Format: 

Blu-ray

Movies Included: 

Watchmen (The Ultimate Cut)

Movies Included: 

Watchmen: The Complete Motion Comic

Publisher: 

Warner Bros.

Release Date: 

11.10.2009

MSRP: 

$59.99

Number of Discs: 

4

Digital Copy: 

Yes

The Movies

Watchmen (The Ultimate Cut)

We’ve gotten the theatrical cut and the Director’s Cut, and now we have the Ultimate Cut. The Director’s Cut of Watchmen added in scenes that were left out of the theatrical version not because they didn’t fit but because they simply made the film too long for Warner Bros. to be comfortable releasing it to theaters. It is indeed a better version of the movie. The Ultimate Cut includes everything in the Director’s Cut plus the animated Tales of the Black Freighter, inserted throughout. The Watchmen graphic novel had this story as a comic within the comic. It is about an eighteenth-century sailor whose vessel is attacked by the Black Freighter pirate ship. He sets out first to save his family from the ship, then to get revenge. As his story progresses, he becomes more and more deluded in his quest for vengeance until the plot reaches its tragic climax. This sub-comic tied in beautifully to Watchmen, paralleling the heroes’ stories both imagistically and thematically.

This part of the comic was left out of both the theatrical and Director’s cuts. Now, in the Ultimate Cut, the filmmakers have gone back and inserted Black Freighter throughout Watchmen, much in the same way that it appeared in the original comic. However, it does not work as well. It suffers a number of problems, none of which are detrimental on their own, but when they are combined, they make for a distinctly flawed viewing experience.

To begin with, when Black Freighter is first introduced, it comes out of nowhere. We’re watching the normal events of Watchmen, and after a fade-out, we’re suddenly watching a cartoon. There is no sense even that it’s supposed to be a sub-reality to the film’s main plot; rather, it seems like the animated segment of Kill Bill, just another part of the movie that is, for stylistic reasons, animated. Once we do learn that it is a comic within the movie, it works slightly better but still does not mesh well. Whereas in Watchmen the comic, there were numerous visual and dialogical tie-ins with the Black Freighter panels and the events of the “real” world, in this movie there are only a handful. In the end it is unnecessary, and thirty total minutes of unnecessary is never a good thing – especially when the movie (the Director’s Cut) was already three-hours long.

As for Watchmen as a whole, it is still a great movie, though it is now flawed by the Black Freighter segments. Check out our full review of the non-Ultimate version of Watchmen here.

Watchmen: The Complete Motion Comic

Watchmen: The Complete Motion Comic is a semi-animated form of the original comic, covering the entire work essentially panel-for-panel and using the illustrations from the comic. As such, this movie is a doozy, clocking in at nearly five and a half hours. Overall, this is an okay work, mostly because it is an almost exact interpretation of the comic, but it suffers from a few distracting problems. The first of these problems is its length, which makes it practically impossible to sit through. Coming in a close second is its voice acting, which is performed entirely by Tom Stechschulte. Stechschulte does an adequate job with some of the characters, even the more idiosyncratic ones like Dr. Manhattan and Rorschach, but with others he falls flat. Case in point: the female characters, which sound ridiculous and occasionally laughable. Add to that the fact that Stechschulte’s voice often undergoes little change when switching from one character to another, and you’ve got a bad voice track on your hands. The story, of course, is amazing, but in the end, there’s really no reason for this adaptation to exist. You’re much better off either reading the comic or watching the real movie.