Who SHOULD Watch the Watchmen?

Everybody, that's who!

There are tons of reviews out there to whet your appetite for Watchmen. They run the gamut from wildly enthusiastic to guardedly favorable, from persnickety to incensed. Such is the fate of the filmed adaptation of THE seminal comic book that truly set the standard for deconstructionism.

Go. Read. Decide for yourselves whether or not you want to invest yourselves in two hours and forty-one minutes worth of real fanboy geekdom. However, if you are stopping by the Catacombs, then I must assume that you at least have a passing interest in the four color world. So here are my thoughts on the Watchmen film AND the reviews that preceded it.

Director Zack Snyder willingly took on an almost thankless task of translating Watchmen for the big screen. Any time that a motion picture adapts a story from another medium there are going to be some out-of-necessity sacrifices to be made from the source material. A couple of hours or so isn't always sufficient length to fit every single passage of a novel or stage play (or whatever) into a feature length movie. So, yes, there are changes made from the comic book - including the ending. But that isn't a deal-breaker folks. I feel sorry for the purists out there who are so bent out of shape over what was altered for the filmed version of Watchmen. After the final credits rolled what really astonished me was how much of the original comics story Snyder was actually ABLE to fit into his movie. Bravo Mr. Snyder! You've achieved the impossible and I applaud your efforts.

Watchmen is fucking amazing!

The cast deserves high praise indeed. Everything you may have heard or read about Jackie Earl Haley's portrayal of Rorschach is spot on. He IS Rorschach! Same goes for Billy Crudup as Dr. Manhattan, Jeffrey Dean Morgan as the Comedian and Patrick Wilson as Nite Owl. Matthew Goode's portrayal of Ozymandias has garnered mixed commentary, but he brought the difficult role of Adrian Veidt to life in my opinion. Now, Malin Akerman as Silk Spectre has seemingly elicited few defenders thus far, with most reviewers saying that she was the weak note in an overall strong cast. I don't get where those comments are coming from and honestly believe that this talk amounts to nit-picking among the geeks. She WAS very effective in the role of Laurie Juspeczyk/Silk Spectre II. And she was absolutely smoking hot in the primary female role in the film, not that Carla Gugino wasn't good in the more limited part of the original Silk Spectre (who is also Laurie's mother). Hell the lech in me simply has so say [with much respect to the very talented Ms. Akerman] that I would dearly love to spend an entire week of my life just snacking on her fine rump. Gotta love those nude scenes! Whew.

I guess that most of the nerdy reviewers in the comic book world just had to find something to dis in Watchmen, but at least this type of attention proves one thing for sure. They had to be playing very close attention to the movie to perceive fault.

I say there is none: Watchmen is fucking amazing!