| Overall Grade: |
A |
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| Story: |
A+ |
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| Acting: |
B+ |
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|
| Direction: |
A+ |
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|
| Visuals: |
A+ |
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|
3-0 Rorschach
by Justin (movies profile)
Mar 6, 2009
42
of
62 people found this review helpful
First: My own review
I was blown away by this movie. I felt it intensely, in a way that only recalls The Dark Knight, and in many respects exceeds that movie. But let us take each of these Yahoo! categories in turn.
Story: With the exception of at least one major subplot's demise and a few changes, the compelling and thought-provoking story from the graphic novel survives intact. For a "superhero" movie, this is the best story out there. Best, not just good. Best.
Acting: A few performances stand out, especially the detached delivery of Dr. Manhattan and the two types of bluster from Rorschach and The Comedian, but overall the acting was not what it could have been. Silk Spectre II, in particular, I found to be weak in many scenes.
Direction: I'm not going to say that Snyder will even get a sniff at a best directing Oscar nod or anything, but Snyder killed it (in a good way) while retaining his own style.
Visuals: OMG. So. Good. I saw it on IMAX, and both the visuals and sound were right there in the theater with me. That's why I felt this movie so intensely, so viscerally. It was up close and personal, without being an annoying breathy crapfest like The Bourne Supremacy.
I'd like to address a few topics here as well.
One is the idea that a movie is only good if it is easily accessible or easy to get into. That is entirely untrue. Art (and Hollywood movies are at some level art, despite all the requisite crap that goes into them because they are made in Hollywood) does not gain by being more or less accessible. Often, movies will appear straightforward (good vs. evil, searcher vs. searchee, whatever) and only offer a twist or two near the climax to keep the audience guessing. I've heard critics call Snyder's version inaccessible for the non-fan because it doesn't follow this well-worn path, but I disagree. Just because the story unaffectedly proceeds without attention to what the movie audience expects or should expect doesn't mean that the story isn't compelling. A movie shouldn't be driven by the audience, but by what it contains in terms of characters, plot, etc. The movie would be tripe if we were forced to latch onto a character like Rorschach or Nite Owl II as our hero and we saw him come out on top in the end. This is a fully realized universe, and unlike Spiderman or Superman, we don't have to constantly suspend our disbelief so that the director can keep giving a tried and true formula superhero movie momentum.
Second is the idea that a movie is only successful if it makes a lot of money. The Dark Knight was really good and it made a lot of money, so that's the benchmark, right? Are you kidding me? Spiderman - the whole world created in that series - was boring and poorly wrought. Superman is ridiculous. Iron Man was an amusement park ride. Harry Potter movies' profits are based on hype, not the quality of the movies themselves. PoA remains the best movie by far but it's still at the bottom for the HP movies in terms of box office. Don't get me started on how much profit Twilight pulled in recently. Ugh. Audiences are fickle and generally not all that smart, but since this is art it doesn't really matter. I'm no exception, of course. Hype gets me all the time. But my assessment of Watchmen isn't based on hype.
Third is the use of the phrase "superhero movie." Now, I never read comic books when I was little, and I only read a couple graphic novels a few years ago on a whim, including Watchmen. In my opinion comic books are boring, superheroes and the comics they inhabit are by and large full of fail, bad writing, and lazy lazy lazy plot design. The reason why the graphic novel Watchmen was so successful and ground breaking is because it exploded all of our notions about comic book heroes. Watchmen is not a superhero movie. Dr. Manhattan is not the main character, is not even a character as we normally think of them, since he is detached from time and space in all but how he physically affects Earth, and since he's impossible to kill his interactions with Earth are not based on traditional notions of self-preservation. What we usually think of as a superhero movie happens in the transition from man to superhero or from man to really-powerful-man. We like to see that power doesn't corrupt those whose hearts are pure. We like to see that evil isn't in human nature if we scrub it out with American values. We like to see lies. And that's why Watchmen is so valuable. It leaps over (under?) The Dark Knight in delving the depths that humans can fall to when given even an ounce of power. The purest characters in Watchmen ultimately have no power. |
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