One of my mates who I dragged along to film has just told me he has now bought the book after loving the film, and I just felt the need to express my joy on the subject to the internet, thankyou for listening
Yeah it's having a wonderful domino effect in my workplace too. A good mate of mine who wasn't really big into comics until when I recently lent him Dark Knight Returns has come away from the film looking to buy Watchmen and borrow my copies of V For Vendetta, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen et al. Great stuff. Then again, one guy at my work thinks it's one of the worst films he ever saw. So, horses for courses!
Stunning. Saw it tonight, was totally empty in the cinema - yay. Seriously blown away by it, the whole film is just superb.
Apart from me, three other people in the cinema this afternoon when I saw it... Spoiler One thing that really dragged the entire film down was the amount of time I had to spend staring at that blue penis... God.
I saw it last week at the Mancs Imax and it was awesome. The ending was even better than the book imo. Mankz: Can't you cope with a bit of wang on screen? I didn't even notice it in most of the scenes tbh.
In the book, wasn't Rorschach's mask just a piece of cloth with a pattern on it? I don't remember it changing like it did in the film.
No, it was made from fibres designed using technology available thanks to Dr Manhattan, the dress itself shifted like in the film, and Rorschach made his mask from it
Not really an easy thing to convey in still pictures though is it? Except by changing the pattern in every single frame. Oh wait...
naked dave is right. everyone else, give yourself a slap. rorshach worked in a tailor's for a while. his mask is made from a custom dress that never got picked up - customer thought it was ugly. it's made of a chemical sandwiched between fabric. always shifting, never mixing to grey.
...eh? i said always shifting, never mixing curses! you're right. wikipedia: A few weeks before her murder in front of an apartment, a woman with an Italian name ordered a dress from him, made of a fabric created by Doctor Manhattan that used two pressure and heat-sensitive liquids suspended between a layer of latex to create black-on-white shifting color patterns, "always changing, never mixing into grey".
Went to see this last night and thought it was absolutely awesome! I read the book first, which definately made it better, although my girlfriend enjoyed it without reading it first. I think I might go and see it again when I can convince more people they need to see it. Also when I went to the cinema I saw a poster for Dave Gibbons giving a talk about Watchmen at my local library in St Albans (which is where he's from). There's a little more info here if any other people nearby are interested. I got my ticket today and there were plenty left.
I have to agree. Although the alien squid was one hell of a Deus ex Machina, the idea that Dr. Manhattan, who has an increasingly detached relationship to the world of human mortals would even care enough one way or the other to intervene so incisively in its fate does not quite work for me. You can never have too much penis. So I've been told. It was in fact two layers of cloth with a heat and pressure sensitive liquid sandwiched inbetween. Rorschach took it from a dress that had been ordered from the tailor's he worked at, but it had been returned because the customer did not like it. He was just mucking around with the material at first (found a way to cut it with a heated scissors and weld the edges shut with a soldering iron) but it later was inspired to use it for his mask. Two insights led up to this decision: Spoiler 1. The lady who ordered the dress was Kitty Genovese, a young woman who was raped and stabbed to death near her home while 38 people looked on but did nothing because "they did not want to get involved". This does, in fact, refer to a true story (although it is a bit aphocryphal). Rorschach mentions this event to the prison psychiatrist (when he is in lock-up) as one of the determining events that defined his worldview and motivated him to become a vigilante. 2. Rorschach describes to the psychiatrist his first kill, in 1975, when he investigated the kidnapping of Blair Roche, a young girl. His investigations brought him to an abandoned dressmaker's shop. After finding the remains of a young child's blanket in the shop, a heavily used cutting board, and noticing two guard dogs chewing on a human bone, he realized to his profound horror what had happened: the kidnapper, realising that the girl's parents in fact had only their last name in common with the Roche millionaire family, murdered the girl, dismembered her body, and fed the pieces to his dogs. He claims that this was the moment when he stopped "pretending to be Rorschach", and fully became Rorschach. He takes justice into his own hands and kills the dogs, and then sets the house on fire with Grice handcuffed to a pipe and still alive inside, leaving him with a hacksaw. The hacksaw was not strong enough to cut through the handcuffs in the little time Rorschach would give him, but would allow Grice to amputate his handcuffed limb to escape. Grice perished in the ensuing fire. Rorschach then says: "Born from oblivion; bear children, hell-bound as ourselves; go into oblivion... There is nothing else. This rudderless world is not shaped by metaphysical forces. It is not god who kills our children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. Its us, only us... streets stank of fire, the void breathed on my heart, turning its illusions to ice, shattering them... was reborn then free to scrawl own design on this morally blank world... was Rorschach" Thus the ever-changing Rorschach-like pattern on his mask reflects the human propensity to impose shape and meaning upon chaos and randomness --but in the end, it is still chaos and randomness. Rorschach's mask is the abyss gazing back at us. Oh, and sorry for editing the title. As E.L.L. Ambiance said, it just had to be done...
