Watchmans

Waiting outside the restrooms of the Odeon, Guildford, I overheard a phone conversation:

"...we're at the Guildford Odeon. We're seeing Watchmans, or something or other. It's about...something or other..."

The film the lady was referring to, was Watchmen. Directed by Zack Snyder and based on the 80s comic book series written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons. I heard of Watchmen completely through word of mouth, or be that, word of podcast. I've been known to overwhelm myself with hours of video game and 'geek culture' podcasts each week and it's only natural that Watchmen would be brought up in conversation with its pending cinema release. I'm usually quite susceptible when it comes to things like this so when I came across the comic book conveniently placed (for the consumer within me) in HMV I picked up a copy. That was last weekend, I finished reading Friday morning and that afternoon I went to see the movie.

The first twenty minutes of the movie were strangely emotional. Seeing the characters I had earlier seen in ink on paper, moving as living, breathing, real people on a huge cinema screen was oddly exciting. I thought this quite strange to have such a feeling, especially since I had watched the trailers for this movie over and over. It's when the story really started to kick in that I found myself slightly pulled out of that experience however.

It's hard to judge a movie that's so closely based on a book, especially one that I had finished reading a few hours before. I knew the plot, I knew each scene, so it was hard to tell if the movie was good or not straight away. There were some changes made to the movie, of course I expected changes for a motion picture, but the violent and gratuitous nature of them seemed less meaningful than in the comic book. The ending was changed, which was probably a wise decision considering the far-fetched nature of the turn of events in the comic book. I think this much better suited the big screen.

I've had a few days to think about it now and I think Watchmen is a great movie. The actor playing Rorschach put on a particularly pleasing performance and the recreation of the Watchmen universe created by Moore and Gibbons over twenty years ago was faithful and highly enjoyable. I would normally recommend reading the source material before seeing a film adaption, but in this case I don't deem it entirely necessary. I think a fresh perspective on the Watchmen movie would be perfectly healthy.

I don't have the authority to give the film a grade or score. Instead, I give you my estimated dong to boob ratio of 10:1