Watchmen Review

I actually meant to write this review two months ago, but here it is anyway.

I finally read Alan Moore's Watchmen this past winter and thought it was fantastic.  And then I found out that the movie would be coming out soon.  So over Spring break, I went to see it.  It was pretty much wonderful.

The actors seemed so perfect for the parts they played.  I personally thought they looked just  like the book characters, but so far I haven't found too many people who agree with me on that.

I was very impressed by Rorschach's mask.  I have to say, I was really wondering how they planned to do that, and it worked very well.  I was pleased.  I was also pleased to see that they left in Rorschach's chronic disjointed journal entries.  As the story went along, he systematically left out articles (a, an, and the). 

I also loved that they deleted the story that the kid was reading in the comic book.  It was just a parallel to what was going on with the Watchmen characters and it bored the hell out of me to read it.  After a while, I kept skipping over that part.

The only two things that really bothered me was the ending.  The ending of the movie was very different from the ending of the book.  There were some things that made more sense about the movie ending, but they never explained what the cat-creature (Bubastis) hanging around with Veidt was or why it was even there (the book explains it).  So I was watching the movie with a friend who had never read the book...and he had no idea what was going on with this animal.  It was very obvious in scenes such as that one that the movie was made for those who read the book.

The last thing that bothered me was the soft-core porn scene.  I know the sex was in the book, but a LOT of screen time was wasted on it.  One page in the book does not have to equal ten minutes of screen time (that may be an exaggeration, but it felt like it lasted that long).  Maybe I can't appreciate it because I'm a straight female, but it was not something I would be comfortable watching with my parents.  Yes, that does matter to me.

Overall, though, the movie was amazing.  It clarified a few things that I had either missed or not understood in the book. Besides the ending, the movie stayed very close to the book and spent A LOT of time on almost all of the small, specific details, which I enjoyed.  Despite its length (190 minutes), I would see the movie again.  And again.  If you didn't get to see it in theaters, you should definitely consider buying the DVD.  It's worth it.