By now, you’ve probably read, or at least flipped past, dozens of reviews for “Watchmen,” so I’ll do my best not to bore you with another, but I thought given the massive amount of discussion, marketing, and possible box office numbers this film might pull, it seemed worthwhile to say a few things.
Big movies have, for quite a few years or at least as long as I’ve really looked for the chance to do so, offered up the opportunity to head to the theatre at 12:01am the night before the premiere, which is typically on a Friday night. In recent years, I’ve gone to see so-called “preview” screenings for films from the “Harry Potter” series, “I Am Legend,” and a few others. This past week, my local theatre had one screen open on Thursday night for “Watchmen,” and if one gauged the success of a film by the amount of people that were in their seats 40-45 minutes before the movie started, then this movie was a winner. That said, I’m not sure if it really is the winner that it might end up being reported as.
Of course, studios are in business to make money for their owners / shareholders / investors, and this film will surely make a bundle. I don’t know if it’ll reach the staggering areas that some “mainstream” titles have in the last couple of years, but it will do just fine, and probably sell a few DVDs, too. But will the film be an “all-time” favorite for movie fans, or just those who love the graphic novel, or dig superhero flicks? At the end of the day, it’s not “The Dark Knight,” but certainly presents some visually stunning images, and the novelty of an “alternate” timeline of the mid-1980’s is fairly amusing for someone who lived through that era. That said, is “Watchmen” a success if it reaps the hundreds of millions of dollars in ticket sales, etc., or does it need to have some staying power?
Considering the amount of marketing muscle put behind this film, which Chris Thilk has documented in his “Watchmen” column this past week at Movie Marketing Madness, is this particular film’s campaign “too big to fail,” as Thilk suggests? THR’s Gregg Kilday reported on Saturday that the film brought in $24.9 million on its opening day, Friday – with more than $4 million of that happening at the screenings on Thursday night. That was the pile my $10.75 went into. That same article states that “Watchmen” is tracking lower than “300,” director Zack Snyder’s last film, did on its first full day. I’m sure the creative spin would be “well, the economy continues to tighten, blah blah blah. But no sale, should that happen. Movie ticket sales are tracking way up for a good portion of the box offices in the U.S. year-to-date, so the film shouldn’t be “hindered” by what is a perfectly logical excuse these days, but has proven to be one of the only upward-moving markets this year. Well, except for condom sales.
Speaking of condom sales, let’s get back to the film. Most comic book movies I’ve seen in the last few years have a pretty mixed up crowd as far as men and women. “Watchmen,” not so much. There were so many guys in this theatre that if it were blown up, those condom sales would have dropped significantly in the town I was in. Beyond the high guy-to-girl ratio, I’d say there were far more “fanboy”-esque guys in the room than normal, but that might not be a fair assessment given that it was a midnight show on a Thursday night.
On the way out, I heard FAR more negative comments about the movie, its ending, how it was shot, the soundtrack (should I go on?) than I did positive. Of course, it’s like the online world, it’s a lot easier to say something negative than to be positive publicly – but still. And while I think we all knew that Dr. Manhattan’s junk was going to be on full display here, but hearing the giggles from the “boys” in the theatre was far more distracting than seeing some dude’s stuff on screen.
As far as the actual movie goes, I thought this wrapup at MTV.com pretty much summed up how I felt after leaving the parking lot at 3am – seriously conflicted. Did I “like” the movie? Yeah, I think I did. Was it too long? I do think it went a lot longer than it needed to, and I *LOVE* really long movies, when it actually covers everything integral to the story, but it just felt like it was going and going at certain points. On the LAT’s site, Kenneth Turan sums it up almost perfectly when he says that the film is “something acceptable but pedestrian, an adaptation that is more a prisoner of its story than the master of it.”
The movie certainly makes you think about things a little differently, especially when you recognize that the “superheroes” aren’t necessarily something supernatural, except for Dr. Manhattan’s time-traveling and molecular-transporting self, and even that has some science behind it, or tries to. I would absolutely go to the movie on opening night again, but unlike a lot of other aiming-to-be-blockbuster films, I can’t say I would recommend it to a lot of friends like I would those flicks. As Thilk’s first few paragraphs discuss, the film has had to bear so much weight about being “unfilmable,” as writer Alan Moore had said about the graphic novel. I wouldn’t ever go as far as saying that the result proved Moore right, as the movie stands on its own two legs just fine, but when you bill a movie in such a monstrous fashion, mainstream appeal is typically an end result of those marketing efforts, and I’m not sure that “Watchmen” will bring the ruckus in that way.
I’d give “Watchmen” three out of four stars (barely), as it was done very well visually, the opening credits sequence did a great job of storytelling, and it tried to take a whole lot of characters and concepts and jam them into less than three hours with decent success. But I liked “300″ better.
[ed: you can check out Wil Wheaton's comments on Twitter that I cited in a screen grab above here. Also, the first three or four grafs in Chris Thilk's above-mentioned review of the marketing behind "Watchmen" are some of the best I've seen out of him, and I've edited / reviewed hundreds (thousands?) of his blog posts since 2005 on a wide variety of topics.]
