Watchmen.
so what did i think?
well.... hmmmmmmmmmmm...
not particularly impressed, but i didn't feel as if i'd had my heart ripped out ad callously discarded, and i'm not gonna be spilling a ton of bile upon Zack Snyder...
in fact i kinda felt sorry for him as i sat watching the film, the opportunity to tackle Watchmen and do it justice was something he clearly relished from the start but now that the project has come to fruition it has become rather obvious that it must have been an extremely hard task to fully translate into another medium a graphic novel that so many people hold such reverence for.
the main downfall of the film seems to hinge on afew key elements, primarily the pacing, the panel layout of the comic makes for a great device that keeps the book moving almost like clockwork but most scenes presented in the film felt rushed with little thought for the impact they hold, every detail from the comic that holds ramifications seemed to have been dispensed with at great speed for the sake of running time.
the fact that this is a movie and that you can't just flick back afew pages or chapters or just re-read the whole thing from start to finish means that onscreen it all becomes a little muddled and unclear, especially in the story's most self-referencing moments
this issue with the pacing also presented more problems for itself, it had a deep impact on the way the character's were presented, giving little time to each character's personal situations and circumstances meant that you either didn't particularly care or didn't actualy know what they have gone through and also the swiftness of the story meant any sense of subtlety was thrown out the window so that some sub-plots became almost lost entirely while others were given a rather heavy-handed treatment.
perhaps as a mini-series all elements would have been given time and room to breath properly, or perhaps we are likely to see a Lord of the Rings-esque 4 disc DVD set that incorporates every scene cut from the film and fleshes out over details that give the story its identity, the first generation of costumed heroes and each of their fates were barely present and the brief screen time they were given gave little context to the next generation, the technological advances capable in a world inhabited by Doctor Manhattan were poorly and sloppily addressed and the imposing threat of nuclear war or any other impending apocalypse hardly seem to matter when we have seen none of the 'real' people that reside in New York, the seemingly bit-part players that are integral to the story.
the fact that some character's were not as i had in my mind was only to be expected, even when all reading from the same source material, differing views are bound to occur as everyone interprets it in their own way
as i left the IMAX i wasn't angry at the handling of Watchmen, if anything it actualy done more to re-inforce just how important it is to the medium of comics, it seems to exist in a world of it's own creating that is exclusively relevant and also revolutionary to comic book writing, the fact that it does not translate well purely enforces comics' firm place as an important and individual artform with it's own strengths that cannot be easily mimicked.
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