Well, I loved it

March 8th, 2009 at 08:36am Will Pfeifer

SPOILERS, OF COURSE…

Admittedly, I was primed to. This movie was aimed right at me, and at everyone else who has read (and re-read) the original comic book. I sat there in the theater, amazed that director Zack Snyder was able to get in so much of the original story. It’s a long, complex work, and there’s a lot of it on screen — much more than I would’ve thought possible.

And I thought Snyder made it work as a movie, too. He and his writers knew which origin stories to focus on (Dr. Manhattan, the Comedian, Rorschach) and which one to deal with in a few offhand comments (Ozymandias). He kept most of the relationships intact, and even including the oddly touching moment near the end where Rorschach tells Nite Owl that he knows he makes it difficult to be his friend. Some stuff was obviously cut from the comic — the Black Freighter comic book (which arrives on DVD soon) and the interaction between the kid reading it and the newsstand dealer (though they are glimpsed throughout the movie and seen at the end). I’m guessing there’s a little more about the paranoid right-wing newspaper NEW FRONTIERSMAN, too — there are detailed shots of it in the ART OF WATCHMEN book, and the ending, where we meet Seymour and the editor, feels like it’s lacking a bit of setup. Don’t be surprised if that shows up in Snyder’s extended cut (due on the DVD). But he covered a lot of ground in the justifiably praised opening credits sequence, and the multiple flashbacks — especially Dr. Manhattan’s time-skipping history — worked very well.

 Performances? Well, Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach is the obvious standout, but Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Patrick Wilson are both good as the Comedian and Nite Owl, respectively, and Billy Crudup does well as Dr. Manhattan, even though it’s just his body movements and voice (familiar from all those MasterCard commercials). Other critics slammed Malin Akerman and Matthew Goode (as Silk Spectre II and Ozymandias, respectively), but I didn’t have much of a problem with them — Goode was suitably distant and arrogant, and Akerman seemed to at least come close to hitting all the right notes. It’s such a big movie, full of characters (Matt Frewer, Carla Gugino and Stephen McHattie also have supporting roles) that it just keeps zipping along from scene to scene, allowing you (well, me at least) to ignore the weaker moments. (There is one special effect that’s so bad — an aerial shot of Ozymandias’ headquarters — that I actually thought it was supposed to be a model, not the real thing.)

And as far as the ending went, I actually thought — and this might be blasphemy of a sort — that it improved a bit on the original. The movie actually tied everything back to Dr. Manhattan in a more direct way, and though some fans missed the “giant squid” that delivered a semi-apocalypse in the comic book, it did get a nod in the movie — the acronymy for whatever project Veidt was working on was S.Q.U.I.D. Otherwise, the ending was almost exactly like the comic, from the rebirth of Manhattan (”I’m very disappointed in you!”) to Rorschach’s last-second return to humanity.

I’m still digesting this movie, but I’d rate it a success. Yes, there’s too much slow-mo (a Snyder trademark), and parts of it must be completely mystifying to someone who doesn’t know the story, but it worked for me.

And you?

Entry Filed under: Reviews