Watchmen

[rm]

1. I totally enjoyed it.

2. Really no moment of the film is as powerful as the opening title sequence, which is a thing of beauty and sorrow and hit me personally in a lot of convoluted ways.

3. That said, the Comedian's death and funeral, as well as the amazing out of sequence Dr. Manhattan back-story are spectacular.

4. Speaking of the Dr. Manhattan back-story.... if you like Doctor Who you will like this movie if only for the timey-wimey and the "all things are now" and "nothing ever ends" angles.

5. The denoument was too... eh. Too steep a slope and it felt confusing -- how had the mother survived? It wasn't awful, and the pullback to NY under reconstruction was good, but eh. If you're gonna change the ending from the original, I would have cut on Ozymandias with the snow coming down around him.

6. Ozymandias! I really, really enjoyed him, and I felt a lot of sorrow for him. Alexander the Great was my only friends in fifth grade too. That said, there's a whole essay on queerness in Moore's universes and a queering the villain issue and blah blah blah to go into there, hat I need more brain than I have right now to tackle.

7. OMG, this film essentially has canonical cosplay sex. Cracked me the fuck up in a meta way.

8. It's hard for me to grok how this film would resonate for someone younger, who didn't grow up with the spectre of nuclear war and certain fashion and music and stuff. It's so of the 80s. It's so of being 13-years-old for me. Does it feel personal and immediate and like a near horror for people that didn't grow up with that? Hell, does it feel that way to people who aren't in New York. The film very much resonated with my skittery childhood perceptions of life here in the bad old days.

9. When the gore is intense, it's intense, but it's so faithful to the original, if you've read that you can probably cope or at least know when to look away.

10. The film is sexy as hell, both overtly and covertly.

11. So where's the Ozymandias/Dr. Manhattan lonely god slash, eh?


Now, on a separate note. Did anyone else see that trailer for the Quentin Tarrantino Nazi movie? What the fucking fuck is up with that?

Comments

[kiji-kat.livejournal.com]

The "OMG NUKES!" angle *was* tough for me to relate to, both in the comic and in the film. I lived during the Cold War, but I would have been about four years old when the events of Watchmen took place - I lived through it, but I have absolutely no recollection of the tensions that existed then. I also grew up in rural and suburban Ohio, where we are were more concerned about the annual corn harvest than the looming specter of nuclear war.

Oddly enough though, there was one scene that triggered a memory for me - that of Laurie checking out the Owlship for the first time. The combination of her sweater and her hair made me randomly flash back to being four or five and seeing my mother in something similar. Other than the use of "99 Luftballoons," that was the only definitively 80s moment for me.

[rm.livejournal.com]

See, for me the whole thing was like this memory of my childhood that wasn't. And I know part of that is how I experience film, but growing up in NYC, being a teen in the '80s, and having a father who joined the army so he could go to art school to learn to draw comics made it really really familiar.