It’s been close to a week since I saw Watchmen. Now that all the fanboy squee has finally subsided, I can share a few possibly-reasonable thoughts about the film.

Naturally, there will be spoilers.

Quite a few of them, in fact.

Enough to ruin the movie for people who haven’t seen it yet.

Ruin it so much that someone might want to throw in a number of useless words and line breaks to make absolutely sure none of them surface above the break.



Hamburger.




There, that should do it.


- There’s one thing the film does better than the original comic books, and this is mostly due to Zack Snyder’s directing. When I read the comics, I learned a great deal about how twisted crimefighters can be- but I saw very, very little of them actually fighting crime. There were occasional references here and there, but there was little to suggest that most of these people were more remarkable than high-end cosplayers. Nite Owl and Silk Spectre got the worst of the melodrama- at no point do we see either of them being even capable of beating up thugs or taking down mobsters. In the few scenes we see them actually doing the hero thing- notably the fire rescue- their actions are noticeably downplayed.

It was refreshing, then, to see Zack Snyder work his action-as-porn magic to give this pair three separate scenes of awesome- rescuing kids from a building, ripping apart a street gang, and busting Rorschach out of prison, In these scenes, Nite Owl and Silk Spectre would look right at home next to the likes of Batman or Spider-Man, and remind us all that this is a story about superheroes, not just people with costumes and complexes.

- I initially didn’t like the music direction; I thought the licensed tunes used in the film sounded like someone threw darts at a pile of Billboard magazines. Looking back, however, I now see the wisdom of using such ubiquitous songs such as “The Times, They Are A-Changin” and “99 Luftballons”- Watchmen is about a world exactly like our own, the sole difference being the existence of superheroes- and the divergence between the two worlds is jarring enough that, without changing a note, Bob Dylan sounds like he’s singing a much different tune.

The one choice I liked from the beginning, however, was “All Along The Watchtower” blaring while Rorschach and Nite Owl are careening towards Ozymandias’ arctic hideout. The fiery guitar and the low, zooming cuts are ripped from every time-to-get-the-bad-guy sequence from every action movie ever made, and even though I knew exactly how their last-ditch effort would end, I still felt my heart race and my fingers grip the armrests. A Pavlovian impulse kicked in somewhere, and, for a few fleeing moments, I honestly forgot the futility I was heading towards. This scene plays the superhero genre completely by the numbers, and in doing so, becomes one of the most subversive pieces of the movie.

- Speaking of Ozy, his characterization was the only big problem I had with this adaptation. The original comic goes out of its way to show that, in his time, Adrian Veidt was a paragon of physical, mental, and spiritual prowess beyond even his fellow vigilantes, making the revelation of his ultimate plan all the more unexpected and devastating. Given that the very theme of Watchmen revolves around the noblest of heroes doing something horrifying for the good of mankind, it was disappointing that Veidt was the only main character not to get a piece of the movie’s gluttonous exposition.

It was a terrific cheap thrill, however, to watch him go tell the energy industrialists to go drill themselves.

- One of my co-workers saw the movie this Wednesday, and he brought up an interesting point- he figured that Watchmen would have been better off as a two-part movie, a la Kill Bill- with the split point being the arrest of Rorschach, and fade-outs of Dr. Manhattan on Mars and the world preparing for nuclear war to establish the setting before fading to black and rolling the credits.

There’s a number of reasons this wouldn’t quite work Kill Bill is sold entirely on its gripping, stylized fight scenes- it doesn’t take a lot of exposition to let the audience know what’s going on. Watchmen, on the other hand, is an obtuse, heady film, crammed with more plot and character than any five non-Batman superhero movies. It’s the cinematic equivalent of drinking a pint of Guinness with a molasses chaser. It takes enough mental effort to absorb its world once- doing it twice seems like an exercise in masochism.

Furthermore, Quentin Tarantino’s earned the public trust. Regardless of what you think of his style, you can walk in to any one of his films and know exactly what you’re getting- a trademark blend of brutality and class, like Frank Sinatra with a samurai sword. Zack Snyder, while notorious for 300, doesn’t have anywhere close to the same amount of cred, plus, he’s working with a property that had, until now, zero public awareness. Does that really sound like something most moviegoers would pay to see the first half of?

Then, of course, there’s the absolute futility of keeping the twist ending under wraps for the entire time. Watchmen’s plot hinges on its final act, knowing it before seeing it in action dulls the point of the entire story.

That being said, Watchmen is a mindbender, more so than most movies that reach mainstream theaters. Even knowing the graphic novel (if there’s any comic that ever deserved to be called this, it’s Watchmen) inside and out, I still had to work my brain to keep up with the myriad threads of backstory and exposition interlaced through the film- at close to three hours, it’s no easy task.

Thus, about halfway through the film, I began to think about how nice an intermission would be right about then.

With its ambitious attempt at world-building, Watchmen feels like a film for another time, when a movie came with a newsreel and a cartoon, and there was always time to interrupt the plot for a 15-minute Gene Kelly dancing sequence.

Zack Snyder took extensive care to maintain the depth, density, and intricacy of Alan Moore’s alternate 1985, and the result is like a hangover after a really good party- one of the best headaches you’ll ever have.

What do you think? Would you have appreciated a 15-minute breather after Rorschach gets hauled off, or Dr. Manhattan's talk-show ambush?