Ok, I am dreadfully sorry for taking forever to write this review. I recently got involved in making a video game and this need to pick only adaptations and animations, as well as the constant work load, has kind of screwed up my reviews. So for now, Watchmen will be my last Ani-Country review. I will still post my weekly movie reviews that I'm doing for homework, but these will be of anything and so, warning ended.
Watchmen is a really good movie, with great pacing, great editing, and great writing. I know that sounds redundant, but frankly, if you've seen this movie, you either love it, don't like all the gore, or hate the ending because you think adaptations should be perfect copies of the source material. Again, being a little over the edge, but let's cut to brass tax.
The movie is about politics and how government should be run. That's not implicit or even a subtle symbolism. That's how it is. Ozymandais is a Socialist, Rorschach is an extreme Libertarian. Dr. Manhattan is an isolationist, and Night Owl and Silk Spectre are pretty comfortable with government their government however it is.
And at the top if it all is the Comedian, who seems to both despise and revel in his country's corruption.
The movie uses wonderful editing, making each shot feel like it was taken directly from a comic book page, which is saying something since the movie takes, scene for scene, every shot from the original source material. The only difference between the comic and the movie is what everyone who's a hardcore Alan Moore fan thinks is the ultimate sin in movies.
The movie's plot goes as such: The Comedian, a deranged sociopath and Anti-hero has been murdered and no one knows who did it. It turns out, in this universe, super heroes left the pages of comic books and real people started wearing costumes. These superheroes got involved in Wars a lot as well, including Vietnam.
The cold war is still going on and while Rorschach is trying to figure out who killed the Comedian, Dr. Manhattan and Ozymandais are trying to stop nuclear holocaust by stopping the energy crisis by creating infinite free enemy. Dr. Manhattan is slowly driven to exiling himself to Mars and Rorschach realizes that [spoilers]Ozymandais killed the Comedian and is planning to blow up hugely populated cities using bombs made from the energy that Dr. Manhattan is made of. This causes the Soviets and the U.S.A to stop fighting each other and unite under fear of Dr. Manhattan.
Now, in the comics, Moore wrote that Ozymandais used Manhattan's energy to teleport giant squids into cities to fake an alien invasion. Now, while this makes some sense, I find that the Manhattan ploy is the smarter outcome. With a fake Alien invasion, should humanity ever go into the stars, we would be very antagonistic towards aliens and probably be very hostile to new life. And should we ever find an alien race of giant squids, we would probably immediately go to war with them.
But with the Dr. Manhattan ploy, there's one specific target, who knows the sacrifice of what he's done. There won't be anything a human can do against Dr. Manhattan since he's pretty much Omnipotent, so the world is basically united under a banner of fear that will never be broken because they are basically uniting under the face of God.
Now, this is a personal opinion, many will say otherwise. Many will say that you should try recreating a perfect film version of something or not even bother, but then, why? Isn't it better to want to use new ideas and to explore alternate possibilities?
The characters are all wonderful and the acting is amazing. Dr. Manhattan especially, with all of his CGI, the man is basically giving a perfect performance with small facial twitches and expressions that are hardly noticeable, but clearly visible if you pay attention. And the argument between Libertarian and Socialism is very interesting, even if they just rule the inevitable answer as Socialism wins, "for now".
And the music. My god. The sound track is masterfully edited together and I really cannot think of a major problem the movie had.
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