Watchmen: The Director's Cut (Two-Disc Special Edition) | 
| Director: Zack Snyder
Actors: Jackie Earle Haley, Patrick Wilson, Carla Gugino, Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup
Studio: Warner Home Video
Category: DVD
List Price: $34.98
Buy New: $14.89
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Rating:  492 reviews
Sales Rank: 997
Format: Color, Director's Cut, Dolby, DVD, Special Edition, Widescreen, NTSC
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Subtitled), French (Subtitled), Spanish (Subtitled)
Rating: R (Restricted)
Region: 1
Aspect Ratio: 2.40:1
Number Of Discs: 2
Running Time: 186 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.4 x 5.4 x 0.7
MPN: 1000089594
UPC: 883929057795
EAN: 0883929057795
ASIN: B001QTXM5Y
Theatrical Release Date: 2009
Release Date: July 21, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Features:
| • | WATCHMEN SPECIAL EDITION (DVD MOVIE) |
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Product Description
Studio: Warner Home Video Release Date: 07/21/2009 Rating: R
Amazon.com
Everybody's favorite graphic novel comes to the screen (after years of rumors and false starts), less a roaring work of adaptation than a respectful and faithful take on a radical original. Watchmen is set in the mid-1980s, a time of increased nuclear tension between the United States and the Soviet Union, as Richard Nixon is enjoying his fifth term as president and the world's superheroes have been forcibly retired. (As you can probably tell, the mix of authentic history and alternate reality is heady.) Things begin with a bang: the mysterious high-rise murder of the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a masked hero with a checkered past, puts the rest of the retired superhero community on alert. The credits sequence, a series of tableaux that wittily catches us up on crime-fighting backstory, actually turns out to be the high point of the movie. Thereafter we meet the other caped and hooded avengers: the furious Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), the inexplicably naked Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup, amidst much blue-skinned, genital-swinging digital work), Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman), Nite Owl II (Patrick Wilson), and Ozymandias (Matthew Goode). The corkscrewing storytelling, which worked well in the comic book, gives the movie the strange sense of never quite getting in gear, even as some of the episodes are arresting. Director Zack Snyder (300) doesn't try to approximate the electric impact of the original (written by Alan Moore--who declined to be credited on the movie--and illustrated by Dave Gibbons) but retains careful fidelity to his source material. That doesn't feel right, even with the generally enjoyable roll-out of anecdotes. Even less forgivable is the blah acting, excepting Jeffrey Dean Morgan (lusty) and Patrick Wilson (mellow). Watchmen certainly fills the eyes, although less so the ears: the song choices are regrettable, especially during an embarrassing mid-air coupling between Nite Owl II and Silk Spectre II as they unite their--ah--Roman numerals. In the end it feels as though a huge work of transcription has been successfully completed, which isn't the same as making a full-blooded movie experience. --Robert HortonAlso on the disc
The extended director's cut restores 24 minutes of connective tissue to the 162-minute film, most significantly the last scene of Hollis Mason, the first Nite Owl. Other elements help restore and fill in details that had been in the graphic novel. Fans of the film will be glad for the extra footage but there's nothing momentous that will change anyone's basic like or dislike of the film. The second disc has the documentary "The Phenomenon: The Comic That Changed Comics," 29 min.), which looks at the original graphic novel and its themes, and interviews artist Dave Gibbons, DC Comics executives Jenette Kahn and Paul Levitz, and cast and crew, illustrating its points with scenes from the movie, panels from the graphic novel, and parts of the motion comic. There's also My Chemical Romance's "Desolation Row" music video and the 11 video journals that helped stir up excitement leading up to the theatrical run. No longer available is a Digital Copy of the film (compatible with both iTunes and Windows Media; download code expires July 21, 2010)l. --David Horiuchi
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 492
 Dark, Awesome Superhero Epic November 7, 2009
Stephen B. O'Blenis (Nova Scotia, Canada)
One of the darker and most apocalyptic comic book adaptations yet to make it to screen, Watchmen is a super-powered epic in a dystopian world where the lines between right and wrong have been blurred and danger and doom seem to be closing in on all fronts. It's famous for its darkness and its view of a cynical world, but I think it's going too far to call Watchmen a nihilistic movie. For every look at the broken society it tales place in, every moment of human depravity, and every shade of despair, there's also an unexpectedly bright glimmer of hope, a chance at redemption, or a moment of tender beauty. And of course, it all takes place in an action-pached, visually awesome panorama.
Taking place in an alternate version of 1985 America where superheroes and supervillains have existed since the late 30s and have changed the course of world history (including a quick ending to the Vietnam War that saw Vietnam become the 51st state), Watchmen opens in a dark, cynical world where a nuclear showdown between the U.S. and the Soviet Union seems imminent. Superheroes - except for those acting under the auspices of the U.S. government - have been banned for several years now, although some rogue crimefighters still continue on in the shadows, such as the masked, highly violent vigilante Rorschach (played by Jackie Earl Haley). We see through flashbacks how the relationship of superheroes, the general public, and the government had changed over the decades: originally greeted with great enthusiasm, beating back a crime wave in the 30s and 40s and helping to win World War II; the backlash a few years later including the hate crime murder of the openly lesbian superhero Silhouette and her lover, as well as the locking away of various costumed crimefighters into mental hospitals; the superhero rennaissance in the 1950s with the appearance of the first truly superpowered hero, the godlike Dr. Manhattan (played by Billy Crudup); the formation of the Watchmen with sincere hopes of saving the world; and the twilight of the superhero age with conflicting agendas between the heroes and the government, rifts within the superhero community opening up due in part to the increasingly open hyper-violence of characters like the 'superhero' The Comedian, public panic, and finally the banning of costumed crimefighters. (And this is just the backstory to the main tale!) Which brings us into the movie's present, where Dr. Manhattan is one of the only 'legal' superhumans (who would be difficult to ban even if he weren't working alongside the government - his power surpasses that of the combined might of all the world's conventional and nuclear armies) - and the mentally unbalanced Rorschach leads a brutal one-man war against crime, while possessed of a seering hatred of the very world he's supposedly protecting. And most of the former costumed heroes have simply slipped back into the fabric of society and are leading relatively 'normal' lives, their secret identities still mostly unknown.
Yes, it's difficult in the beginning to tell who the good guys are and who the bad guys are, and to some extent even after the movie's conclusion it's up to the viewer to decide who falls under which heading. It's made somewhat clearer as the flashbacks bring in the long-standing motivations of various characters, as well as their often tragic pasts. In my mind, by movie's end, there actually are some characters who deserve to be filed as true heroes, there are definately some true villains, and there are a lot who straddle that blurry line. The lack of the movie clearly identifying in its early chapters who you're 'supposed' to root for and against ends up as a plus rather than a minus and fits in with Watchmen's somewhat non-linear storytelling.
After Rorschach decides that the death of one of the supposedly retired members of the old Watchmen team was actually a murder, he gets it in his head that someone's coming after all past and present superheroes, and attempts to enlist other former Watchmen to form a resistance. He also seems to feel that this ties in to some grand conspiracy that's going to usher in the end of the world. Largely dismissed as paranoid by his former peers - and with understandable reason given his increasingly erratic and hostile behavior in recent years - later events begin to add credence to at least some of Rorschach's theories. But can he put the remaining members of the Watchmen back together, and if so, will that save the world or somehow destroy it? In the overall story that, with flashbacks, covers years, we see heroes unable to stop the chaos in the world from spinning out of control and nearly go insane from it; we see heroes fall from grace and try to crawl their way back up; we see villains recognize at last the horrors of their own atrocities and attempt to go straight - or do they?; and we see the most powerful being on the planet slowly start losing the ability to relate to humans or to perceive existance in the same way mortals do. In many of its instances Watchmen is as it's been touted - heroes struggling in an uphill battle to make a difference, and not always succeeding. In other cases though it's a case of the Villains doing exactly the same thing - trying to make a difference and not always succeeding. Because in the minds of most (not all) of the movie's real bad guys, they Think that what they're doing is for the greater good. And what's even more potent than having them just all be insane with really twisted views of the world, when you see their reasoning and their goals, it often makes a horrifying kind of sense.
There's more subtext to the movie than could be discussed here. A few random observations - the musical score and the use of various songs fits in absolutely perfectly with the onscreen happenings; the sudden return of two supposedly retired Watchmen to save the trapped inhabitants of a burning skyscraper is one of the most dramatic and awesome movie moments I've ever seen; the physical battles are incredible; the constantly changing patterns on Rorscach's mask are freaky cool; and Malin Akerman as Silk Spectre II is possibly the sexiest super-heroine yet seen on screen.
Watchmen succeeds hugely on multiple levels. It should be noted that though this is a superhero movie, this definately isn't something to get in for your seven year-old Spider-Man/Iron Man fan (those movies are great too, but in a different way). A grand, disturbing and enthralling epic.
I got what I ordered. November 4, 2009
Nicholas J. Sayotovich
Great movie! It was shipped on time and cost me a fraction of what it was going for in the stores! What else do you need to know?
 This Movie Was Much Better Than What the Critics Said! November 2, 2009
Michael A. Newman (New Hyde Park, NY)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
The movie was a little bit dark (the superheroes in this parallel universe literally kill their enemies) but I found it entertaining throughout. The movie starts with the murder of The Comedian, a sometimes hero, most times a nasty bully acting as a hero. He was part of a group of masked adventurers called the Watchmen. Most of the Watchmen were retired but they get together at the funeral and each has their memories of the group that go back to the 1940's.
There is also a "doomsday" clock that slowly moves closer to 12:00. All the television pundits believe that Dr. Manhattan has the answer. Dr. Manhattan is a brilliant scientist who absorbed a huge radiation blast and became a blue skinned mutant that has the ability to alter his size, teleport and split into different bodies. He also seems to parade around naked much of the time and is not modest about full frontal nudity. He is the most powerful of the Watchman and is virtually indestructible.
Throughout the movie, the story is focused on on of the Watchmen's quest to find out who is trying to murder the group members and the dark daliances of the Comedian from him trying to rape another hero, to his brutilization of the Vietnamese during the Viet Nam war including the woman who carries his child.
Nixon plays a big part as he was elected to a third term in this parallel world.
I found the movie very fast paced which is the opposite of what the critics had said and wouldn't mind a sequel if one is in the works.
Watchmen November 2, 2009
Serabily (Saint Albans)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Another gift for the hubby. He is into comic books. Honestly, I thought it was a great movie. Not for children of course. But good.
 The Comedian and Nite Owl II make this movie November 2, 2009
Fry Boy (Orlando, FL USA)
First off, I never read the graphic novel, so I won't be comparing it to the movie or vice versa. Second, I heard that Alan Moore wouldn't even let his graphic-novel writing credit into the movie, which prompted me to do a little digging into Alan Moore. Frankly, he sounds like he'd be a difficult person to live with or be friends with. In fact, he's probably ramping up for next year's Renaissance Fair in Sterling Forest, a supposition based on the photos of him that I've seen, the recent, odd publications he's produced and the biographies I've read about him.
That being said, I came away from "Watchmen" rather impressed. The opening credits are done exceptionally well, presenting a history of the Watchmen group circa 1940 from its inception to its existence in the movie's present day of 1985, with Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are a-Changin'" as the song (which is pretty good, even though I don't generally like Dylan's voice). Later on, there's a fantastic scene where the Comedian and a giant Dr. Manhattan are fighting in the Vietnam War with Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" playing, not to mention a post-war Vietnam bar incident. Wow.
My big issue with "Watchmen" was the sheer ridiculousness of the superhero, which in this film generally constitutes nothing more than a human being running around in a costume fighting for the good old U.S. of A. Some of their names add to the silliness, namely "Silk Spectre" and "Ozymandias." And why does Rorschach's mask have moving bloodstains when his face doesn't? Unexplained.
The Comedian, played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan (from the "Supernatural" TV series), and Nite Owl II, played by Patrick Wilson, are the best characters in the movie. Morgan steals every scene he's in with profane sass and violent behavior. Outstanding job. Wilson's Nite Owl is the kindest superhero of the bunch and, for that reason, is the most likeable. The "Silk Spectre II" character, played by Malin Akerman, also has quite a few redeeming qualities.
Although I'm sure it's all pretty much computer-generated, there's WAY TOO MUCH of Dr. Manhattan's swingin' blue pepe in this movie. I'm surprised no one in the movie--the Comedian, for instance--makes any cracks about it. That would be the first thing I would say: "Hey, Manhattan, could you put some pants on! I don't wanna get poked in the eye, you know."
All in all, the movie is worth watching, but be prepared to be somewhat confused about all the goings on in the movie (i.e. if you haven't read the graphic novel). I had to go back and review a few sections after my first viewing in order to gain some clarity as to who was who and what was what. Plus there were a few impressive scenes I wanted to see again. I think there's so much going on in "Watchmen" that it turned some people off ("Transformers" crowd) and annoyed some fanboys because it couldn't cinematically do enough justice to the heavy, involved storyline. You've really got to stay focused throughout the entire movie to catch every detail.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 492
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