Watchmen

I read Watchmen shortly after its original explosion onto the scene in 1986 or 7. I've read it a number of times since then, and it always rewards rereading. I'm not a fan of motion comics in general, and I was not a fan of this particular one, with its single narrator rather than full a cast recording. But my son, who found the original novel daunting due to his dyslexia, loved it. This motion comic opened the book up for him and he was able to enjoy it when otherwise he wouldn't have been able. So for that, it gets my 8 stars.

I saw the Watchmen movie the weekend it came out.I was completely blown away by it.I then read the graphic novel, and was blown away by that.I then saw a few episodes of the motion comics.Is it faithful? well yeah because they just took the comic book, animated it and used voiceovers.The graphic novel was awesome, but this was fairly pointless.The animation is fairly good and it does a good job of capturing the graphic novel.However, I found it annoying to watch.There is only one voice for every single character in the comic(yes even the women), it was fairly slow as well.My suggestion is you just stick to reading the graphic novel.

For the longest time, "Watchmen" was considered an unfilmable property. It took years to get the script, visuals and story into a form that was manageable for a motion picture, let alone the rumored miniseries.

While I appreciate the talent that went into the "Watchmen Motion Comic", I can't help but think that the project just took a few weeks or months to put together in an effort to cash in on the Watchmen marketing blitz. Some bits of it are rather well done, most of it is just long and expositional, and a few parts, especially the female characterizations, are embarrassing to watch. The original "Watchmen" comic was none too kind to women, and this video is even less so.

Apart from the single baritone male voice that reads the entire comic aloud, the whole thing has one massive issue with pacing. When you read a comic book, you set your own pace. You can spend half an hour gazing at a single panel of ultra-violence, or you can blip through a dozen panels of navel-gazing introspection, it's your choice.

I suppose you can advance the DVD at whatever pace you'd like, but sometimes the voices and the animation just do not flow naturally, and the motion comic lingers over scenes that should be brief and skips over stuff that needs more visual attention.

After a while, I found myself becoming obsessed that the characters never (or seldom) blinked and their mouth movements would periodically and reliably go askew. Maybe you like the theatrical film, or maybe you don't. Maybe you like the motion comic, I know I don't. If you want the best Watchmen experience, bloated, misogynistic, dated, self-important, and yet compelling and even a little beautiful under all that blood and ick, just read the book.

Bought last night and watched it all in one sitting. 10 out of 10. Can't wait to see the movie tonight at the IMAX! I bought the comic years ago and have read several times over the years. The writing rivaling many classics I have enjoyed time and again over the years. Other than Frank Millers Ronin I can not think of a another graphic novel I have so looked forward to on the big screen....The writing was something and such a level I had never seen in a comic and containing such dark view points I had never seen in such a media. I was always of the opinion that this was a graphic novel that would never see the big screen. The comic in motion literally brings to life what I have read in comic form for so long in such a new way and perspective.

This is a curio, simple as that. And yet it's hard to ignore the work that went into it. This is a one-of-a-kind occurrence. Normally a book is translated into an audio format, like a radio play (at best) and with a narrator or sometimes actors playing various roles (i.e. Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas the audio book has this). With Watchmen, unlike the movie by Zack Snyder, this is absolutely faithful to the source, with every panel included (the only thing it lacks, somewhat sadly, are those novel-type in-between chapters in Watchmen, such as the excerpts from Under the Hood), and with Dave Gibbons and the original colorist included.

It's a pleasure to watch the images come to life, and with a level of vibrancy that does make one see the recreation of an entire masterwork. As with the book, you can get sucked in and want to read/watch the entire thing. The only big difference, however, and the most glaring deterrent, is that when reading the Watchmen book you can fill in the gaps and the characters with your own voices and accents and things, as with any book, and pause at will. With this, it's continuous and with one voice only. This isn't to decry Tom Stechschulte too much, since he bounces between the male characters reasonably well (he even puts on a clever Nixon accent). But when it comes to the women, or with certain minorities (i.e. the pregnant Vietnamese woman), it doesn't work nearly as well. It's a matter of taste, perhaps, but they should have tried for a few more actors or voice-people to cover the book-on-video.

But if you're a big fan of the book, and you have an interest in seeing something like this that hasn't been done before, do check it out, if only for a few episodes. It's an approach that could pave the way for more... which depending on point of view is a great thing or a terrible thing. At the least it's an admirable experiment.