Watched-men

Like the other 99% of the world, I have now given in and seen the latest in block buster silver screen super heroics, aka Watchmen.

If there was one thing that occurred to me strongly while watching this movie was that there was very little story. Moreover, there was very little story in the original comic book. There's a lot of exposition of back stories of characters, but of actual narrative content, there ain't much.

Then again, that wasn't really the point, was it? Alan Moore was trying to show what the world would be like if there really were superheroes and it was taken seriously (which accidentally set off the whole grim'n'gritty superhero line), and incidentally about what they would lengths they would go to to protect the world.

The story is necessarily different to that in the comic book, and I think ties together a little more nicely than the comic did, with the big event being within the characters of the movie rather than suddenly going "here's this big gribbly thing which hasn't been established, yay!"

It was...sufficient what happened in the movie, but the comic of course could, and did, establish more and made making sense of the movie a lot easier.

As for the characters... I can't remember who said it, but they were right in that the Comedian should have been played by Bruce Campbell. As it was, I have no idea who any of those actors were, and no idea if I've ever seen them before. They played their parts well (although not going "that's so-and-so from thingy" like I did with Matt Frewer helped), and I'm not entirely sure how they did Dr. Manhattan. There's a must-see behind the scenes featurette.

Definitely a different beast to the comic book, wouldn't call it better or worse, just different. By itself, it's all right, but stands better by itself with knowledge of the comic book (if I can put it that way).

The only bad point was needing to rush to the bathroom afterward. That's a long movie!

[END]