See Watchmen, Make Up Your Own Mind

March 13, 2009

watchmen-posterLet me get this out of the way right off the bat, I loved Watchmen, it was the breath of a fresh air the comic film genre desperately needed. I don’t get the lukewarm (or downright negative) Watchmen reviews. To be honest, it was one of the best films I’ve seen in quite some time and easily better than enduring one second of Toby McGuire as Spiderman. Watchmen had something most comic films lack, a soul.

Perhaps if I had read the comic, I’d have a different opinion but that’s the point. I didn’t read the comic and now I want to, what better testament to the filmmaker’s ability is there? See the thing a lot of “fans” miss is that even a wildly popular underground comic is still an underground comic, and in all honesty a film based on an underground comic doesn’t stand a chance at the box-office compared to the likes of a Batman, Spiderman or even Ironman for that matter. And whether you think they should be compared or not, rest assured they will.

For a film like Watchmen to be “successful” certain artistic license has to be taken, staying true to the original story is great but wider appeal is what pays the bills. For those unfamiliar with the story, there’s a “Watchmen: Complete Motion Comic” on DVD and Blu-ray that does a fair job of telling the story and setting the mood. I just can’t say whether I’d recommend seeing the comic before or after the movie. I rather enjoyed the movie without knowing much about the Watchmen universe.

Oh and to the guy that thought it would be a good idea to take his tween-age boys to the film and even more surprisingly to the guy that brought his 7-9 year old daughter: Congratulations, you just exposed your kids to (I shudder to say hopefully) their first images of a woman being beaten like a boxer, a rape and a full on love scene all in under an hour-flat.

Yeah I know it’s not chic to lecture other people on how to parent, but if my skins crawling at the prospect of them seeing this stuff and you’re passing the popcorn, that’s a pretty big disconnect. Ah well, maybe I’m just an old fuddy-duddy who thinks kids that age missed out by not growing up with The Bugaloos, H.R. Pufnstuf, The Banana Splits, and Land of the Lost. Wait…yeah reality check, it’s probably just me.



Posted by B.Greenway | | Filed Under Movies & Television


Comments

  • B.Greenway
    Coffee, yeah I kept thinking I'd seen him somewhere before but I couldn't place it.
  • I didn't read the comic either, I thought it was below average and exactly the argument for why comic books probably shouldn't be made into movies. Things that are interesting on the page are simply boring onscreen.
  • I kept thinking that the guy who played the Comedian was Javier Bardem (I found out later that it's actually Jeffrey Dean Morgan), but the two actors definitely look alike
  • B.Greenway
    Thanks Chris, bullseye.
  • Chris B. Behrens
    Re: parenting...

    I always tell people that when you're young, you look around and say "I can't understand why all these uptight people have a problem with this stuff, just get a life". And then you hold your newborn child in your arms and you go "ahh...now I understand."
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