My WATCHMEN experience (no spoilers)

In a word, it was predictable.

Not the movie. The situations surrounding the movie.

I pretty much called everything that happened within the 24 hours following my viewing of the film.

Firstly, as soon as my group took their seats in the theater, in walked a mother and father with their two boys, who, by my estimation, were somewhere between the ages of seven and nine. Called it.

About an hour into the movie, said family got up and walked out. Called it. This is what happens when parents aren't freaking parents anymore. Check the daggum rating. Rated R for "strong graphic violence, sexuality, nudity and language". Morons. The thing is, those are the kinds of people who go to the ticket office and complain because "if I had known I wouldn't have taken my kids to see it." Uneducated, uninformed, ignorant.

Which leads me to my basic premise of things surrounding Watchmen, and many other films of similar nature. To so many people, Watchmen is "just another superhero movie". Likening Watchmen to an ordinary run of the mill comic book or superhero movie is the same as likening The Simpsons or South Park to Looney Toons, and subsequently plopping your kids down in front of the tv, expecting them to get the same thing out of both. Watchmen is a mature film, just like The Simpsons is a cartoon for mature audiences. They are not, and cannot, and should not be viewed on the same level.

But I expected things to be like this, because of the stigma that is attached to comic books, superhero films, and those who enjoy them. Apparently these are only for immature people, dorky people, thirty-something white men who still live in their parents basements. (This is utterly false, and I have written about it in a previous post, entitled "In Defense of Comics").

This makes me irritated, because the entire point of Watchmen is that they're NOT superheroes. They are normal people who happen to be masked vigilantes. They have real life problems. They're real people, and it looks at how they're unusual activities affect their lives and their minds and their relationships. Only one character in the story really has extra-normal abilities, and that is Dr. Manhatten. That's the point of his character: He disconnects from humanity because of his powers. It's brilliant commentary on the "superhero".

Moving on to more things that I predicted.

When Dr. Manhatten came on screen, I heard half the theater giggling like little schoolgirls. Seriously? Apparently America is still in the third grade. Called it.

The day after I saw it, I talked to another of my friends who also saw it (not with me, with a separate group). This friend, whom I love dearly, belongs to the Talledega Nights/Superbad crowd to which I have referred previously on this blog. He said, "I saw the Watchmen yesterday, the movie was the dumbest, most retarded thing I've ever seen, don't you think?" Already knowing what answer I would receive, I asked him why. "Because I didn't understand it!" I then asked him to explain which one was the dumb, retarded one, the movie or himself. It seems to me that if you don't understand something, it is YOU that is dumb, not the object in question. But this reason has been given to me again and again for why a movie is bad. A person's lack of understanding or ability to comprehend something measures more that person then it measures whatever they are viewing.

The funny thing is that my friend expected me to agree with him. He was surprised that I didn't.

But perhaps the award for quote of the night goes to the unseen gentlemen whom I overheard in the bathroom immediately following the film. "You know why that movie was interesting? Because it had so many ideas in it. It was almost like....almost like a book."

I then started banging my head against the wall.

Not really. I mean, at least he picked up on the depth of the film, which is more than my friend did, and more than most people will do. Maybe it's just me, but I don't know how people don't know that Watchmen is based on a graphic novel. You have to live under a rock. Not only was there a lot of controversy surrounding the film, but it says on the daggum trailers, "based on the acclaimed graphic novel". And unless I am mistaken, I believe it said it at the beginning of the film. I could be wrong, I don't exactly remember.

Not to be tangential, but another thing that I called was the reaction I got when I was explaining to a group of people who asked me about the movie that it was based on a graphic novel. They asked me, "Isn't it based on a comic book?" I wussed out and instead of saying, "No, it's not a comic book. It's a graphic novel", I said "Sort of." I THEN explained the difference between a comic book and a graphic novel. Then there was a chorus of "you're such a dork!", "Oh my gosh, hahaha", "It's the same thing! You Geek!" etc.

Yes, I'M the dork for knowing what I'm talking about, for actually being informed.

I won't go into the differences between a comic book and a graphic novel. But suffice it to say, they're not the same thing. I know this because this is my field. I'm a writer. Plus I'm not an idiot.

I digress.

Finally, to the point. What did I think of Watchmen?

It stayed very true to the source material. The ideas. The characters. The violence and sexuality. All of that was in the graphic novel. And it all made it to the screen intact, for better or worse. I think some of the violence and sex was a little overboard, but the graphic novel didn't shy away from that stuff either.

But perhaps the main reason I say that it stayed true to the source material was that I walked away from the movie with largely the same feeling I had when I finished the graphic novel: conflicted. This solidifies my personal definition of Watchmen, both novel and film, as something that is not so much something to be either liked or disliked, as much as it is something to think about. It is thought provoking to the extreme, and not something you easily forget. This is precisely why people are reacting the way they are to the film.

People don't want to think. People don't want to use their brains. Anything that is challenging they label as "dumb" (when it is THEMSELVES that are dumb), and they sit around until the next Will Ferrell or Seth Rogen movie comes out.

I've probably beaten that horse to death. So I'll wrap this up.

Two best things about the movie? Jackie Earle Haley WAS Rorschach. Aside from Heath Ledger as the Joker, that was the single most amazing performance of a pre-existing fictional character I think I've seen.

Also, at the end of the movie, when there is a certain shot of a certain object and a certain song by a certain band kicks in: FREAK YES.

The truth will out.


-a.