Movie Review - Watchmen

So, yes, I'm a comic book geek...big time. I read many titles, and I love Alan Moore's classic Watchmen comic. Along with Frank Miller's "The Dark Knight Returns", these books from DC pretty much saved the comics industry. Rumors have existed for years about a possible Watchmen movie. I even read Sam Hamm's terrible script for it, which, thankfully, was not used. In fact I, like many people, was fairly convinced you couldn't make a Watchmen movie and have it be any good.

I am so happy to be wrong.

I enjoyed the Watchmen immensely. I was at first skeptical...then the trailers came, and I got excited. Then I got nervous...some bad reviews started showing up...but then I realized that what a lot of reviewers were sayign was "Oh, this is too dark!" and I thought, "oh, good! Maybe they got it right!"

I feel they did. In my opinion, the movie is brilliantly cast, well acted, choreographed like a ballet version of a favorite piece of work. I found very few flaws...primarily with the terrible make-up job on the actor playing Nixon. Given how good everything looked around him, how ridiculous he looked really stood out.

There are some changes from the book, of course. Certain scenes are gone, and a major element of the ending was changed. Despite this, it comes across as very true to the original material, sometimes slavishly recreating frames from the book. It's really quite a work of art.

I also had a chance to see the DVD that was released of "Tales of the Black Freighter" and "Under the Hood". It's defintiely an enjoyable companion piece, though I doubt anyone who hasn't read the original will understand how Tales of the Black Freighter fits into the Watchmen mythology. I've heard that, someday, an ultimate director's cut that includes these Black Freighter and Under the Hood material may be coming. Hopefully that will make things clearer for the non-geek population.