Watchmen
August 9th, 2009, 1:24pm by Mike
Bachelor for an evening, so what do I do? Rent a movie, of course! Last night I watched the Director’s Cut of Watchmen, and I’m still trying to decide what I thought of it.
I read lots of comics growing up, but never read Watchmen. I was a strictly Marvel Comics guy, so Watchmen, which was a DC Comic, was for some reason not cool. Anyway, last May, on Free Comic Book Day, I picked up a free copy of the first issue of Watchmen, and thought it was pretty interesting. It was the first comic I had read in over 20 years. I wanted to know what happened next, and since the movie had just come out, I figured I’d find out someday.
One fun thing about comics is that they all occur in an alternate world not so different from our own. Watchmen’s premise takes us to a somewhat believable yet fantastic mirror-world, in the sense that if you accept just one crazy unbelievable thing, the world very well could have turned out the way it’s portrayed in the comic. In Watchmen, it’s 1985 in New York City, and the U.S., which won the Vietnam War, is still being led by Richard Nixon in his 5th term (I suppose the 22nd Amendment was repealed somewhere in there). This alternate reality came about in large part because of (here’s the required “suspension of disbelief”) a superhero, Dr Manhattan, who was a nuclear scientist who got caught in an accident that gave him near-godlike superpowers. It’s because Dr Manhattan was used as a weapon by the US government in Vietnam that Nixon is reelected, etc, etc.
The plot has three main levels: Globally, impending nuclear war due to the tensions between the US and the USSR, a situation made more worse by the continued existence of Dr Manhattan. Locally in NYC, the fear of vigilantes on the street fighting crime resulted in the passage of a law banning “masked adventurers,” meaning that Batman-like crime-fighters essentially all go into retirement, and there’s lots of public fear and resentment toward them. And on the personal level, we watch the post-crime fighting lives and relationships of former “masked adventurers” — what do they do after they’ve been forced to retire from crime fighting?
It all comes together to make a great backdrop for a story. One of the things I liked best is the way the movie pays homage to the vintage comic stories. The opening credits of the movie are really masterful at setting the stage, and the music choice is perfect (in fact, I thought the music choices and score were really exceptionally good throughout — read the first comment on the Amazon page, which echoes what I thought).
Unfortunately, I think the movie fell a little short of its promise, and for me, it was the backdrop and its execution, more than the actual story, that kept me engaged. The interpersonal relationships, I thought, were pretty poorly developed (“Why are they friends?” “What does she see in him?”). The action scenes were fun, but at 2 hours and 43 minutes (24 minutes of which was extra director’s cut footage), it was far too long.
But still, have to say it was worth the $4 rental.
August 9th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
I nearly got the download last night ($5 for the HD version), until I saw how long it was. Maybe I’ll watch it tonight.
August 10th, 2009 at 2:34 am
Thanks for the review– Like you, I never read these particular comics, but as a fan of the genre, I’ve been tempted to rent this movie, probably over XBox. On the other hand, I don’t know if I could fit a 2.5 hr movie in a 24 hr period. I’ll probably just rent the DVD for less $$ and more flexibility.
Did you do it over Apple TV?
August 11th, 2009 at 2:06 am
The comment that got out of control! Goes w/ this pic, and cross-posted to Jake’s Adventures.
———-
Lovely. I can rent a movie from RedBox for $1/day, or I can download a movie from Amazon for $5 (the non-HD version is $4) and have 24 hours to watch it. Watched the whole thing last night, then wandered back to re-watch the opening scenes. And got this. So tough luck if it takes you 2 nights to watch a movie– that’s $10 gone. Really, would it be so hard for Amazon & the movie studios to give their customers a full week to watch a movie?
Honestly, these movie executives are idiots. The number of people that rent the same movie twice within a week has got be well below 0.1% of their customers. In the meantime, they’re losing 10-50% of their sales because some people aren’t always able to watch a film in one night, especially if it’s three hours long. So they rent it from RedBox for $1/night. Which the movie studios in their infinite wisdom, recognizing a novel (yet simple) service that people really enjoy, are trying to shut down.
The movie studios are about where they record companies were 10 years ago, trying to hold back the flood. The record companies wasted 10 years and squandered billions of dollars trying to protect, through artificial means, their obsolete business model. The movie industry is doing the same.
Amazon Video on Demand via TiVo is a great service, but I spend far less on it than I would because of the rigid DRM requirements. It’s a shame really that the movie studios are crippling what could be a great service in its infancy, making all too appealing for people to download movies via Bit Torrent b/c that’s the only way they can be easily watched on a wide variety of device, without restrictive rules.
August 11th, 2009 at 7:07 am
So what did you think of the movie?
As for the digital “rental” vs Redbox argument: I watched via Apple/iTMS on the AppleTV. Same issues there — you have 30 days to start playing, but once you start, only 24 hours to finish. Though it’s never affected me, it would be great if you could keep the movie longer. You cite Redbox, where you’d get the movie for 4 days for the $4 — hell, even Blockbuster, back in the day, gave you movies for 3 days.
The way I see it, downloading digitally is paying an impulse and convenience tax. I never wait more than 5 minutes after downloading to start watching. I just download it when I want to watch it. I can also walk to the library, which is closer and cheaper than even Redbox.
That said, it seems like they could easily implement a way to pay an extra $1 for an extra day, or something. I mean, there’s no more bandwidth used, so absolutely no cost to Tivo/Amazon/Apple, other than the revenue they think (wrongly) that they’d lose from a second full-priced rental day. I’m sure nobody actually re-rents, since they only way to do that now (AFAIK) is to re-download the movie.
The thing that gets me is that I am actually not be opposed to DRM on rentals as a concept, if the terms were reasonable. I understand that the studios need to protect their multi-million dollar investments, and I think $15-30 is a fair price for viewing forever (and very few movies are worth that to me, which is why I really don’t own many DVDs).
August 11th, 2009 at 9:38 am
I would guess that like Mike, most people are not affected by this limitation, although the concept may still be a deterrent. But the watch immediately and watch completely model is pretty deeply engrained– theater, pay-per-view, premium and broadcast television. For me, the price is as big an issue as the convenience (or as Jake says, the inconvenience). In fact, I just rented Watchman yesterday from Redbox’ competitor, DVDPlay. Haven’t watched it yet, but hopefully, I will, someday!
August 11th, 2009 at 7:03 pm
I enjoyed the movie, broke enough cliches to keep it interesting without getting caught up trying to create “unexpected” twists.