Director: Zack Snyder
215 minutes (18) 2009
Paramount 4K Ultra HD
Rating: 9/10
Review by Christopher Geary
“Why
does death pass me by?”
What
makes Watchmen such a classic of
superhero movies - after Ang Lee’s Hulk
(2003), and Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight (2008) - and in retrospect a landmark of 21st century cinema in general, is
director Snyder’s astute blending of radically varied, yet
exquisitely balanced, satirical tropes and sub-genres still typically avoided
by nearly all of its screen competitors, like the Avengers and X-Men
franchises. Watchmen embraces modern film
noir and gumshoe movie style within its urban vigilante motifs for the morally
bleak and uncompromising Rorschach character. Setting this alongside the exotic
physics of weird SF in a backdrop to Dr Manhattan’s origin, itself twinned with
the innate complexity of stunning alternative history that spans generations, from
post-war Minutemen to their successor team, the Watchmen, while also offering a sinister
political conspiracy for widescreen war-movie dramatics in Vietnam scenes, that builds up to
apocalyptic imagery of WW3 via SQUID-tech events.
Costumed
heroics of characters with secret identities like Nite Owl, particularly
effective in a night-blaze rescue mission and jail-break sequence, contrasts
magnificently with all the horror show elements of serial-killer violence and grisly
animation of Black Freighter’s
supernatural events. Although twin enigmas Rorschach and Dr Manhattan might seem
to be figures of primary interest here, it is anti-hero the Comedian (killer of
presidents and pregnant victims) who is the pivotal character. Portrayed in this
scratch-built universe as an alternative history’s deeply twisted flip-side
answer to Marvel’s patriotic super–soldier Captain America, homicidal brute the
Comedian makes crazy depressives like Rorschach seem tame, as far as
‘inspirational’ champions go. His role in events certainly makes the movie a
great screen version of writer Alan Moore’s seminal and tremendously influential ‘satirical
deconstruction’ of superheroes.
“Who
wants a cowboy in the White House?”
Daring
asides into sexual violence against original Silk Spectre (Carla Gugino) is offset by romantic
comedy (mostly involving Malin Ackerman, whose Laurie also becomes the first
woman on Mars) explores territory for two glamorous action heroines that is rarely
charted in more main-stream superhero movies. Finally, Watchmen asks is any utopia that’s based upon a lie... worth
accepting or not? What if a wholly united world remains a strictly unhappy ending?
A
comicbook adaptation that, perhaps, is simply too faithful to its graphic-novel source,
locked into a narrative and its darkly witty sub-texts, which might have benefited from updating
beyond the contexts of its mid-1980s’ geopolitics, and that alternative-world’s
cultural zeitgeist, to 21st century concerns, this ultimate Watchmen arrives just in time to be
viewed as an important work in the last 20 years of superhero cinema to rival
standalone masterpiece Hulk.
Re-mastered
version of Watchmen: The Ultimate Cut
looks absolutely extraordinary in 4K UHD with stunning use of colour and sound.
Bonus
material on a Blu-ray disc includes featurettes:
- The Phenomenon: The Comic That Changed Comics
- Real Super Heroes, Real Vigilantes
- Mechanics: Technologies Of A Fantastic World
- 11 Watchmen ‘making of’ webisodes
- My Chemical Romance ‘Desolation Row’ music video
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