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

[smirnoffmule.livejournal.com]

I so hear you on 11. I came home from the film, and was like, ok, now where do I find the good fic? (I have yet to, btw).

Regarding 8 - I felt the film kind of skated over the personal nature of the terror. The book really had an impact on me that way, but the film, not so much. I think by losing the scenes on the streets of New York and the "real people" characters there, it failed to present us with the real rawness of the situation. I hope that'll make it back with the director's cut. (I was born in 1980, so was a little too young to really be impacted, but I studied the cold war at college, and cold war paranoia is an interest of mine).

I actually didn't find it nearly as gorey as I expected it to be based on some of the reviews I've read. It felt quite clean and sterile to me (which worked within the context). I loved the fighting scenes - I loved how they'd thought of the physicality of each character and used that, really showed attention to detail. It felt like such a comic book thing, and as a huge comic nut, I appreciated that - I felt like, here is a director who understands and appreciates this medium, and I want to trust him.