We Watch the Watchmen - The Guest Review
Mar. 8th, 2009 12:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eumeliaHi,
This is [Southern!Grrl], asked by Mel to do a review of Watchmen as someone who's never read the book. I should preface this by saying that I also don't watch a lot of movies and when I choose to watch a particular one (as opposed to watching a movie because it's a social activity) I tend to like ones that say something significant about a Major Issue (i.e. American Beauty or You and Me and Everyone We Know or that are fluffy and have a happy ending (i.e. Mars Attacks and School of Rock. That being said, here are some of my thoughts about Watchmen (includes spoilers).
To be blunt, I didn't like it. Why?
1) Throughout the movie (but more painfully at the beginning) it felt like I as a viewer was being introduced into an ongoing flow without knowing what was going on. The movie starts with a murder, then shoots to a bit of background about the guy being killed, and then starts the "main" flow of events with someone cleaning up the murder scene. This may just be me Liking Linear Plots (TM), but I feel like it would have been easier for me to get into the movie if they'd started it with the clean-up shot and then gone back to show the "earlier" scenes. That way it would have established the main time-line and therefore to recognize aberrations from it as opposed to spending the first twenty minutes of the movie wondering WTF was going on and who everyone was. Speaking of wondering who everyone was, they didn't explain where Dr. Manhattan came from until halfway through the movie. I'm not saying that they should have done the actual flashback earlier, but a one-line "he was a physicist in a weird accident that turned him into an omnipotent smurf" would've been nice for people like myself who didn't know who he was. While that was the most striking example, I think it's also fairly true for most of the other major characters.
2) The movie included a lot of characters saying, "Look at me being deep about human nature!" and use of symbolism that seemed to be there just so the producer could say, "He look, the movie is deep!" without actually symbolizing or saying anything. Between the two, I didn't feel like it gave me any food for thought and just made the characters all rather un-likeable. While most of the major characters represented various attitudes about humanity, it was done in a really ham-handed way. Dr. Manhattan, Ozymandias, and Rorschach all explicitly say, "This is what I believe about human nature!" and, with the exception of the last of those, the movie has them do so without showing why their arguments are compelling. Incidentally, while Mel was searching for the userpic she mentioned that a lot of people like Rorschach best, and I think the fact that his ideology is so clearly rooted in his personal pain goes a long way towards explaining why that might be the case.
3) The gendering in this movie made me Not a Happy Camper. The most obvious issue was that there were so few female characters (Bechdel Rule FAIL). Even the most major female character, Laurie, seemed to be there as a tool for the male characters' to explore and articulate their feelings about human interaction.
The sex scene with her and Dan was just painful; it was so clearly intended to cater towards (straight) men. The camera focused way more on her than on Dan and she came across (at least to me) as being there for his pleasure (both visually, and in that she was more vocal and more active than he was). To top it off, the movie perpetuated ideas about intercourse that really don't help heterosexual women have a satisfying sex life (if you're having intercourse with such force that you're moving, that means you're going to orgasm soon! And who needs stimulation anywhere other than the vagina!)...
4) Tied in with both points two and three above, I was troubled by the value that seems to be placed on procreation. While my personal ideology seems to be fairly consistent with Dr. Manhattan's in that I think that the negative aspects of humanity are "made up for" by the positive, the positive that the character mentions in the movie is the birth of a child that came out of an abusive relationship. From a feminist perspective I'm bothered by the idea that having kids makes everything better, especially because that similar sentiment was expressed by the woman who gave birth as well as Dr. Manhattan. Aside from that, though, with the character relationships being set up the way they were, I feel like the "take home" message could have been much more general than a focus on "future generations", and it would have resonated more for me in that case.
5) The violence wasn't too gratuitous, really, but man were there some gory parts.
On the plus side, the movie was pretty and the music was kinda great.
This is [Southern!Grrl], asked by Mel to do a review of Watchmen as someone who's never read the book. I should preface this by saying that I also don't watch a lot of movies and when I choose to watch a particular one (as opposed to watching a movie because it's a social activity) I tend to like ones that say something significant about a Major Issue (i.e. American Beauty or You and Me and Everyone We Know or that are fluffy and have a happy ending (i.e. Mars Attacks and School of Rock. That being said, here are some of my thoughts about Watchmen (includes spoilers).
To be blunt, I didn't like it. Why?
1) Throughout the movie (but more painfully at the beginning) it felt like I as a viewer was being introduced into an ongoing flow without knowing what was going on. The movie starts with a murder, then shoots to a bit of background about the guy being killed, and then starts the "main" flow of events with someone cleaning up the murder scene. This may just be me Liking Linear Plots (TM), but I feel like it would have been easier for me to get into the movie if they'd started it with the clean-up shot and then gone back to show the "earlier" scenes. That way it would have established the main time-line and therefore to recognize aberrations from it as opposed to spending the first twenty minutes of the movie wondering WTF was going on and who everyone was. Speaking of wondering who everyone was, they didn't explain where Dr. Manhattan came from until halfway through the movie. I'm not saying that they should have done the actual flashback earlier, but a one-line "he was a physicist in a weird accident that turned him into an omnipotent smurf" would've been nice for people like myself who didn't know who he was. While that was the most striking example, I think it's also fairly true for most of the other major characters.
2) The movie included a lot of characters saying, "Look at me being deep about human nature!" and use of symbolism that seemed to be there just so the producer could say, "He look, the movie is deep!" without actually symbolizing or saying anything. Between the two, I didn't feel like it gave me any food for thought and just made the characters all rather un-likeable. While most of the major characters represented various attitudes about humanity, it was done in a really ham-handed way. Dr. Manhattan, Ozymandias, and Rorschach all explicitly say, "This is what I believe about human nature!" and, with the exception of the last of those, the movie has them do so without showing why their arguments are compelling. Incidentally, while Mel was searching for the userpic she mentioned that a lot of people like Rorschach best, and I think the fact that his ideology is so clearly rooted in his personal pain goes a long way towards explaining why that might be the case.
3) The gendering in this movie made me Not a Happy Camper. The most obvious issue was that there were so few female characters (Bechdel Rule FAIL). Even the most major female character, Laurie, seemed to be there as a tool for the male characters' to explore and articulate their feelings about human interaction.
The sex scene with her and Dan was just painful; it was so clearly intended to cater towards (straight) men. The camera focused way more on her than on Dan and she came across (at least to me) as being there for his pleasure (both visually, and in that she was more vocal and more active than he was). To top it off, the movie perpetuated ideas about intercourse that really don't help heterosexual women have a satisfying sex life (if you're having intercourse with such force that you're moving, that means you're going to orgasm soon! And who needs stimulation anywhere other than the vagina!)...
4) Tied in with both points two and three above, I was troubled by the value that seems to be placed on procreation. While my personal ideology seems to be fairly consistent with Dr. Manhattan's in that I think that the negative aspects of humanity are "made up for" by the positive, the positive that the character mentions in the movie is the birth of a child that came out of an abusive relationship. From a feminist perspective I'm bothered by the idea that having kids makes everything better, especially because that similar sentiment was expressed by the woman who gave birth as well as Dr. Manhattan. Aside from that, though, with the character relationships being set up the way they were, I feel like the "take home" message could have been much more general than a focus on "future generations", and it would have resonated more for me in that case.
5) The violence wasn't too gratuitous, really, but man were there some gory parts.
On the plus side, the movie was pretty and the music was kinda great.
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Date: 2009-03-08 02:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-08 06:53 am (UTC)-S!G