Okie doke, here's the deal. I'm changing the day order because I came up with some wacky titles that are admittedly gimmicky but I like them. So Mondays are now music/movies because then they can be Music Monday or Movie Monday (this week is Movie Monday), Wednesday is my dumb findings/funny stories in the spirit of having "Wacky Wednesdays". And Fridays got the lamest of the titles because I like alliteration. Oh, and that's Faithful Fridays. Yeah, that's the devotional one. I'm kind of embarrassed at how lame that sounds, but screw that. I like lame.
Ok, so now for the movie of the week: how could I not do "The Watchmen"? So here's the thing, I don't know what you people consider spoilers and what they won't so I'm going to avoid what I would consider spoilers.
First off, the purpose of the graphic novel on which it's based is to explore the concept of what it would look like if super heroes were real. So that explains a lot about the movie. It isn't your classic Spiderman or X-men movie. It is more in the vein of The Dark Knight in that it explore the psyches of real people combatting both inner demons and external dangers and pressures.
Set in 1985, the movie opens with a man being brutally beaten and then thrown from his apartment high in New York City. This is the trigger for a long series of events that culminates with a different ending from the graphic novel. (You all thought I was going to give away the ending, didn't you? I'm not that cruel.)
The cinematography is brilliant, a comic book lover's dream. From the beginning I was hyped out over it's accuracy. Page for page is matched onscreen with painstaking attention to details. The lighting also seriously enhances the whole feel of the movie. Everything is overcast which is really important for the film noir effect that as Roger Ebert pointed out in his review is so often the goal for comic books movies these days.
Costumes have been slightly updated as they haven't really aged well, the risk now being the new ones won't age any better but for now some of them are a little better. Other subtle cuts have been made that no doubt have left some fans lacking their favorite scenes. The dark pirate saga was cut entirely, but the old man and the young kid who read it at the old man's newstand still make an appearance. It seems that where something was cut, the director managed to work them back in in a way that would let the fans at least see that they weren't forgotten, but had to fall by the wayside for expediency's sake.
Now a word about my favorite character. Rorschach is dynamite in this. Every time he is on screen he is channeling Alan Moore's idea of the character in every way possible. He has personified him perfectly and the direction and writing has kept all the essential points of Rorschach's story so that it is almost perfectly translated from the graphic novel. Now, you can disagree with me on that, but I felt extremely satisfied with the portrayal.
Ok, so to sum up, here's the rating. I'd give it a 9/10. I loved the movie right up until the ending and I really can't get past the deviation. So for those who haven't read it, I'd give it a 9.5/10. There is a lot of violence and nudity in it and there are some extremely graphic portrayals of sexual situations so don't take the kids.
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