Saturday, March 07, 2009

Watching Watchmen

Ginger's grandmother ended up getting taken back to the hospital last night. So Ginger's still down there. The circumstances behind it sounded a bit dire, but at the same time, the hospital is waiting until Monday to run some more tests, so they obviously aren't overly concerned. While Ginger and the kids were gone I made arrangements to go see Watchmen.

Before she left I was telling Ginger my plans to go see it with Ben and she said "Ah, so you guys have a man date."

To which I had to reply, "No, it's not just me and Ben. Ben and Katylin were going and they invited me."

To which Ginger replied "Wait, so you're the third wheel?"


On to the movie itself. It's long. Close to two and a half hours. But given that it's adapting a 12 issue series written by Alan Moore it would have to be. They cut out a lot of stuff (again, because of time constraints they simply had to), but the parts that are left are extremely faithful to the original material. Overall I liked it, but I knew what I was going into beforehand. Anyone that goes to this expecting something like Spider-Man is going to be sorely disappointed (which is why I believe it may not resonate with some portions of the regular viewing public). Now they did change some aspects of the original novel to make it more appealing to the general populace, such as they made the heroes much more competent. All those slick partially slow motion action scenes really didn't occur that much in the actual book. At the same time, they left some stuff in that I was sure wouldn't make it onto the screen (such as some Dr Manhattan full frontal). Overall I liked the movie and given the source material I can't really think of ways things could have been done differently and stayed faithful.


4 comments:

Cordell said...

your hair needs to be a little longer, but otherwise you you fill it out well...

wtfree3 said...

James, I'm just speechless. Not sure what to say about your character there. I guess I'm kind of glad they didn't cast that character with your face (no offense intended).

Ken Church said...

Why does it appear that the sign is sized for children when clearly this isn't a movie for children?

JamesF said...

Yea, I wondered about that myself as to why do that with Watchmen versus some other kid movie (the other side of it had Hotel For Dogs, which is much more kid appropriate).