The Watchmen

I did not know that there was a Watchmen movie coming out until only a few weeks ago. A few years back I picked up the graphic novel and really liked it, so I was excited to see the movie adaptation. This morning I rode my bike over to the movie theater in the Chaeng Wattana Central Mall to see the movie. I went by myself because Tim’s schedule is pretty busy, and I didn’t know when she would be available to see it.

I liked the movie. It’s been almost two years since I read the book, so I don’t remember all the details, but the movie seemed pretty close to what I remember. I thought that they did a good job casting the characters, and Dr. Manhattan was done really well.
The movie was almost three hours long but it didn’t seem to go on and on. It was quite like The Dark Knight, where I was completely oblivious to the time, but it certainly didn’t drag on.

The premise of the story is not as advent guard as it was when the book was published in 1985. While the book will go down as one of the seminal works in comic book history, the movie will not achieve that status for films. The idea of a “darker” hero is a lot more common place now than it was then. Perhaps the reason that the movie is not as cutting edge as the book is because the book inspired similar works in the intervening twenty-four years.

My comparison to the comic is not to diminish the movie. It is a very good movie and I enjoyed watching it. It does contain a lot of violence, nudity and a few sex scenes, so it’s not appropriate for children.

Of course, when seeing a movie in Thailand, the movie itself is only part of the story. I was running late when I got to the mall, but I knew that the movies always started fifteen or twenty minutes after the stated start time. When I arrived at the mall, however, it was ten minutes past the start time, so I had to hurry a bit.

I went to the ticket counter to purchase a ticket. Here in Thailand, you actually pick your seat for the movie. There are different prices based on the location of the seats. The very back row of most theaters have a love-seat style chair made for two. While it is nice to be able to pick a seat when you purchase it, it does tend to slow the process down. I’ve been in line before behind people who just couldn’t find that perfect seat.

This time there was no one in front of me in line. The clerk pulled up the screen and showed me the available seats. There was not one seat marked occupied. I pointed to the row in the back and told him that I wanted to buy one seat there. He told me that I had to buy those in pairs. Those seats were about six dollars each, while the next row was five dollars apiece. I was not going to pay twelve dollars to sit in the back row. I thought that they might sell me one seat in the back row since the movie was going to start in less than five minutes and the theater was completely empty. They would have made an extra dollar on the bargain. Wisely, I decided to let it go, because all I would have gotten for my efforts was frustrated.

While I usually watch what I eat, I have a bit of a weakness for caramel popcorn. The first concession stand is open, but the clerk walked in the back room, so I went to the next one. At this point, I knew that I was pushing the time, since the movie was going to start soon. I ordered the special, a large popcorn, drink and a Watchmen clock for six dollars. Mind you, I am the only customer at the counter. The clerk starts to fill my order, and then for some reason starts getting distracted by other things. It took three or four minutes to put the popcorn in the bag and fill the drink cup.

I was starting to get a bit impatient, and was ready to walk away from the counter. Finally they gave me all my stuff, and I handed them a five hundred baht bill. That is equivalent to about fifteen dollars. She looks at the bill, looks at the change drawer, and starts heading for the back room. I pull out my wallet, and saw that I had almost exact change, so I yell to her “excuse me, excuse me”. The guy working saw that I had smaller bills out and called her back. I gave her one hundred and sixty baht for the one hundred and fifty-nine baht charge. She pulls out a plastic wrapped pack of one baht coins and starts struggling to open it. After about twenty seconds with no visible progress, I decided that I did not want to miss part of the movie for one baht (about three cents) so I said don’t worry about it in Thai and went to the theater.

I got to my seat with about two minutes to spare. I actually got there after the King’s anthem, so I was really pushing it.
In Thailand, they sometimes edit the movies by blurring certain parts. I don’t want to spoil the movie for anyone, so if you absolutely don’t want to know anything that happens in the movie, you should stop reading.

During one scene, one of the heroes attacks someone with a cleaver, striking him in the head. The censors blurred out the parts where the cleaver struck the head. Later in the movie, however, they did not censor a character sawing off someone’s hands with a power tool. They left in parts where people were shot in the head and you could clearly see the bullet hole. I’m really not sure of their criteria.

One of the main characters of the story is Dr. Manhattan, a hero who gained the power to manipulate time and space through accidental exposure to radiation. He takes the shape of a blue human. Dr. Manhattan is frequently naked during the film. When they showed a frontal shot of him naked, his private parts were blurred. I’m not sure if that’s the Thai censors, or whether it was that way in the film. I don’t think that Dr. Manhattan has the same problem as Barbie’s Ken, but I just don’t recall from the comic book.

Despite the added entertainment of the Thai workers and censors, I did enjoy the movie.