DVD Review: “Watchmen: Director’s Cut”
Rating: 60
The best method for understanding the strengths and weaknesses of Zack Snyder’s adaptation of “Watchmen” is to compare it to the first screen versions of the Harry Potter books. Director Chris Columbus was so slavish in capturing the action of the first two volumes that he gave short shrift to the soul of the stories. Snyder’s “Watchmen” culls Alan Moore’s words and Dave Gibbons’ images with such painstaking detail, this director’s cut takes as long to watch as the graphic novel does to read — it’s not so much an interpretation as a scanned-and-animated copy without much life of its own.
Moore’s vision of a dystopian 1985 in which Richard Nixon is serving his fifth term in office is packed with vivid anti-heroes and historical grace notes that add an alarming realism to the proceedings. Some of Snyder’s casting decisions are stellar (Patrick Wilson as Nite Owl II, Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach) and some are simply terrible (Matthew Goode as Ozymandias, Malin Ackerman as Laurie Jupiter), but it’s the pacing that trips up “Watchmen” — the film feels oddly static and laborious given the intensity of its story.
To its credit, the director’s cut wisely adds more Rorschach moments and Nite Owl I’s mesmerizing death scene. But since Snyder was being so completist with “Watchmen,” one cannot help but wish that this edition integrated “The Black Freighter,” the grisly comic-within-a-comic that was animated and sold as a separate DVD upon the film’s release. “Freighter” would add depth to this story, and since this “Watchmen” clocks in at 186 minutes, four-and-a-half hours of combined “Watchmen” and “Freighter” wouldn’t run out the doomsday clock for most purists.
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Comments
Here’s the link to details on the Ultimate 5 disc set:
I guess there’s a coupon so that people that buy the current director’s cut get $10 off the purchase of the Ultimate Set. So it’s not as egregious a double dip as some dvds have been in the past.
I guess that makes me feel better about the whole exercise, but still — do it right the first time instead of these obvious half-baked releases for fun and profit.
I still wish this had been an HBO mini.
Yeah, it’s funny how LOST basically built its whole format on what Watchmen was doing in the mid 80’s. A straight-up adaptation in 12 parts would have solved so many pacing problems that bogged the movie down.
I loved the movie, but that is because the whole time I was reading the comic in my head and losing it over how each scene that wasn’t cut was as close to a moving version of the comic as possible.
The super-super slow-mo recreations of the old, faded 1940s superhero photos in the credits blew my mind, but may have been a metaphor about transposing still images into film. Visually stunning, but slow.
Yes, in the extendo-cut, The Black Freighter should be shuffled into place. It’s already been made, the extendo-cut has been made. It would be idiotic not to just put the whole kaboodle together for the fanboys like me. Fanboys don’t mind a 5 hour DVD movie.
I watched the movies first. and as simply a movies i loved it. very surreal, violent and thought provoking. like Harry Potter one has to seperate the book from the movie and enjoy each for it own sake.
I thought Zack Snyder’s adaptation was wonderful. Of course there are a couple small things I could nitpick. The people who say it is too slavish a version, are the same people who would’ve complained if too many changes were made. I actually prefer the altered Squid ending.
I mainly miss the two Bernies. I read Snyder say that he filmed small in’s and out’s with them, to integrate with the Black Freighter footage. I miss the little touch of their discovering that they have the same names, and Bernie giving Bernie his cap.
This was a fantastic adaptation.
I read somewhere that at Christmas a multi-disc set will be released that contains the director’s cut with the Black Freighter footage integrated into the movie, plus the full animated comic that was sold on iTunes. So they’re double dipping here.
I’m looking forward to checking out the director’s cut. I’m sure it will be an improvement, but I can’t see how it could undo the problems I had with the film, namely its awkward music choices and the overall sense that Snyder couldn’t see the forest for the trees when it came to the major themes of the story. And that god-awful love scene.
It’s a weird thing. Snyder probably made the best movie adaptation of Watchmen that could have been made (barring a 12-part pay-cable series), but like you pointed out, his attention to detail almost serves to highlight the areas he got completely wrong.
Still, though, I stand by my original review that a flawed movie can never ruin a book, and the movie was worth it just for the conversations (and arguments) about its relative merits and weaknesses.