Watchmen

I admit that I didn't really know about Watchmen until the talk about a movie finally being made started to make the rounds across the internet. Before that I had heard about it and it's legendary landmark status for comic books, but other than that nothing. Then the very first teaser came out and that sparked my interest.

I immediately went into Wiki-mode (yes I just made that up) and got to finding out everything I could about it without spoiling anything. Superheroes banned by the government: Nite Owl II, Rorschach, Ozymandias, Dr. Manhattan and Silk Spectre II. They were the players.

Intensified version of the Cold War, Nixon re-elected to third term as term limits lifted, Russia stockpiling nukes, war imminent, world likely to end. That was the setting.

The Comedian has been brutally murdered. This was the catalyst.

I eventually got around to getting the graphic novel when Amazon had it on sale for around $10. Once I started reading it was hard to put it down. Within a few days I finished it and... well, all the accolades it had received were very well warranted. It was a masterpiece!

Then of course I started to think about how this would even begin to translate to a single film. What would be cut out? What could be cut out? Like any great piece of fiction there were multiple threads to the story that ultimately led to it's shocking climax.

What I saw yesterday however, was about as close as anybody could possibly come to committing such an elaborate tale to film. It focused only on the main story and left out pretty much every other subplot. It definitely works for whoever has read the graphic novel as characters from those subplots are shown in the movie. It make sense since the main characters never interact with them. So seeing them is almost as if the movie is saying "Yes, they're still there."

It really was such an awesome movie. It even wins the "Best use of 'The Times They Are A-Changin' for an opening credit sequence" award. Hands down.