SovietCanuckistan

About 23 years ago, in 1986, I feel in love with two series of comics that came through comic shops in Vancouver. Although I was living in Prince George at the time, I was able to get ahold of all 4 issues of Frank Miller's 'The Dark Knight Returns' and all 12 issues of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's 'The Watchmen'. All things considered, the shop probably shouldn't have sold them to me as I was only 12, but such were the vagaries of mail order at the time that one couldn't tell how old you were. And I was a good paying customer.

These two series, along with a few other things, ruined me for most comics, and I haven't collected seriously since '89 or '90. I sold the original issues I'd collected a few years later for a horrific amount of money, and ( if I recall correctly ) bought books for college, or possibly a bass guitar

Flash forward to a few years ago, Christopher Nolan took the savaged zombie corpse of the Batman movie franchise and breathed new life into it with 'Batman Begins' and last year's 'The Dark Knight'. While not actually movie versions of Miller's Dark Knight, they certainly captured some of the savage darkness in that series. Zack Snyder made a splash as well with 300, an incredibly literal and visually stunning telling of another Miller comic. At the time I enjoyed 300, but also thought it was a bit superficial.

I wasn't exactly pleased then to hear that Snyder was being picked to direct the Watchmen; various people including Alan Moore himself had considered the book un-film-able. Combine this with a gimmicky green-screen director, and it seemed at first glance to be a recipe for disaster.

Man, was I wrong.

The Watchmen to me was always brilliant, but also a bit flawed, dense, and saddled with an odd ending. Some things about it were so fantastic, yet others I still struggle with. The film does a great job of resolving these rough bits into a much more powerful, streamlined version. The ending is, in my opinion, better, more dramatically satisfying. The things that are gone would have only slowed the main action down. The things that were right, were PERFECT.

I won't say much more, except that if you don't know the story at all, the Watchmen is a dark, horrific, relentlessly adult story set in a world far more desperate than ours. The movie itself is almost 3 hours long. There is brutal violence, explicit sex, horrifying gore, and glowing blue full-frontal male nudity. But don't let that stop you from going; In my opinion it is hard to imagine a film more faithful to the source material, so faithful in fact that in my opinion the director and screenwriter actually made it better. They fixed it.