Thursday, March 5, 2009

Watchman Part 1


It’s hard to write about a movie when you’ve read the book, especially when it’s greatest graphic novel of all time. Furthermore, when there are two categories of people who are going to see Watchman: people who’ve read the book and those who haven’t.

Those who haven’t read the book will, in short, be blown away. At least, that’s what I think. The downside of having the audience’s mind getting blown to smithereens is they might have trouble following the story and understanding what the movie is actually about, particularly with the subtleties that occur throughout the movie. We’ll see how audiences react by next week…
Those who have the read the book will most likely be either content or ecstatic. I just read the book last week so every single difference in the movie was blatantly apparent to me, which, upon reflection, was a bad idea. The graphic novel is a highly detailed story board for the entire movie with almost every shot, angle, or lighting replicated.
There is no way a movie could cover every detail of book and it’s the small details that grab and pull readers into a literary work such as watchman. With many of its parallel and narrative elements and metaphors dispensed to make room for other more important things like characterization and explanation of plot, Watchman is lacking, to an extent.
The cinematography was fantastic, done by the wonderful Larry Fong (He did the first few episodes of lost). Jackie Earle Haley's Rorschach was incredible as he embodied the very essence of Rorschach. Billy Crudup was fantasic and Jeffrey Dean Morgan was a damn fine Comedian.
Hopefully, I’ll write more later. This is just my initial impressions of the movie.
Joel Samson Berntsen (Kodo-Yoshida Brothers)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

i totally understand what your saying because that was how i felt when twilight came out...

movies have to quickly get to the point to get the audience interested but books are better when there more descriptive and detailed