Monday… again…
One Thing I Love: Watchmen
I really did like it. It was beautiful. Jackie Earle Haley was great. Billy Crudup was great. Jeffrey Dean Morgan was great. The film was haunting overall, and after a lot of negative buzz pre-release, I was pleasantly surprised to enjoy it as thoroughly as I did. I recommend it.
One Thing I Hate: Watchmen
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Despite the fact that I like and recommend the movie, it has a HUGE flaw. The ending. And it’s not the lack of the Squid. Forget the Squid. (If you don’t know what that means read the graphic novel.) This is the problem with the ending of the movie. The above picture is how Watchmen ends. Massive amounts of death and destruction. Now this happens in the movie, but you don’t see a single body. This is ridiculous. This movie is so damn gory, and completely and unnecessarily so. But at the end, when you need the gore. When you need to feel the weight of the death. When Ozymandias needs to feel the weight of that death. There’s not a single body to be found. I get why (dead bodies in Manhattan is obviously a sensitive subject), but when that’s the point of the whole thing and you go gory everywhere else, its absence is conspicuous and it undermines the moral ambiguity that should be present.
Overall, The Watchmen is a solid 7/10. It gets everything right that was thought unfilmable (Dr. Manhattan’s slipping through time on Mars for instance), but then pulls its punch on the finale and undermines the whole thing.