Watchmen - The Guardians

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Movie
German title Watchmen - The Guardians
Original title Watchmen
WatchmenBloodySmiley.png
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 2009
length Theatrical version:
163 minutes
Director’s Cut :
187 minutes
Ultimate Cut :
215 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
JMK 16
Rod
Director Zack Snyder
script David Hayter ,
Alex Tse
production Lawrence Gordon ,
Lloyd Levin ,
Deborah Snyder
music Tyler Bates
camera Larry Fong
cut William Hoy
occupation
synchronization

Watchmen - The Guardians (Original title: Watchmen ) is a superhero film based on the comic novel of the same name by author Alan Moore and illustrator Dave Gibbons and directed by Zack Snyder from 2009 .

action

The film takes place according to the comic book in 1985 in an alternative world , a. distinguished by the appearance of the vigilante Minutemen and later the Watchmen . The difference is particularly clear due to Richard Nixon's third term as President of the United States of America, and the fact that the United States emerged victorious in the Vietnam War thanks to a superhuman being on its side. As a result, the threat of a nuclear end of the world has increased considerably.

Various well-known historical events are shown in a modified form in the opening credits. The bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima during World War II was not named Enola Gay , but instead named Miss Jupiter, based on the superhero Silk Specter . The nurse in the famous VJ Day photo in Times Square is not kissed by a sailor, but by the lesbian superhero silhouette , who is later found slaughtered together with the nurse by a fanatic in a motel room. The assassination attempt on John F. Kennedy was carried out by the superhero The Comedian . The Vietnam War protest event made famous by Bernie Boston's Flower Power photo , at which demonstrators put flowers into the gun barrels of the National Guards, is the Kent State massacre , in which fire was opened on the demonstrators. Andy Warhol uses the superhero Nite Owl instead of the motif of Marilyn Monroe for his famous Marilyn Diptych . Neil Armstrong actually speaks the words " Good Luck, Mr. Gorsky " during the moon landing and is supported by the superhero Dr. Filmed Manhattan. Because President Richard Nixon repealed the provisions of the 22nd Amendment to the United States Constitution , he was re-elected for a third term as President of the United States . Many other events, which are explained in more detail in the template, are also summarized in the opening credits.

The Minutemen formed in the late 1930s - in response to masked criminals - as a group of masked individuals who went on the hunt for criminals. In 1940 the group consisted of Silhouette, Mothman, Captain Metropolis, Nite Owl, Dollar Bill, The Comedian, Silk Specter and Hooded Justice. A few decades later, a new group based on the model of the Minutemen , called the Watchmen , was formed. In 1977, President Nixon's Keene Decree made vigilantism illegal, forcing the criminal hunters to either work for the government or to quit. Meanwhile, Dollar Bill and Silhouette have been murdered, Mothman admitted to a mental hospital, and Silk Specter suffers from alcoholism .

October 12, 1985: Edward Blake (The Comedian), the 67-year-old superhero from the very beginning and who has worked for the government since 1977, is ambushed by a stranger in his apartment in New York City and struck after a fight killed the window. The police assume a robbery, but Rorschach , one of only two superheroes still active, takes a closer look at the crime scene and assumes a targeted murder by a perpetrator who knew the superhero's secret identity and is targeting the Watchmen Has. He investigates his suspicions and keeps a diary. Rorschach seeks Daniel Dreiberg ( Nite Owl II ) in his apartment (who had just visited his predecessor Hollis Mason, the old Nite Owl) to warn him about the murderer. Dreiberg then visits Adrian Veidt ( Ozymandias ) in his office, who was the only one besides Hollis Mason (Nite Owl) to reveal his identity to the public. Veidt is considered the smartest person in the world and made a fortune selling Watchmen fan articles, among other things.

The next day, Rorschach invades the Rockefeller Military Research Center to get in touch with Jon Osterman ( Dr. Manhattan ) and Laurie Jupiter ( Silk Specter II ). Dr. Manhattan already knows, but his view of the future is blocked by unknown interference, and before Rorschach meets Dr. Manhattan can continue to discuss, he will be teleported back out of the area. On the site of the military research center, Dr. Manhattan to develop a source of energy that should function in the same way as his body. Together with Adrian Veidt (Ozymandias), he hopes to be able to end wars, as this will eliminate the struggle for scarce energy resources.

Rorschach finds out that on the day of the comedian's funeral, his archenemy Edgar Jacobi (Moloch) also came to the grave, whereupon he visits Moloch. He tells Rorschach that the comedian visited him drunk and without a mask a week before his death and told him confused stories. At the same time, Laurie Jupiter (Silk Specter II) is dissatisfied with her relationship with Jon (Dr. Manhattan). She feels neglected by his increasing spiritualization and the constant immersion in his work. After he works on the reactor during the sexual act by duplicating his body and then teleporting it to Adrian Veidt in Antarctica , she leaves him and seeks the vicinity of Daniel.

On a television program, Jon (Dr. Manhattan) is confronted with the fact that numerous people who have been near him have developed cancer. Including his former colleague at the Gila Flats research center, Wally Weaver (who died of cancer in 1981), his government contact General Anthony Randolph and Edgar Jacobi (Moloch). After Jon makes the emotionless statement that a living and a dead body contain the same number of particles, so death would make no structural difference, and then his ex-girlfriend Janey Slater appears, who is also suffering from cancer and blames him for it , there is a commotion in the television studio Jon teleports himself to Mars and remembers how he fell in love with his physicist colleague Janey Slater as a 30-year-old in July 1959 and the accident at the Center for Intrinsic Field Research happened a month later.

After President Nixon Dr. Manhattan asked to intervene in Vietnam, the US won the Vietnam War a week later through the superhero's mighty powers. Hollis Mason published his autobiographical book Under the Hood , marking the appearance of Dr. Manhattan as the beginning of the superhero era. In September 1970, Dr. Manhattan know and love the young Silk Specter II, whereupon Janey Slater leaves him.

In the meantime, Lee Iacocca appears in Adrian Veidt's office along with other senior company managers. They accuse him that his idea of ​​free energy for all is socialism and that a public inquiry would be necessary to investigate possible contacts between Veidt and communists . Veidt explains his admiration for Alexander the great and his idea of ​​a united world and that he considers fossil fuels and atomic energy to be drugs of mankind and the company managers present for drug dealers. Suddenly a delivery man appears and tries to shoot Veidt, but instead Iacocca is fatally hit. Veidt is able to overpower the assassin, but before he can be questioned, he dies from a cyanide poison capsule.

Rorschach finds out that the assassin was a certain Roy Chess who worked for the company Pyramid Transnational , from which Jacobi also receives a pension. When he visits Jacobi, he realizes too late that he has fallen into a trap, because Jacobi has a bullet in the head and the police, who have already been informed, think he is the murderer. He is arrested and the secret of his identity is revealed. Rorschach, who has now been exposed as Walter Kovacs, is attacked in prison, whereupon he seriously injures the attacker and he later dies. In his cell he is threatened, among other things, by the criminal Big Figure, whom he had brought to prison.

Dan and Laurie start an affair while Jon is on Mars. Since Dan suffers from potency problems, they decide to slip back into their old disguises despite the ban and take off with their Archie aircraft. In the event of a high-rise fire, you can evacuate the trapped fire victims from the building at the last second. This sense of achievement solves Dan's potency problem. It also encourages both of them to free Rorschach from prison. In the meantime, an uprising has broken out in which Rorschach is said to be killed. He can fight off his attackers and flees with Dan and Laurie. When all three have returned to their shelter, Jon is already waiting there for Laurie and teleports with her to Mars to talk to her. She learns that her father is the comedian and that he tried to rape her mother, the first Silk Specter. Later, however, both fathered Laurie by mutual agreement. She asks Jon to protect the earth from nuclear destruction.

Meanwhile, Dan and Rorschach find out that Jon's ex-girlfriend Janey Slater also worked for Pyramid Transnational . On Veidt's computer, they then find a hint that this is one of Adrian Veidt's companies and that Veidt is behind everything. They fly to his laboratory in Antarctica, where he reveals to them that the only way to prevent the nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the US is to create a reason for rapprochement. He wants to achieve this by building fusion bombs with the energy signature of Dr. Manhattan ignites. An agreement between the two superpowers based on the fear of further alleged attacks by Dr. Manhattan come about. Veidt thinks it is a necessary crime to kill a few millions in order to save billions of people. The superheroes cannot prevent Veidt from detonating the bombs.

When Dr. Manhattan shows up and wants to intervene, Veidt turns on the television. President Nixon is delivering a speech announcing close cooperation with the Soviet Union in order to meet Dr. Protect Manhattan. Dr. Manhattan understands Veidt's actions and wants to keep the true background secret from the world in order not to endanger the peace agreement between the superpowers. But Rorschach is upset because he doesn't want to live with this lie. He sets out to inform the world of the real cause of the attacks. Rorschach's attitude never to compromise, not even in the face of the end of the world, and the consequences of exposing Veidt bring Dr. Manhattan to kill Rorschach. He then leaves Earth and travels to another galaxy. Laurie and Dan are committed.

The last scene shows a New Frontiersman newspaper employee finding Rorschach's diary, in which he recorded the entire results of his investigation, in the mail.

Origin and production

This is a model of the Archie aircraft exhibited at Comic Con 2008

After the first Watchmen comics were published in 1986, producers Lawrence Gordon and Lloyd Levin planned the cinematic implementation with the support of 20th Century Fox . An attempt was made to hire Alan Moore for the script, but failed because of his view that the story was unsuitable for filming: "We have used stylistic devices that only work in the comic medium, but not as a novel or film." Sam Hamm won for the implementation, who was also able to deliver a first draft of the script on September 9, 1988. But the high calculated budget of 120 million US dollars was the reason that Fox turned away from the project. Warner Bros. recognized the opportunity and now acquired the rights to the film. Terry Gilliam set to work on Hamm's script and Joel Silver pledged a $ 40 million budget. But since Gilliam's previous work, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen , flopped at the box office , Silver withdrew his funding commitment. Also because of the complex story with its innumerable plot lines and elaborate images, the film was not considered feasible for the next few years. At the end of 2001 Gordon and Loyd were able to win Universal Studios over for the implementation. David Hayter was responsible for the script and direction and was able to present his adaptation of the comic in July 2003. In October 2003, however, the collaboration with Universal Studios failed and the producers moved with Hayter and the finished script to Revolution Studios, which they left again in July 2004. Now the rights were with Paramount Pictures and Darren Aronofsky was chosen as director. Since this was not available due to obligations for his film The Fountain , Paul Greengrass was hired . Greengrass was already busy with the preparations for the production in London in June 2005, so the project should also be canceled by Paramount Pictures for financial reasons. Gordon and Levin, still interested in a conversion, then tried again to bring the film to 20th Century Fox, but failed and finally found a studio with Warner Bros in late 2005, which accepted support. However, Paramount did not completely surrender the rights, but secured a 25% stake. This time they won Zack Snyder for the directing assignment, who had already made a name for himself with the filming of 300.

The film was shot in British Columbia , mostly in Vancouver . Few scenes were actually shot in New York City .

Author Alan Moore had already declared in the late 1980s that he thought his graphic novel could not be filmed. With Watchmen , the author wanted to show what advantages the comic medium has over cinema. Alan Moore was always against the filming and did not help Zack Snyder with the implementation. In an interview with Spiegel Online , Zack Snyder stated: He [Alan Moore] has forbidden any contact. I tried to speak to him one time or another, but had to bow to the circumstances. Fortunately, we had the other half of the Watchmen team on board with the artist Dave Gibbons. When asked whether he suffered from it, Snyder said: It hurts too! Maybe that's why we made the film as true to the original as possible. To make up for his absence.

In an interview with the British comic magazine Tripwire , Alan Moore reiterated his aversion to the film and made it clear that he would never see the film. ( I'm never going to watch this fucking thing. )

Differences to the comic template

Overall, the film sticks very closely to the original, but deviates significantly in some points from the narrative of the comic.

In the first chapter of the comic, Adrian Veidt is visited by Rorschach to inform him of the comedian's death and his "mask killer theory". In this dialogue, a profound psychological picture of the two characters and their disgust for each other is drawn. This key scene does not appear in the film. There it is Dreiberg (Nite Owl) who visits Veidt and has a rather friendly conversation with him.

The film version is more explicit, especially when it comes to depicting violence and sex. Fights are portrayed as bloody and brutal. The characters are portrayed less as costumed people than as superheroes with superhuman powers. The sex between Nite Owl and Silk Specter is concretely portrayed in the film, while it is only hinted at in the comic.

The most significant difference between film and comic is the ending of the story. Instead of Ozymandias faking an invasion by evil aliens from a parallel universe, he makes Dr. Manhattan directly to the scapegoat through brutal annihilation attacks against many metropolises on earth, or more appropriately: to the supposedly greatest threat to humanity. He gives the impression that Dr. Manhattan would have grown tired of humanity and now wants to destroy it. The basic idea that Dr. Manhattan and the surviving Watchmen in both versions accept the logic of these extreme mass sacrifices, but are not affected by it, even reinforced.

In a key scene in which Rorschach kills the kidnapper and murderer of a girl, the girl admits his act, whereas in the comic he denies it to the end, even if the evidence Rorschach finds in his house means that he is guilty of him Reader is presented very convincingly. Rorschach's merciless cold-bloodedness towards criminals is also clearer in the comic: He throws a saw at the child murderer in order to saw off his arm and thus freed from his handcuffs to be able to leave the burning house.

The graphic novel also has an omitted subplot of a fictional pirate comic that looks unusually morbid and brutal and is supposed to be an example of a trend on this alternative earth (but included in the Ultimate Cut). Large fragments of it were repeatedly inserted into the narrative. For the actual plot, however, it is generally meaningless. Only related scenes at a newspaper kiosk in Manhattan are still hinted at in the film; also in the context of the explosions that destroy the kiosk owner and a boy who visits him constantly.

In several places in the film the phrase “Who watches the Watchmen?” Can be seen, to which the title of the comic novel also refers. In the comics, however , Watchmen is not used as the name of a superhero group. The sentence is based on the saying of the ancient Roman satirical poet Juvenal : Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Satires, VI 347 f .: "But who should guard the guards themselves?" - translation by Joachim Adamietz )

Soundtrack

The soundtrack Watchmen - Music from the Motion Picture was released by Reprise Records . It contains the following titles:

However, the film's full soundtrack also includes other tracks that are missing from the CD:

publication

The world premiere took place on February 23, 2009 in London. The cinema release in German-speaking countries was on March 5, 2009, in Great Britain, Canada and the United States on March 6, 2009. The production costs of the film were estimated at 130 million US dollars. The film grossed around 185 million US dollars in cinemas worldwide, including around 107 million US dollars in the US and 5.3 million US dollars in Germany.

The “Ultimate Cut” will appear for the first time on December 5, 2019 at Paramount in German stores - on Blu-ray and Ultra HD Blu-ray. The Ultimate Cut was previously released on November 22, 2019 in two different exclusive 4-disc media books in collaboration with Nameless Media, each limited to 500 copies.

Awards (selection)

In 2010 the film won the Saturn Award in four categories , including: a. with as best fantasy film . There were nominations in five other categories.

Composer Tyler Bates won the BMI Film Music Award in 2009 .

reception

The film journalist Gregor Wossilus states whether the blunt brutality of some scenes is that the film is "anything but light cinema fare and in any case only for adults". In an interview, director Zack Snyder said of the portrayal of violence: “But I wanted to go too far, I wanted exactly this excessive violence. Nothing is worse than this everyday violence in action films, released from the age of 13, in which nobody is really injured or nobody dies. I find that dangerous, especially for the kids. But I want to get to the point where the viewer catches himself enjoying the most terrible scenes and wondering if something is wrong with him. Then it gets really interesting, then maybe he thinks about all the other violence that he just consumes as entertainment in other films. "

“The film adaptation of the comic dismantles the conventions of the superhero genre by allowing the broken characters a lot of time to develop and just as rigorously denying simple good-bad schemes as a stable identification figure. All in all, the film remains piecemeal: Between atmospherically dense noir scenes and furious assembly sequences, the staging repeatedly slips into sensational clichés and explicit scenes of violence. "

- Lexicon of international film

“The film struggles from episode to episode. Snyder seems to have noticed this himself and keeps adding fight scenes, which he underlines with fast beats - the sexiness of pure speed, tried and tested a thousand times in superhero films. The consistency is sacrificed for this: Rorschach's partner Nite Owl was just obese and impotent, but suddenly he can beat a whole gang of well-trained prison inmates. These combat insoles are not just ready-made goods at Watchmen , they are out of place. Alan Moore's message that violence doesn't create morality falls by the wayside. One scene makes this particularly clear: Rorschach bestially kills a child murderer - in the comic there is no one hundred percent certainty that the man was really the murderer, in the film the suspect admits the crime. A tiny change with a meaningful statement. [...] Such changes make the film version close to a dull vigilante ideology. "

- Martin Zeyn - The daily newspaper

“It's a dark time that Alan Moore conjures up in his groundbreaking comic book Watchmen , an intricate fantasy of what the world of the early 1980s might be like had the previous decade followed the laws of classic superhero comics. [...] Snyder spreads out almost all of the motifs of the meandering original in a stately 160 minutes, which only become a bit tough in the second half. His film is an astonishingly cinematic puzzle from comic and cultural history, in which there is enough space for William Paley's watchmaker god and peace pharaoh Ramses II next to Nietzsche's superman . That Snyder has to philosophize a little with the fantasy hammer at the end is probably in the nature of things. "

- Michael Kohler - Frankfurter Rundschau

“Snyder's new work will also be received controversially. Because like 300 , Watchmen is repulsively brutal: in the close-up, legs and arms break, heads are made to a pulp with a cleaver and pregnant women are mercilessly shot. "

- Wolf Von Dewitz - Der Tagesspiegel

"The broken America, which is facing the atomic apocalypse, is perfectly represented by Snyder in his film version. [...] This is exactly how the all-round successful title sequence of the film works [...] But unfortunately director Snyder fails in the most difficult and most important aspect of his film. [...] The ending, which is different from the comic, makes the film fail for good. Not because it's different from the comic, but because it's a cynical clean-up of mass murder and a glorification of its absurdly ugly face. And even the fact that Snyder 'matrixed' the down-to-earth fighting sequences in the comic with kung fu acrobatics runs counter to the characters and shows that the director has more love for supermen than for humans. "

- Jakob Schmidt - Jungle World

“As an almost three-hour dark superhero meta-epic, Watchmen is not exactly bad - a lot about it works, some impresses, at least as long as you see it as a mere entertainment cinema. But everything that is good about the film is not a product of one's own reflective performance, but is traced. What little of his own - Snyder also cultivates his fetish for slow-motion dynamics in skirmishes - seems rather insignificant. […] It's a constant talking point, a constant nod towards the comic book: Look here, look here, see this, see this - a fabulous in pictures, which, in contrast to the original, every riddle, every allusion in favor the mere presence of the expected was thoroughly expelled. "

- Thomas Groh - pearl divers

Web links

Commons : Watchmen  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Watchmen The Watchter . In: BFI .
  2. ↑ a b Watchmen - Die Wächter (2009) - average report (comparative versions: theatrical version / director's cut) . Schnittberichte.com . Retrieved January 12, 2016.
  3. ↑ Watchmen - Die Wächter (2009) - average report (comparative versions: Director's Cut / Ultimate Cut) . Schnittberichte.com. Retrieved January 12, 2016.
  4. ↑ Release certificate for Watchmen - The Guardians . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , February 2009 (PDF; test number: 116 982 K).
  5. ↑ Age rating for Watchmen - The Guardians . Youth Media Commission .
  6. ↑ dramaking.de ( memento of March 22, 2009 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on March 20, 2009
  7. ↑ sf-fan.de , accessed on March 20, 2009
  8. ↑ Jonathan Crocker: (February 2009). Hero Complex. Total Film: Pages 52–59, accessed March 20, 2009
  9. ^ Latimes.com , Los Angeles Times, accessed November 17, 2008
  10. ↑ Interview with Zack Snyder on spiegel.de
  11. ↑ techland.time.com
  12. ↑ boxofficemojo.com
  13. ↑ Watchmen ULTIMATE CUT - Germany premiere - exclusively in Mediabook | Avengement - EXCLUSIVE in Mediabook - UNCUT | Gloomy Legends 1 & 2 - UNCUT. In: nameless-media.de. November 15, 2019, accessed November 28, 2019.
  14. ↑ Nameless Media markets "Watchmen - Ultimate Cut" on Blu-ray in two limited media books. In: bluray-disc.de. November 8, 2019, accessed November 28, 2019.
  15. ^ Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films, USA . In: IMDb . IMDb.com, Inc., June 24, 2010, accessed on May 20, 2016 (English, Won: Best Costume, Best Fantasy Film, Best DVD Special Edition, Best DVD Release; Nominated: Best Supporting Actress, Best Director, Best Writing , Best Special Effects, Best Production Design).
  16. ↑ Page no longer available , search in web archives: Comic book adaptation: Watchmen - die Wächter ; br-online.de@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.br-online.de
  17. ↑ spiegel-online.de "Watchmen" director Snyder: "I wanted this excessive violence"
  18. ↑ Watchmen - The Guardians. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  19. ↑ Film review Stand above the law
  20. ^ Rorschach test film review
  21. ^ Watchmen film review
  22. ↑ Film review What are a few million lives?
  23. ^ Film review Perlentaucher