Watchmen

[Chief]

so who's seen it? I just did and i really liked it, but i never did read the comic.

[Lady Pyro]

I've read the comic and have had people stealing my opinions on it for the past month because they don't want to read it themselves.
But I haven't seen the movie yet, I figure I'll wait about a month until the hype dies down. I hear it was pretty fantastic, but people said that about 'Dark Knight' too .

[Senor Matt]

But the Dark Knight WAS fantastic Pyro.

[MusicallyInspired]

It wasn't that great. Decent but definitely overhyped (Dark Knight).

[Lady Pyro]

But the Dark Knight WAS fantastic Pyro.

I stand by my unpopular opinion that it was mediocre at best, I probably wont even get it on DVD unless it's given to me. It was okay for a live action Batman movie, but that's not saying much.
I let 'Begins' get a bit of a pass because even though their Batman is terrible, their new 'Vicky Vale' was so poorly acted that I didn't bother to learn her characters name and the first half crawled so slowly I almost gave up on it, atleast the second half was action packed, interesting and they did a very good job on Scarecrow.
And they tried to fix things in Dark Knight, I could see that. A new actress to play Stupid Mcvillainbait and I liked how Harv was a bit crazy from the get go but that's about where it ends for me. I wasn't impressed with Ledger's Joker (In fact I found the constant lip smacking a bit annoying) and plot holes riddled the story. I kept trying to shut my brain up and just enjoy the explosions but everything (to me) was either dumb or dull. By the time Harv and the Chick were about to explode I found myself hoping the movie would end soon so I could just go home and read, watch or play something good.

I know, I know I just insulted an insanely popular movie on the internet. I'm prepared for the insults and flaming that could possibly come next (though thankfully usually doesn't on this forum). I blame comic books. I've spent over a decade of my life in and out of Gotham and I've seen Batman and the Joker in so many situations and written so many different ways that I guess I'm not as forgiving as the general audience when it comes up flat.

I'm not saying I think it's wrong if people enjoyed it, on the contrary I'm glad so many did. It means they'll make another one and hopefully I'll find the next one more appealing.
But in all honesty, for the above reasons and I'm sure many others, I just didn't like it.

[Brainiac]

I know, I know I just insulted an insanely popular movie on the internet. I'm prepared for the insults and flaming that could possibly come next (though thankfully usually doesn't on this forum).

Considering your handle, I think it's only right that you proceed to flame yourself.

<hands LP a Pyro outfit from TF2>

Have fun.

[Lady Pyro]

I chose this fate, I have no regrets!

Speaking of TF2, I really have to get that game. Though I bet my handle has already been claimed long ago.

[alfdaur]

I've read the comic, saw the film last wednesday... It is definately not your average superhero movie... but then again I never thought it was going to be.

The one thing that will possibly put off most people off this film I think is that it's not really as much a film trying to be a comic as it is a comic trying to be a film (I know that doesn't make much sense, but see the movie and maybe you will see what I mean). For a few minutes the dialogue confused me, as the actors appeared to be very limited in their acting.. as if they were stating their lines more than saying them.

Then I realised that they were actually behaving as they would if they were comic characters that had been somehow halfway transformed into movie characters: their lines were much longer than they would have been in a comic (although in some places the dialogue/scenes were straight out of the comic), but you could kind of tell that they weren't completely transformed either: there was some sort of comic like quality that remained (think somewhere between early batman series and actual acting).

Or, I could be completely wrong about this, and they were all just lousy actors

I thought the movie was good, it stuck with the comic storyline very well but wasn't afraid to adapt certain things to make sure that the story was still relevant (cars dont' seem to be all electric for instance, like they are in the comic, and nobody smokes.. which I guess was a political decision seeing as quite a few of the characters in the comic smokes, and even a key event in the comic that involved smoking had been rewritten to cut out the smoking part. (Ok, maybe it wasn't 'key', but it was certainly high profile enough to make me notice when it didn't happen)

The only thing that disapointed me was that some things appeared to be a bit 'cut', almost as if someone had decided after the film was ready that they wanted to remove 45min of material and went about cutting it away where they thought no one would notice. I've heard rumors regarding a directors cut with 30 min more footage. In this case I think it might be a case of putting stuff back in rather than padding out.

of course, it is also possible that some of the things I noticed in the theater; lack of smoking, leccy cars, etc, was only due to the fact that those things had been cut out.

I'm off to my local Borders bookshop in glasgow tomorrow to have my copy of the Watchmen comic signed by David Gibbons (the guy that drew the comic.. and did backgrounds for Beneath a Steel Sky, if anyone has ever played that game).. If anyone is interested in meeting up in the queue I'll be the really tall guy with the red somewhat high visibility jacket and red TWA bag.

[Quest For Glory Fan]

Edit: If you don't want to read the full ramble I did put a number at the bottom you can skim

I saw Watchmen specifically because David Hayter was in the credits, that and so my friends would stop trying to ruin it for me. It was good for sure, long, but good. Without going into much detail there were some parts that were a bit slow and some parts that made me say out loud "Am I watching a porno in a crowded place with a bunch of strangers? Just show them wake up together and I'll infer a half hour sex scene" and some parts to make me say "Well that sure puts a new spin on the term blue-balls" speaking of which, did anyone else find the multitude of blue dong in that movie a bit strange? I can see including it to be edgy but considering there are scenes where he wears clothes in public why is it that he has no need to any other time? Although it is kind of funny now that I think about it. He could be thinking "I'm such a bad-ass super hero that I don't have to wear clothes and no one will say shit!" Still the movie kept me interested and entertained right until the end and kept me guessing.

If you're wondering, no, I did not read the comics. I saw an interview at the theater with David Hayter discussing the script and saying he'd actually prefer people to not go out of their way to read it if they hadn't already because the movie stands well on its own. He was right and having read it now I do think I would have enjoyed the movie a lot less had I seen it. Like in Sin City which I read before seeing it was really just a distraction of "Oh that veranda looks just like it was drawn" and so forth.

There's a difference between what it is and what I think of it though and what I've thought is shown quite evidently. What it is in a nutshell is a comic adaptation that can stand alone to new audiences while still appealing to the old ones. It is longer than you're average movie but not in a Return Of The King sense of "JUST FINISH ALREADY!" and it is like seeing a sparkle of gold in a sea of Superman Returns and Batman Begins' For the new and uninformed like myself it is a lot to digest and it took me about a week to finally settle on what I thought of it overall. The only thing that really irks me about the film is the same thing that I didn't like about the new Batman's and this time it comes in the face of Rorschach. That damn voice! You know what I'm talking about. When Rorschach said "where are they!" in the same voice as Batman did here I actually laughed but I did die a bit inside. Comparatively when you stack Dark Knight and Watchmen against each other it is a close call but Dark Knight had so many more flaws about it that I have to go with Watcmen even if it is the bias of choosing the second option. As much as I loved Ledger's performance and to a greater extent Eckhart's the characters themselves in Watchmen seem so much more relatable which is what The Dark Knight really beats the audience over the head with as if it's trying to say "Oh please just understand" but the plot is so all over the place and the meanings of the dialogue are so subject to interpretation that my choice for preferring Watchmen comes almost strictly from the fact that I didn't have to see it twice to catch all the nuiances and plot twists that just passed me by in Dark Knight.

Watchmen get's an 8.9 from me