Early WATCHMEN Reviews Are In!!

Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with my thoughts on WATCHMEN. I must preface this with a couple of things. First off, I will be discussing some specific spoilers, but I’ll make sure to hit those at the end of the review so if you don’t want to know you can be fairly certain of not hitting any huge spoilers through the main review.

Secondly, this review needs to be taken in with a certain context. Much like Alan Moore and David Gibbons’ original comics, the movie is dense and packed to the gills with visual information, so my thoughts are first impressions. I’m eager to see it a second time to see what holds up, what is clarified and what, if anything, has less impact.

I had to do the same with The Dark Knight, actually. So many layers, so much foreshadowing and ambiguous character development… that I had to see it a second time to actually explore the world presented on the screen.

Now, WATCHMEN isn’t as good as THE DARK KNIGHT. I don’t think anyone can successfully argue that DARK KNIGHT is lesser filmmaking than WATCHMEN, but both share one common bond. They shouldn’t exist in this over-homogenized, lowest common denominator studio system that dictates what is made.

DARK KNIGHT is the very first comic book movie to take the ludicrous and completely ground it in reality. Others have come close, but it was Dark Knight that reached the finish line completely. The villain was dark, the structure was uncommon, there were real threats, real deaths and true ambiguity in the villains and heroes alike.

WATCHMEN is a near 3 hour long adaptation of one of the most dense and layered stories in the history of comic books. It’s a $100 million R-rated studio picture that keeps almost everything that people have been saying for two decades now would never ever make it into a movie.

The gore, graphic violence, graphic sex, the comic’s structure, the foul language, the bleak ending, a main villain that is possibly the hero of the book depending on how you look at things, the blue genitalia and the overall grayness of character all survive in the context of what the book demands: an epic spectacle.

I know there are those who would argue with me on that, but don’t misunderstand me. Spectacle isn’t what the book was about, but it’s very much part of the world. Can you imagine a film version without Mars? Can you imagine one without Antarctica? Or without the world-changing plot coming to fruition?

In order for the characters to have