Watchmen
I just got back from a screening of Watchmen, and I have to say that I’m more than a bit impressed with the way this film turned out. True to the source material, many scenes appeared to have been torn straight from the panels of the graphic novel. The Comedian was spot on, Patrick Wilson was the perfect doppleganger to the illustrated Dan Dreiberg, and much in the way that Heath Ledger put his irrevocable stamp on the Joker, Jackie Earle Haley was born to play Rorschach. Stepping into the Wayback Machine you might also remember Haley from the movie The Bad News Bears.
If I had to say anything negative about this film adaptation of Watchmen I’d have to mention the obvious omission of the Tales of the Black Freighter sub-story and the interactions between the news stand owner and the kid. I hear that TotBF will get a separate DVD release in a few days and will be included on the blu-ray version of Watchmen, so no big loss there. We’ll eventually get to see the life raft composed of bloated corpses and ginormous shark carcass on the small screen soon enough.
I’m also a bit upset that the original ending found in the novel was completely scraped from the movie. In its stead is a more “mainstream”, sterilized ending that I think was included to make the film a bit more palatable to the average non-comic book reading moviegoer.
It’s a shame really. I was looking forward to seeing how they were going to handle the extraordinarily gory “space squid” scene…
We are looking forward to seeing this. Would you recommend IMAX?
I wish we had seen it on IMAX. The last movie we saw on IMAX was Spiderman 3. I’d imagine Watchmen would look amazing on the big-big screen
Jackie Earle Haley was just awesome! It is so funny to see him over the years have just crap roles and now getting the lead on Watchmen. I just love it!