Come gather round people wherever you roam and admit that the waters around you have grown

Each Day, A Film
January 22nd 2012 (Retrospective)

If I have to be honest, I don't actually go to watch that many films in the cinema. This is less to do with the whole DVD / streaming / torrenting argument and more to do with the fact that, nine times out of ten, it's a pain in the arse.

If you go at any other time than the matinee, you're running the very basic risk of being in a room with a lot of people you don't know - and every extra person is the extra gamble of a talker, or that their mobile phone will go off at an inopportune time, or that any one of hundreds of annoying personal habits will grate, grate, grate on you for the two hours you're trapped in a communal experience.

And yes, I probably sound like a misanthrope at the moment.

But I do occasionally like to go to see films on The Big Screen, and there've only been comparatively few times I've been disappointed, and this wasn't one of them, because we're here to talk about Watchmen.



Now, I have to be honest, I was a little shocked when the cinema was near-full for this one, because if you wanted a popular topic for a film, a seminal comic-book of the 1980s deconstructing tropes of superheroes and vigilantes wouldn't be my first choice. 

Then the beautiful, serene title sequence starts up, and after that, I was pretty much sold. A little shallow, I know, but I'm a sucker for a well-made title sequence. If you've seen the film, admit it, it's beautiful. 

The second thing to bear in mind is that this is one of the longest superhero films out there. Normally, there's a kind of progression; discover power, use power, meet villain, fight villain, angst, cake. Watchmen ignores such petty concerns to tell what's basically a detective story in the present rooted so far in the past that time gets all... I had the urge to write that "the timeline is a-changing", but there you go. Flashback, flashforward, try to ignore the dangling blue penises, focus on the drama; it's that kind of film.

Now, being a comic book reader - don't worry, it's not contagious - I had, after a decade or so of Marvel and DC, started to explore the 'seminal' texts, which boiled down to Watchmen and V for Vendetta, among a few others. Because of this, I'm fairly partisan when it comes to criticism; I don't hate the movie because it makes some small changes and one major squid omission, because it's a movie.

There's not much more to write, but I'd like to add one thing; Watchmen was clearly a gutsy proposition, coming before the final hurrahs of the massively over-budgeted films of the 2002 - 2009 period. Imagine pitching it to the executives;

"You know comic book movies are popular at the moment, right? Well, how about we make a nearly three-hour-long film about a Blue Nudist God and the bunch of nearly-psychotic vigilantes who supposedly "fight crime" until the government tell them not to, except one of them's planning to unite the planet via the gift of genocide - except that his plan causes the vigilantes to try to find out what's happening by breaking people's limbs in a variety of massively bloody ways, and there's a metaphor for orgasm using a flamethrower. Sound good?

Guys?

Guys?"