[9.4/10] When I watched the first batch of episodes from Watchmen, I thought it tossed a number of interesting balls into the air, but I questioned how and if it would be able to catch them all. Showrunner Damon Lindelof, of Lost fame, is not necessarily known for delivering satisfying endings. And while his series asked all sorts of intriguing questions about the institutions of power and those marginalized by them, and while it threw in one eyebrow raising plot point after another, to answer all of the former, and tie together all the latter, seemed like too much for even the smartest (person) in the world to do in a satisfying fashion.
And yet “See How They Fly” somehow does it.
The finale of Watchmen’s first (and, blue god willing, only) season tells us what Lady Trieu’s angle is, how it fits with the Seventh Kavalry’s plot, how Ozymandias factors into it, what Dr. Manhattan’s role is, how it intersects with Will Reeves’s plans, and what Angela Abar’s place in these grand events is. It tells a story of so many people seeking power, seeking vindication, seeking adoration, and then puts it in the hands of the one person who wasn’t looking for it.
It also allows us to understand not only the plot mechanics that led to the second momentous rain of squid of sky, but the motivations of everyone who reached that point. The racist, status quo-preserving rationale behind the Seventh Kavalry’s scheme has been clear for some time now. But “See How They Fly” accounts for the consequences of Cal Abar’s moment of reflex on the White Night. It accounts for the collection of watch batteries from the pilot. And it accounts for their failure, the assumption that they’ve thought it all out and have all the right answers. The truth, however, someone much smarter is pulling the strings, and even left to their own literal devices, the forces of Cyclops would have turned themselves to mush anyway.
That someone is Lady Trieu, and in Watchmen’s last character-defining, plot twist-revealing vignette, it sets her up as Adrian Veidt’s inheritor. She is, through one enterprising refugee’s machinations, his daughter, one who has matched, if not exceeded, his genius. She is playing the Seventh Kavalry, letting them do the dirty work of capturing Dr. Manhattan so that she can dispose of them and localize him in one fell swoop. It is another instance of a Veidt being one step ahead.
But we understand, for the first time, why Lady Trieu is doing this. She claims that it’s to better the world, to use the power that Dr. Manhattan sits on to eliminate the world’s nuclear arsenals, to clean the air, to fix all that ails us. But she does not seek that goal for pure altruism and, like her father, she’s shown a disturbing propensity to use whatever means are necessary if her goals are just. Instead, the episode suggests that all of this is an effort to impress her parents, to gain their approval, to show herself worthy of the gifts that she’s been given and to prove that she can build herself up to the highest heights of human achievement on her own, as Ozymandias challenged her to do.
But it’s Ozymandias who thwarts her. He declares that she cannot be trusted because she suffers from the same sins he does: vanity and self-aggrandizement. He tells his compatriots that she has to be stopped because she’ll soon demand that everyone bow down before her, because he knows it to be true of itself. And in one of the many little bits of irony and connection in the episode and the season, he uses the frozen corpses of the veritable offspring of his giant squid to crush his daughter, must as he used the frozen corpses of Dr. Manhattan’s children to ask her for help.
There’s two ways to read that scene. The first is as a rare moment of self-recognition in Veidt, knowing what he would do with that power and why, given the hell he’s been through, where it would lead, to the point that he resolves to stop it. The second is another instance of, true to the show’s themes, a white male going to great lengths to preserve the status quo and prevent a person of color from overtaking his position and assuming his legacy.
Either way, the triumph if brief for Veidt. Whether his pronouncements are accurate for Lady Trieu, they’re true for himself. Ozymandias seeks veneration and adoration. He got to save the world, but grumbled miserably for decades because he never got to take credit for it, never got his due from the people he put in power or the lives he preserved. On Europa, he had the thing he always wanted -- endless appreciation and devotion from all those around him -- but it was given reflexively, without due, and thus became hollow and even maddening. And in the end, he saves the world once more, and gets to take credit for it, both for now and for 1985, but it’s also his downfall.
That’s the other cruel irony and the button put on the stories of Laurie Blake and Looking Glass. After everything, the two of them decide to arrest Veidt for the lives lost amid his gambit from the original comic. For Wade Tillman, it’s enacting justice against the man who wrecked so much of his life, who left him so scared for so long, in the name of a well-intentioned lie, but a bloody lie nonetheless. For the former Ms. Juspeczyk, it’s the chance for her to have agency in this story, to take charge rather than be more of a bystander to larger forces as she was in 1985, given time to reflect on what happened and her place in it. And for Ozymandias himself, it’s the price he pays for being known, the music he must face for returning home, the cost he finally has to account for instead of his gilded cage of anonymity.
But the thing that he and his daughter share is that they’re not able to thwart a god. Even though Dr. Manhattan is trapped in his lithium prison, even though he’s mentally disoriented from whatever Keene Jr. and Trieu have done to him, he still has the wherewithal to transport away the people whom he knows can stop this, and to spend his last moments with the woman he loves. If Ozymandias was sent to his own private hell, Jon Osterman spends his final seconds on this Earth in his own private Heaven, experiencing all of his best moments with Angela at once.
As much as Watchmen is a story about racism and its institutional infestation, as much as it’s about masks and what happens when people put them on, it’s also a story about love. It is, as the episode name-drops, another thermodynamic miracle in the making, of two people coming together despite lightyears of distance between them, and the way it changes the world.
That change takes a little dealmaking though. William Reeves gives Dr. Manhattan up to Lady Trieu in exchange for her rooting out and eliminating Cyclops. But Cal very probably knew what the result would be, even suggested the trade to Hooded Justice. Reeves’s plan was to stop the organization he’d been fighting for nearly a century. Dr. Manhattan had even bigger plans, ones that may have widened even Will Reeves’s aspirations here.
As the season’s penultimate episode portended, Dr. Manhattan left something behind for his wife, a piece of himself that would give her godlike powers. In the final scene of the episode, she consumes it, and while the episode ends too tantalizingly soon before she can walk on water, the implication is clear.
So many people in this episode reached toward Dr. Manhattan this season, so many aiming to replicate him or supplant him or best him. But the person who receives his abilities is not someone who sought it out. It’s someone who it was given to, who it was earned by, through her capacity to love, for her capacity to try to save what might be unsaveable, for her willingness to fight and appreciate what’s lovely and wonderful even if it’s only fleeting.
But it’s also someone who has awoken to the injustices that lie under her nose. When Will Reeves offers some comfort and commiseration to his granddaughter, it comes with one admonition -- that for all Dr. Manhattan did, he could have done more. THey’re the words of a man who seems to know what’s coming. His project, and the project of Lindelof’s Watchmen, was to show an awakening in Angela, an internal transition from someone who believed, like Reeves himself once did, that the systems could be fixed from the inside, that they could be welcoming to and changed by people who looked like them, but that the color of law was never going to supersede the color of their skin in the people who tried to hold onto the power that badge conferred. Hers is a tale of epiphany, of understanding, of an insidiousness in the institutions she risked her life to protect that was, unbeknownst to her, ready to chew her up and spit her out like it had done so many others.
So she takes the power that would never be willingly forsaken by those who possess it. It is, in its own subtle way, a radical message. It’s radical because it ties in with a moral that David Simon, who chronicled faltering institutions himself on The Wire once put it, that when those institutions have fully failed you, the only thing left to do is pick up a brick. Will Reeves couldn’t find justice from the police department or the sterling heroes that were supposed to help him, so he found it himself, often in bloody terms. Watchmen firmly suggests that these institutions retain the same debilitating stink of racism in 2019 that they did during the time of Black Wall Street, and ends with Angela Abar picking up one hell of a brick.
The way Angela’s son looks at her own mask, much as William Reeves’s son did his, suggests (as Watchmen inevitably must) that this cycle isn’t over, that the age of heroes and vigilantes and those who’ve suffered trauma finding a way to exercise it in the name of justice isn’t over just yet. Topher has suffered his fair share of trauma today, and long before. When Ozymandias kills The Game Warden, his erstwhile servant asks him why he made him wear a mask, and Veidt responds that masks make men cruel. Only time will tell whether Angela’s son will don the same type of hood his mother and great grandfather did, if he will mete out justice with the same sort of cruelty, and on whom.
But the other way that Watchmen is radical come in whose hands it puts the responsibility and the ability to obtain that justice. While superhero stories can come in many stripes, most often they are a power fantasy. A strapping hero, often one the reader or viewer can see themselves in, fights for truth and justice and the American way with a force and a level of excitement that the muddy grays and grim realities of the real world can’t match. It is, if not as radical as the show’s political message, then certainly bold, for the show to declare in Angela’s raw egg cocktail and first, tenuous step, that it’s time for a change in who gets to assume those power fantasies.
It is remarkable, then, how well this show puts everyone in place and builds, thematically and narratively, to that moment. In the end, Watchmen finds a reason to bring everyone of significance to the show’s story and themes into the same location, as though each vignette and sequence we witnessed led to this moment. It reaches its climax at the same place it started, in what was once Black Wall Street and the theater where young Will Reeves saw a black hero in a mask and borrowed his name and mission. For a show that, from its first frame, asked probing questions about who holds power, how that intersects with the color of law, and who gets to be inspired by the power fantasies of masked adventures, it answers all three with a woman of color about to walk on water.
Each setup had a payoff and each payoff had a setup. Almost every seeming loose end is weaved together by the final frame. There are still queries that can be raised, objections that could be lodged, but everything that the series set up it knocked down. It seems too easy to say -- for a show that trod into such messy territory, that tugged on so many knotted threads of both the real world and its fictional one -- but there’s only one word to describe Watchmen and its ending. Clockwork.
This may be the most literal film adaptation of a print property we'll ever see, but that alone can't make it half as successful as it could have been. Having grown up with the trade paperback by my bedside, a holy grail of sorts for comic book fanatics, it's almost a religious experience to see these themes, characters and visuals represented so loyally on the big screen. As he did with 300, Zac Snyder has absolutely nailed the look and feel of the comics, breathtakingly, but underneath that dazzling surface is a terrible lack of soul, conviction and character.
With the exception of Jackie Earl Haley, who is absolutely magnificent as the mentally teetering vigilante Rorschach, this is a large collection of miscast characters which never really seem to buy into what they're saying or doing. The words are right, ripped line-for-line from the bubbles and narrative boxes of the comics, and of course everyone looks great, but bland inflections, bad interpretations and a hectic, compressed timeframe strip away the power of the plot's weightiest bits. In a way it's TOO loyal, as it's surprisingly the one major moment that steps away from the guiding hands of the source material - a significant tweak to the story's conclusion - that works the best.
Snyder was ambitious to tackle such a booby-trapped property, and to do so with so passionate a love for its roots is admirable, but there's a reason it was dubbed unfilmable for so many years. There's so much going on at any given moment that even the most familiar reader runs the risk of being bucked, and even at three hours, a large portion of the story is left on the cutting room floor. For Watchmen, those seemingly-dispensible character moments are every bit as important as the heaviest plot developments. A valiant effort, but ultimately a failed one.
Weird. Very weird. I had really mixed feelings when i saw it back in 2009. Now, for the new Watchmen-TV Show i wanted to give it a re-roll.
I never saw the Directors Cut and choose the Ultimate Cut. Besides a Story about a Boy who reads a Comic at a Newspaper Stand, i can say: you need only the Directors Cut.
But regarding the Directors Cut: A lot of the scenes appearing much more 'complete'. You know that feeling when you watch a Directors Cut and you think to yourself 'okay, they cut this for a good reason. This does only make the scene longer not better'. The Watchmen DC was not like this at all. The movie was over in no time.
So I was no big fan after the first screening. And now?
Now the plot works much better for me than back in the days. I still don't like the 'Batman'-Superhero, because is so much more whiny than Batman. Some violence is a little bit out of place, but the acting is great.
And Zack Snyder, man some of his movies are awful. But for this one: He knew his sh*t.
Finally you have to say: It's a great aproach on the whole superhero-Theme and definly a good movie.
[8.8/10] “The Deepening” is a pitch-perfect Jaws parody, but it’s also more than that. It’s a snootful of very funny, irreverent comedy that works whether or not you’re super acquainted with what the episode is spoofing.
I love how the episode sets Bob up as the block captain early on (via Hugo, who is at peak entertaining Bob antagonism here) and then has him take charge when things go awry with the mechanical shark. It’s a fun outing for Bob as a would-be hero, even when the stakes are sillier than they are high.
It’s a funny premise to begin with – a gas-powered shark terrorizing a neighborhood block – while the locals concoct a variety of Wile E. Coyote-style solutions to neutralize it that, one after another, only worsen the situation and make the shark more dangerous.
But what really distinguishes “The Deepening” is how much character comedy there is in it. In addition to Bob playing the straight man and disbelieving hero, you have great character moments from so many characters. Again, Hugo is in top form, having a great exchange with Bob about muttering that Linda made a mistake by marrying him and taking credit for defeating the shark as “quad captain.” Teddy is wonderful as someone who bears a grudge against the shark and claims it’s cursed after it nudged him into spilling his drink on another extra in the movie, causing him to lose his chance with her. And Tina is true to form by imagining the mechanical shark as a misunderstood loner whom only she can defend.
Even the folks on the margins deliver great character work. Louise is great in wanting to chop of the shark’s fin to sell to “a guy” who wants to make mechanical shark fin soup. Mort’s woe-begotten comedy routines are, ironically, a great source of humor. The old lady from the arts and crafts store brings the laughs as usual, and Mr. Fischoeder delivers his typical great, off-the-wall shtick. (His wondering if Bob raises chinchillas or children cracked me up.) And the testy, one-armed shark attack victim was a great, if brief, addition.
All the while, Bob’s Burgers delivers a great parody of Jaws by transplanting the beach-threatening severity of a real shark with the sidewalk-damaging ridiculousness of a mechanical one on the lose. There’s great animation, whether it’s the herky-jerky, kind of scary motions from the shark itself, to the image of it overflowing with frozen yogurt (another detail the episode sets up well early), to the commotion in the restaurant at the block meeting.
Overall, it’s a well-done episode with tons of laughs and a propulsive story that gets a little out there at times, but somehow manages to fit both the tone of the show and the tone of the film it’s making fun of. Top notch stuff.
"This is what life looks like. People who love each other. A home. You should take a moment... Feel it".
It's very rare that a X-men (or any superhero movie), could be the hardest thing I've ever progress in terms of my thoughts and feelings. Much hard when writing about it. Heck, I wouldn't even call it a superhero movie, but a mixture of both western and drama in disguise. No one is safe and the stakes are higher than before. While the villains themselves aren't anything I would call "great", but they did felt like a real threat and wasn't too cliché to the story.
Still...
"Logan" is one of the best non superhero movies I've seen in awhile. A sad but satisfying farewell to are fan favorite. A surprising character driven movie with real consequences. A bold and risky film that wouldn't have been made years ago in the hands of FOX. But I think it's the unexpected powerhouse that got me in many ways. Something the previous movies couldn't do.
Much darker and gruesome than I expected. Remember in "X-men: Apocalypse" when Wolverine goes on a full rampage and violently kills all the guards, but most of it was off-screen, even through you can clearly see blood on the walls. Well take that scene and imagine actually seeing him tearing through people. Yeah, it really goes for it and that ain't a bad thing.
Hugh Jackman has portrayed Wolverine for over seventeen years and this is by far his most powerful performance. It's the humanity and the depression of the character we never truly seen. Despite happening around him, Logan's true enemy is himself. Before the end of an era, he learns the meaning of family and being a hero for others. I know this may sound far-fetch, but I would go as far to say that Jackman deserves some award buzz for this. The raw emotion he brought to his scenes without any sloppy music under neath it, is achievement. Jackman will forever be Wolverine and nothing will top that.
Patrick Stewart delivers his last and most heartfelt performance as Charles Xavier. In this movie, he isn't the same Professor X who know and love. He is 90 year old, suffers from dementia, and has a dirty mouth. But at the same time, he's a father figure to Logan. The scenes between Stewart and Jackman are one of the few highlights of the film.
Dafne Keen was fantastic as Laura/X-23. She captures the characters inner emotions just by her facial expressions that says so much than dialogue. What's more impressive that this is her first major role and already I'm interested of what she dose next.
I have to give major credit to James Mangold for what he brings to this harsh, but beautiful film. I wouldn't say he's an absolute professional when it comes to action scenes and story, but the perfect balance of brutal and bleakness he brought to those scenes was freaking spot on. The Wolverine series have been all over the place in terms of quality and tone. Mangold gave me what I wanted for years and much more.
Overall rating: "Logan" is a special kind of ride that hits you in places you wouldn't expect. I grinned and cried at the right moments. And that last shot was just perfect.
Farewell bub.
