Watchmen - What do you watch?

There are few movies that can force me to find their original sources to read, Watchmen is one of them. The movie is not such a super great movie like The Lord of The Rings but it can be equally compared to the Dark Knight. Both movies, the Dark Knight and Watchmen, are fell into the catergory of action movies; but the great thing is they both have the sub contents. If you are someone who loves martial art novels, you would know the name of Louis Cha or Jin Yong. His novels were not only about fighting, but also there are tons of sub contents which have cost a lot of paper and ink or critics for over 20 years. The Dark Knight and Watchmen can be considered as one of those.



Critics and viewers can be seperated into 2 main catergories which are they either like it so much or hate it. I am the one is on the 1st catergory. Eventhough there are a lot of complains about the movies such as its length, or it was so closed to the comics, Watchmen is still a great movie. Unfortunately we can not talk all day about the movie, I will only emphasize about 3 great things about the movie which most people should consider when they watch a movie.



I - The Contents



A lot of critics complained about the content of the movie which is so closed, 90%, to the comic. Come on guys, like Mozart said in Amadeus, you can not change which is perfect. The comic was a great book with a perfect content, how could you change that. Just try to take one part out of the story, the whole piece will collapse just like u push one small domino piece. But you might ask me, what is so great about the content? Killing people?

The great thing about the story line is that it's all about what is good. In this world, good and bad can not be completely seperated. We all live in the grey zone of that. Therefore there are certain things that people consider as good while other consider as bad. We can see that clearly in the content, or may I say the sub content of the movie.

It started with the death of a Comedian who appeared later on as a jerk. He raped his partner, showed no mercy to his pregnant girl friend, and attacked to his own people. Everybody hates him, but he works for the goverment. Is that weird when in a society which considers human right is the best and criticizes other countries for their lack of human rights, holds in its hand a human right repressors tools? It raises another question that how much freedom we should have, and how we can define our freedom? I love the way that both the movie and the comic describe the American society. Under the greatness of a nation lies a lot of lies. But is it bad? I would say no, because simply sometimes lies are better. It shows clearly at the very end of the movie when Roschach was trying to lets the world know the truth, and Ozymadias let's Dr Mahattan finish Roschach off. The world in the movie is a better place with that lie, so people should never reveal it. That is a great point.

The two hours movie with a lot of investigations came to an end with the great plot that Ozymadias was behind. His plot can be looked under many scopes. Many would say that the killing of millions people will lets the world afraid and stop killing each other. Others might say that it's better to let millions die for the better tomorrow of billions. I, in my opinion, think that Alan Moore wanted to show the power of fear. Like in his previous V for Vendetta, Alan showed that fear made people united and give their fates to the hands of a great one. Fear in Watchmen made everybody united and live happy together. Only when there are a greater threat to the human life, they turn to look at each other and ask for help. This is not a new concept, but Alan showed it in another way. Moreover, Zack Snyder had brought the story up to another level which I considered as an improve to the orginal, since he lets Ozymidias created a bomb mimiced the power of Dr Mahattan instead of a giant squid. It is great because we can see at the very beginning that the reason for the Russia to develope rapidly nuclear power because they were afraid of Dr Mahattan, and it was also the reason that America did not back down in the cold war because they knew Dr Mahattan was on their side. So since suddenly Dr Mahattan was not on any sides and attacks America, it made the America to look for a new allaiance, and it also reminded the Russia that they had a greater enemy . Only on the face of amagedon people know how to united, or like Gabriel in Constantine says, only at the face of amagedon we show our truth noble self.



II - Cinetography and music.



Those are the two most important things in a movie. Watchmen mostly follow the scenes from comic with a great improvement from the visual effects and music which was the only thing that lacks in the comic. There are so many great scenes in the movie, especially the first 5 minutes of the beggining of the movie. It shows a great scene of two Russian soldiers smoking and slowly moved down to show tons of missles. There is a scene when the little put a flowers in front of the gun, and then the gun fired.

In order to replace the texts in from the comic for each scene, such as the funeral scene or the sex scene in the space ship, Zack Snyder found a very good solution by using music. The music from the movie was mostly come from 80s songs with great insert. Zack did not care about the length of the movie when he inserted those songs into the movie because simply they are necessary. Each songs perfectly fits into the scene and showed like a great video clips. This movie, somehow, can be considered as a musical movie since there are about 20% of the time was music video.



III - Scripts



The scripts should be awarded to Alan Moore since about 90% of the lines were from the comic. The movie and comic were full of rich great lines. I did not remember how many times I had to watch the pirate version of the movie just to hear the line again.

The scripts describe the feeling inside the man, the darkness in the everybody hearts, and even the story. These great lines are the one that made Watchmen and the Dark Knight stands out of the normal action movies. It's not hard to make an action scene of a great explosion, but it's so hard to insert great lines before the scene and make the action much more better.

The scripts from Wathmen were slow, long and monotone but rich of contents. They made the viewers or even readers think so much about that. It could be the awesome scripts that made me loved Watchmen so much since I am such a man who loves to listen to the scripts in a movie, that's why i usually now watch movie in a language that I can barely understand (this will be for another blog).