![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I saw Watchmen in IMAX last night. Overall, I enjoyed it. As an adaptation, it didn't capture much of the nuance of the original, but it could hardly be expected to. It was a fairly shallow reading of the source material. However, plot-wise it was pretty faithful to the original, and overall it was an entertaining and well-made movie.
The opening fight in the Comedian's apartment was a bit overlong. But the movie swiftly go onto a better foot with the alternate-history montage showing the initial promise of the masked crimefighters and how things started to go very, very wrong. It was very effective.
Jeffrey Dean Morgan was dead on as the Comedian, reprehensible yet magnetic. He was one of the best things about the movie, and I didn't mind at all that his part took up a greater proportion of the movie than it does in the book.
Jackie Earle Haley did a good job as Rorschach, too, although his performance was more emotional than how I interpret the character when reading: I "hear" his voice as an affectless gravelly monotone, and he only shows visible emotion in two instances in the comic. He comes across as more sympathetic in the movie, while in the comic he's essentially a sociopath, a serial killer who happens to kill criminals.
I was pleasantly surprised Patrick Wilson's Dan Dreiberg. The previews and costume design made it looks like they were going to make Nite Owl II more of a conventional action hero type, but they actually kept him a bit of a pudgy, out-of-shape nebbish. I was less impressed by Malin Akerman's Silk Spectre II. Some of her line readings were a bit flat.
Dr. Manhattan was fair. He came off as more just soft-spoken than out of touch. Also, I think they could have stood to put him a little deeper into the uncanny valley; despite the CGI, he mainly looked like a guy with blue makeup.
Ozymandias bugged me a bit. He had an unplaceable accent for some reason, which I found distracting. Obviously they played up the hint that he may be homosexual (with the Village People/Studio 54 bit in the montage, and the "boys" folder later), while in the comic it's only Rorschach's suspicion, mentioned offhand once.
( Here be spoilers! for both comic and movie. If you haven't seen one or the other, but think you might, move along. )
Before the movie, they showed a Kid Rock "music video" slash recruiting ad for the National Guard, and it was absolutely the most redneck damn thing I've seen in a long while. I'd assumed that Kid Rock must have died of a meth overdose or something by now, but no, apparently the talentless bastard is still breathing and allowed near microphones. The video switched between shots of the National Guard doing guard stuff (mostly patrolling somewhere in Western Asia, but also fighting a fire) and scenes of NASCAR racing with Dale Earnhardt Jr., punctuated with Kid Rock "performing". Somehow I don't think they were trying to say that people should join the National Guard to dominate Arab countries so we can have plenty of oil for NASCAR, but....
Also, one of the lines in the chorus is "Freedom makes us free". Seriously.
The opening fight in the Comedian's apartment was a bit overlong. But the movie swiftly go onto a better foot with the alternate-history montage showing the initial promise of the masked crimefighters and how things started to go very, very wrong. It was very effective.
Jeffrey Dean Morgan was dead on as the Comedian, reprehensible yet magnetic. He was one of the best things about the movie, and I didn't mind at all that his part took up a greater proportion of the movie than it does in the book.
Jackie Earle Haley did a good job as Rorschach, too, although his performance was more emotional than how I interpret the character when reading: I "hear" his voice as an affectless gravelly monotone, and he only shows visible emotion in two instances in the comic. He comes across as more sympathetic in the movie, while in the comic he's essentially a sociopath, a serial killer who happens to kill criminals.
I was pleasantly surprised Patrick Wilson's Dan Dreiberg. The previews and costume design made it looks like they were going to make Nite Owl II more of a conventional action hero type, but they actually kept him a bit of a pudgy, out-of-shape nebbish. I was less impressed by Malin Akerman's Silk Spectre II. Some of her line readings were a bit flat.
Dr. Manhattan was fair. He came off as more just soft-spoken than out of touch. Also, I think they could have stood to put him a little deeper into the uncanny valley; despite the CGI, he mainly looked like a guy with blue makeup.
Ozymandias bugged me a bit. He had an unplaceable accent for some reason, which I found distracting. Obviously they played up the hint that he may be homosexual (with the Village People/Studio 54 bit in the montage, and the "boys" folder later), while in the comic it's only Rorschach's suspicion, mentioned offhand once.
( Here be spoilers! for both comic and movie. If you haven't seen one or the other, but think you might, move along. )
Before the movie, they showed a Kid Rock "music video" slash recruiting ad for the National Guard, and it was absolutely the most redneck damn thing I've seen in a long while. I'd assumed that Kid Rock must have died of a meth overdose or something by now, but no, apparently the talentless bastard is still breathing and allowed near microphones. The video switched between shots of the National Guard doing guard stuff (mostly patrolling somewhere in Western Asia, but also fighting a fire) and scenes of NASCAR racing with Dale Earnhardt Jr., punctuated with Kid Rock "performing". Somehow I don't think they were trying to say that people should join the National Guard to dominate Arab countries so we can have plenty of oil for NASCAR, but....
Also, one of the lines in the chorus is "Freedom makes us free". Seriously.
