Pinocchio syndrome), the biggest uncut CG dick you'll see in movies, and distracting speed ramps and slow-mo, WATCHMEN has been done definitive justice on the silver screen. Changing gears from 300 to WATCHMEN proved worrisome, but Zack Snyder's final product has certified itself to be more than sufficient in telling the tale that Alan Moore envisioned in 1986. Handsomely photographed and audaciously keen, WATCHMEN is an entirely apt consummation of a graphic novel that deserved nothing less.
Apart from a laughingly embarrassing sex scene in an Owlship, a Richard Nixon who seems to be suffering from bloating of the face (and apparently Pinocchio syndrome), the biggest uncut CG dick you'll see in movies, and distracting speed ramps and slow-mo, WATCHMEN has been done definitive justice on the silver screen. Changing gears from 300 to WATCHMEN proved worrisome, but Zack Snyder's final product has certified itself to be more than sufficient in telling the tale that Alan Moore envisioned in 1986. Handsomely photographed and audaciously keen, WATCHMEN is an entirely apt consummation of a graphic novel that deserved nothing less.
