It was ok I guess.
Song of the Blog: Oh, you’re not satisfied with that? Well neither am I.
To start us off, the action-curve of this movie is way off. It does not belong in a movie at all! I guess they were trying to stay true to the novel, but you can’t just put a novel in a movie and think that it’ll work! This entire movie builds up to one point, which is really good, that’s how movies are supposed to be built, with everything leading up to the peak, or turning point if you wish. The problem was that the point that is built up to in the movie is not the turning point of the story! After the major event occurs, I’m sitting there thinking, that’s it? That doesn’t solve anything! It doesn’t explain anything either! What the heck! And so on. I can’t believe that that is the end, and I’m correct, of course it isn’t the end, but it feels like one, and that really is a problem. The event that seemed like the major turning point, expositionally speaking, didn’t even feel important at all! It’s just feels malplaced, like it should have been shown as a small side-note. This all leads to a more confusing than pleasing experience.
But the fighting makes up for it! The fight-scenes are so radically bad-ass that it completely redeems any mistakes in the dramatic structure. I guess I should really attribute this to DC Comics, but the coreographers must have had a hell of a job bringing all the characters’ specialties shine like they did. Again, whilst fearing to repeat myself, the fighting in this movie is awesome.
The characters I’m not so sure about. Nite Owl just seems like a cheap Batman ripoff who gave his growl away to another character, Rorschach, a mysterious fellow who had his moments of pure awesomeness. There’s the narcissistic Comedian, whose death starts off the movie yet he still manages to be a major character, and the slutty Silk Spectre. I don’t really have to delve any deeper into these characters to talk about them, these characteristics define them well enough, they are not deep at all. The more interesting ones are Ozymandias and Dr. Manhattan, though the latter was proven pathetically simple towards the end. Ozymandias is a sneering intellectual bloke, trying to fix the world at whatever the cost, and Manhattan a failed energy experiment whose only effects seem to have been that they made Manhattan very very smart, enabling him to recompose himself after having been torn to shreds, and then understanding quantum mechanics. All over they are a shallow bunch with epic fighting skills and blue wangs.
Yes, blue wangs. If there is one thing you need to be prepared for before watching this movie it is the extraordinary amount of shiny blue penises you will be seeing. For whatever the reason, Dr. Manhattan is bright shining blue, and he doesn’t care about much, so he walks around naked. He feels the need to duplicate himself every now and then, and so there are times when there are several blue shining penises on the screen at once! One might think that the crew were using dirty tricks to get the record of most penises displayed in a hollywood movie ever. There is cheezy sex smeared all over this title, but this is fine, it’s 2009, I think we can all handle a couple of awkward moments.
Now the ending is what really leaves me feeling unsatisfied. I heard someone say that they’d changed it a little bit? Well I hope the original was way better, this one was just so dull. It seems like there are no consequences, and it’s put completely in the shadow of the previous “ending,” making the real ending seem even less important. The moral seems to be that it doesn’t matter at all whether the good guys or the bad guys win, everything is just rosy afterwards in either case. I’m not saying that the classical good beats bad ending is always how it should go, but at least make the alternative ending have alternative effects, please!
Song of the Blog: Blue (Da Ba Dee)
Sincerely
Bjørn
