Movie Review #7: Watchmen
(DVD release date: 07/21/09)
Directed by: Zack Snyder, Rated R, 2 hr. 42 min. (Director's Cut: 3 hr. 6 min.)
Reviewer Rating: B+
This is a movie that I really wanted to watch in the theaters. It's large scale and epic and full of special effects. If you're going to spend over $10 at a movie theater for a ticket, it might as well be for a movie like this one. However, I did nto get to go to the theaters to see Watchmen, and so I watched it at home instead.
It held up to basically all of the expectations that I had for the film: namely those things mentioned prior: epic, large scale and special effects heavy. I was pleased to note that the tone is the exact same kind of tone for the film that, say, The Dark Knight had, and the cinematography was similar. I also enjoyed the acting in the movie, and the script was taken almost word for word from the book, at least in the opening. The book's vocabulary and prose is a real delight.
The only thing I can say for it though, is that it is dated subject matter. While I was amused with some of the items in the movie, Nixon in his third term and so on, I don't think the message at the finale at the film is one for the 21st century. Everyone's used to the hero's journey story by now, even if we are not consciously aware of it, and we know (in most stories and films), that doing things for the greater good by sacrificing even one person is not a good thing at all, and those sorts of actions are to be despised. This movie, with a plot created in the 1980s, basically states that this idea is debatable. This is where I felt uncomfortable with the film. It didn't say outright that things can and should be sacrificed for the greater good, but it does pull the issue up to mind. And this is an issue we should be beyond. This is the difference between Watchmen and Superman or Star Wars or Harry Potter. We know, without a doubt, that choosing the greater good by sacrificing others, is the wrong thing to do. We know that we should learn to sacrifice ourselves for our beliefs, to die to ourselves and succeed in that way. Watchmen calls this into question. Perhaps it should, perhaps its point is to question this and to shake our resolve (or at least shake us in the shoulders to make us resolve something). Perhaps it is a lesson for us should we turn down the wrong path.
All in all, this makes for a very philosophical and political movie. And for that I give it two thumbs up, because it makes one think. But you have to be thinking to watch this one (especially at its length) in order to get the message, or the one we should understand at the end of the film since we're not in the 1980s. Since this is the 21st century.
Ozymandias was completely wrong. Don't doubt it.
