InsaneJournal

Went to see "Watchmen" with my sister.



Visually, Watchmen was incredible. The filmmaking was so well done, from the way they reproduced many scenes as if they'd leapt right out of the pages of the graphic novel, and the period details, the music, they apparently had an entire team of people just making internally consistent fake newspapers/ads/buttons/signs. THe concept of the AU is so cool. And if you lived through any of that era in RL, you can kind of understand how weird it all was and how narrowly we all escaped things getting even weirder.

When Ozymandias is standing in front of that bank of tvs, one of them is playing the 1984 Apple commericial.

They were concentrating so much on that, and kind of...forgot the plot. My sister thinks it was "a mess". Neither of us have read the book, and I agree that the plot was difficult to get ahold of- and it wasted too much time on extending certain unpleasant scenes that would've been just as effective done less explicitly. I had been warned about the scene with the dogs, so I immediately closed my eyes and kept them shut during the entire scene- a scene lasting far too long for something that didn't really enhance the plot at all. It was awesome filmmaking, wonderful character study and great worldbuilding and incredible fight choreography with a villain that comes out of nowhere and a resolution tacked on. and a muddled philosophy.

"It rains on the just and unjust alike." Well, yeah, but it doesn't rain in both California and NYC at the same time.

The scene yonmei pointed out, yeah, I was very bothered by that. They just HAD to be in skimpy lingerie on top of everything else, didn't they. And Laurie/Silk's positive, strong and proactive role barely made up for the whole thing with her mother and The Comedian and The Comedian and the Vietnamese woman. I mean...speaking of that...I'm obligated to point out that the only non white person with a speaking role was a pregnant Vietnamese woman who The Comedian murders and the only non white characters *period* who were onscreen were getting beaten up or killed in crowd scenes. I have never seen such a *white* depiction of NYC in the 70s and 80s in my life. I don't have a problem with stories where you'd expect everyone seen to be white, because that happens in RL but this is New York City. It's like those shows about San Francisco where not one single character ever encounters a gay person.

But this doesn't seem to be a problem for most other people, so maybe I'm mistaken. after all, I never read the book.

The philosophy. Uh...well...In 1986, maybe all this was shocking, new, revolutionary but now it just seems pretentious on a certain level. There are plenty of Dark superhero stories around now, and we just *had* The Dark Knight. Maybe it was just me, or just my mood, although my sister seemed to agree. She said it was a "conservative" movie. Was it? I mean, it was taking place in a world where Richard Nixon was still president, the film never elaborated on whether they thought that was a good thing or not but it didn't look like it was to me. NYC in the 1970s/80s in a world where Nixon was still president was worse than it was in RL. What it came across to me as, was cynical and nihilistic- the characters who weren't or didn't turn into that, totally failed to stop the ones who were, so what did any of it matter? TOo little, too late, and since the movie didn't give us any chance to figure out who the villain was on our own, it's like "Huh? what?"

I get what they were trying to do there but why did I sit through an entire movie for it? I really don't know what o think of the ending.

I am also wondering how they got such a low rating for this, considering the copious amounts of explicit violence, full frontal male nudity (even if *most* of it was blue) and one near pornographic sex scene. I was only *bothered* by the extremely gross violence and not as much by that as you'd think but I bet someone is going to go see that and be upset that they weren't warned. And you can bet the rating would've been higher if Nite Owl and Silk Spectre had been a gay couple.



Maybe my mind will change later.