Watchmen (2-Disc) [Blu-ray] [2009]

Buy Watchmen (2-Disc) [Blu-ray] [2009] Now
Suitable for 18 years and over

Paramount Home Entertainment

Release date: Monday 27th of July 2009

Starring: Billy Crudup, Malin Akerman, Patrick Wilson, Carla Gugino, Jackie Earle Haley, £29.99
Editorial
Product Description

Carla Gugino, Billy Crudup, Malin Akerman, Patrick Wilson, Jack Earle HaleyDirectors: Zack Snyder

---

Editorial
Amazon.co.uk Review

Everybody's favourite graphic novel comes to the screen (after years of rumours and false starts), less a roaring work of adaptation than a respectful and faithful take on a radical original. Watchmen is set in the mid-1980s, a time of increased nuclear tension between the United States and the Soviet Union, as Richard Nixon is enjoying his fifth term as president and the world's superheroes have been forcibly retired. (As you can probably tell, the mix of authentic history and alternate reality is heady.) Things begin with a bang: the mysterious high-rise murder of the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a masked hero with a checkered past, puts the rest of the retired superhero community on alert. The credits sequence, a series of tableaux that wittily catches us up on crime-fighting backstory, actually turns out to be the high point of the movie. Thereafter we meet the other caped and hooded avengers: the furious Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), the inexplicably naked Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup, amidst much blue-skinned, genital-swinging digital work), Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman), Nite Owl II (Patrick Wilson), and Ozymandias (Matthew Goode). The corkscrewing storytelling, which worked well in the comic book, gives the movie the strange sense of never quite getting in gear, even as some of the episodes are arresting. Director Zack Snyder (300) doesn't try to approximate the electric impact of the original (written by Alan Moore--who declined to be credited on the movie--and illustrated by Dave Gibbons) but retains careful fidelity to his source material. That doesn't feel right, even with the generally enjoyable roll-out of anecdotes. Even less forgivable is the blah acting, excepting Jeffrey Dean Morgan (lusty) and Patrick Wilson (mellow). Watchmen certainly fills the eyes, although less so the ears: the song choices are regrettable, especially during an embarrassing mid-air coupling between Nite Owl II and Silk Spectre II as they unite their--ah--Roman numerals. In the end it feels as though a huge work of transcription has been successfully completed, which isn't the same as making a full-blooded movie experience. --Robert Horton

---

FINALLY the superhero movie with A BRAIN that I knew would come one day
Review date: 2010-05-23 Rating: 10 out of 10

There's been a lot of negative writing here. "The talk is a bit heavy", "interminable", but in fact this movie should have the acclaim in the fantasy/fantastic area that the dumb Lord of The Rings took, with its remedial dialog and total lack of character depth. Then there's the pathetic Spiderman movies, with apparently absolutely no thinking behind them. Ditto X-Men etc. Matrix was the best superhero movie before this, which isn't saying a great deal, with its cod-philosophy and Keanu.

Watchmen brings the brilliant words of the graphic novel comic, in its detail and perception, its thought on the nature of humanity, and excels in the graphics to bring it alive. So the dialog is necessarily comic book style, but gladly so, being smart and witty without being glib. The characters have depth, their flaws being fleshed out for once in a superhero movie.

For once in the superhero genre, here is one of them for a lover of film, rather than a childish lover of fantasy or super powers.

---