Review: Watchmen Director's Cut on DVD

Warner Brothers / Legendary Pictures / DC Comics

Watchmen has more in common with art films than comic book movies. Watchmen is an art movie about superheroes, a three-hour epic drama made for adults. This isn't a movie for your kids, this is a movie for you (unless you're a kid, in which case, get an older cousin to show you this movie). Watchmen is pretty wild. And by wild I mean, the violence is crazy, the story is pretty epic and the movie includes visuals never seen before in a film. And there's f*cking of all varieties because, like I said, this is a movie for adults, not children. These are superheroes with libidos who actively act on them. But that's not the point. The point is these are people...well, except for Doc Manhattan (Billy Crudup, Public Enemies), who used to be a person. And their sexual jaunts in the film represent their bigger problems. The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Dillinger and Capone) is a misogynistic and violent meathead because he's a hate-filled bastard who lucked out by being able to be vent his psychopathic tendencies in the name of being a superhero. Dan Dreiberg/Nite Owl II (Patrick Wilson, Little Children) is literally impotent without his costume. Dr. Manhattan's inability to relate sexually simply stems from his inability to relate to people at all.

And then there's Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley, uh, also Little Children...makes that movie just that much stranger now), who doesn't have any sex. We later find out that his mom was a whore, and even took customers in front of him, so his views of sex and the hearts of men and women were being warped from the beginning. Rorschach is a person who probably hates sex and it makes him incredibly uncomfortable and rage-filled, which just all goes back to him being a scared, lonely child, picked on by bullies and slapped around by his hooker-mom.

Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias (Matthew Goode, Chasing Liberty) comes across as gay at best, but is seemingly asexual because he is so focused on his task at hand. The Smartest Man in the World doesn't have time for sex, cause he needs that time and energy to solve the world's problems. It is a lot like that Seinfeld episode where George doesn't have sex for a few weeks cause his girlfriend had mono, and with thoughts of sex completely removed from his brain, he was able to become much smarter and utilize his brain for its actual purpose. So Adrian Veidt is George Costanza. Which means Dr. Manhattan is Jerry Seinfeld. And Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle) is Elaine Benes. And Nite Owl is Kramer? Okay, that doesn't really work, although Danny Woodburn does play The Big Figure, a dwarf inmate who wants to see Rorschach "die by inches," so I guess Kramer could be his lackey Lawrence, who gets one of the goriest scenes in a very gory and violent movie.

My favorite sequence in the movie is the origin of Dr. Manhattan. In a roughly ten minute scene, we get an intimate idea of how the Doc's mind works, as he looks back on his life and sees everything in disjointed pieces, leaping back and forth in time. As it is, he already sees time as one multi-faceted unit, as opposed to something linear with a beginning and an end. The story  is shortened and simplified a bit from the source in order to make it flow bettercinematically, but the essence of what the chapter was about remains intact. And for all that's in the novel that is left out of the movie, it's what Snyder gets in there that is amazing. There are more than a couple of times where ideas or pieces of dialog are shifted around, even spoken by different characters, but the ideas are still coming across as intended. This story is thick, like molasses, and the details within are rich and satisfying.

 

Some parts of Watchmen don't seem to work at all: some of the make-up is surprisingly awful. Carla Gugino as the original Silk Spectre/Sally Jupiter and Jeffrey Dean Morgan looked like they literally had silly putty smeared on their faces for old age make-up. Akerman's wig looked like a heavy curtain, and Nixon looked jaundiced. His skin was almost yellow, like Simpsons-yellow. And some of the music used on the soundtrack was a little too on the nose, like Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" during a sex scene. And "All Along the Watchtower" just feels out of place where it is used. But for the most part, I dug the music cues, including the ones lifted directly from the book (like "Unforgettable" for the opening fight scene).

The director's cut of Watchmen, now finally made available on DVD and Blu-Ray, is a huge improvement on the original theatrical cut. Over twenty minutes of deleted materials have been reinserted into the film, putting the running time at just over three hours. And with the new running time and added scenes, the movie loses the strange sensation of being rushed despite it's long length. Characters are allowed to breath more and the story has a more normal, deliberate pace. This is not a case of an "unrated director's cut" DVD being released with less than two minutes of extra footage, and not a single change made to change the movie overall. This is more like the director's cut of Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven, where the extra running time and story tangents makes the entire thing work so much better. Fates of characters are reinserted and awkward and jarring edits are smoothed out by having the natural transitions put back into place. Having done disappointing business at the box office (though getting a three-hour superhero drama to over $100 million should be seen as some sort of feat, though not the one Warner Brothers was hoping for), hopefully this DVD release will help Watchmen find a larger, more willing audience, and in time the director's cut will go do as one of the best movies of 2009.