Comics aren’t meant to be this powerful.
At least – not comics that make it to the mainstream.
I just got out from viewing Watchmen on the big iMax screen, and this is a movie that’ll probably make female lead Malin Akerman famous. While there are the odd quivers where your belief isn’t as suspended as it might be, what’s in the rest of the movie will stay with you for a long time afterwards.
Ultra-violent, bleak, occasionally very darkly funny and visually stunning all the way – as you may have expected from 300’s Zack Snyder, this is a movie that reminded me how much I loved comic books, and how truly exciting the human imagination can be.
The reverberations with today’s world are painful – even though the movie is thoroughly rooted in the mid eighties paranoia of Cold War nuclear armageddon. Irrational not to be paranoid in such times.
Ironically, the ‘comic book’ characters are more deeply imagined, multilayered and – real than the vast majority of media entertainment ever produced. You’d swear they were straight out a novel…
The characters are absorbing, the dialogue as real as pain.
It’s a collossal wank to ever call a comic ‘literature’, but you’d have to be the most fanatical of deniers, or purists, to argue that Watchmen doesn’t rise to that level.
This movie takes the concept of “noir” to a whole new abstracted level.
I’ve read that inspiration from films like Blader Runner and Sin City permeates the vision of this movie, to that list I’d add A Clockwork Orange and – even though I haven’t even seen it yet (still) – the cable tv show The Wire, for it’s sheer grittiness.
I just can’t wait for the conceptual doors that have been opened by this movie – to be married to the visual technology of the 3D version of Beowulf.