A Director's Cut of a Film Based on a Much-Lauded Graphic Novel
Watchmen (2009) is visually dazzling and creates a memorable dystopia, but it's not all that emotionally involving, and the cast has no charismatic stars. The film is adapted from the most acclaimed of graphic novels and is not nearly as good as its source material. However, the movie is still worth seeing and can serve as an introduction to the book.
Set against the backdrop of the Cold War in an alternate 1985, the story in Watchmen centers on a group of half a dozen costumed vigilantes who go by names like Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson), Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) and Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman). The film opens with the murder of one of the costumed vigilantes, and someone may be trying to kill all of them. Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup) is the only character with superpowers, which he got because of a nuclear accident.
The version of the feature film on the Watchmen 2-disc Special Edition DVD set is billed as a director's cut and is about 24 minutes longer than the theatrical release. It contains perhaps a dozen additional/extended scenes, including more about Rorschach and the depiction of Hollis Mason's death. But the book's Tales of the Black Freighter is not present — it is expected to be integrated into an even longer version of the feature film to be released on home video at some future date. However, if the names in the preceding two sentences aren't already familiar to you, the 2-disc Special Edition may not be right for you, and you should consider just renting the barebones single-disc DVD, which contains the shorter theatrical version of the movie.
Bonus Materials on the DVD Set
The Watchmen 2-disc Special Edition supplies only a few extras.
The best of these is the half-hour "The Phenomenon: The Comic That Changed Comics," which covers the response to and provides some analysis of the film's source material. In 1986-87 DC Comics published a series of 12 issues, each containing one chapter of what was later a 461-page bound book, thus becoming the graphic novel Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. It's a richly textured, complex, discursive, thematically heavy work that eventually received a lot of attention in the mainstream press as something a well-read adult might want to take a look at. Time magazine went so far as to name it one of the 100 best English-language novels of the period 1923 to 2005, along with William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse.
Also on the DVD set are 11 Webisodes with a total runtime of 37 minutes. These are short behind-the-scenes video journal entries that originally appeared on the Internet. One of the most interesting is "Rorschach's Mask."
Another extra is the music video of the band My Chemical Romance performing Bob Dylan's old Cold War song "Desolation Row," which warns of nuclear destruction. In the film, this is heard over the closing credits.
Finally, there's a digital copy of the feature film — although it's the theatrical version rather than the director's cut — which makes it easy to watch the movie on portable devices.
DVD Details
Below I have listed all the details for the 2-disc Special Edition DVD set containing Watchmen.
Release Date: July 21, 2009
Number of Discs: 2
Feature Film Runtime: 3 hours 6 minutes (Director's Cut)
MPAA Rating: R for Strong Graphic Violence, Sexuality, Nudity and Language
Aspect Ratio 2.40:1, Color
English 5.1 Dolby Surround
French Soundtrack (Dubbed in Quebec)
English Captions for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing
Spanish Subtitles
French Subtitles
The Phenomenon: The Comic That Changed Comics (29 min.)
Watchmen: Video Journals (37 min.)
Music Video: "Desolation Row" performed by My Chemical Romance (3 min.)
Digital Copy of Feature Film's Theatrical Version (2 hrs. 42 min.)
