The Watchmen and the 80s.

Today we saw The Watchmen in Orinda. My first reaction is that it was just like I expected. Apart from the fact that I wonder if bodies really hit things that loudly (and if they had the volume inexplicably turned too loud for my approaching-30-year-old ears), it was basically just what I expected from a film that very faithfully follows the look and feel of the graphic novel. The violence that made me avert my eyes more times than I can count, but I knew that going in - the filmmakers reproduced images I recognized, as gruesome as they were in the novel.

The only question I had - and this hadn't occurred to me before - was "where was AIDS?" In this alternative world of 1985 where Richard Nixon was still president and half-naked blue men wander the cosmos, I wouldn't normally ask the question. But several cemetery shots featured an angel very closely matching the angel statue in Angels in America. I suppose in the landscape of impending nuclear doom, maybe AIDS didn't make the radar in the same way. It was a curious omission that might have enhanced the dramatic feel of the film. They did, after all, alter Sally Jupiter's (that's Laurel "Silk Spectre"'s mother) hairdo to look more realistic than the novel.

Maybe I'm being nitpicky, but it was almost as if the filmmakers wanted me to ask. Or maybe I'm overly sensitized to angels statues. I don't know if the film was particularly good or bad, but it was impressively faithful to the novel, which was kind of cool.

One last thing: during the flashback scene where Mr. Manhattan remembers how he first appeared in the lunchroom of the lab, a woman in her 60s sitting behind us whispered loudly to her companion "There's the blue penis!"