DVD Review: Watchmen: The Complete Motion Comic

By Cyril Pearl -- Video Business, 3/2/2009

WARNER

Squeezing as much juice as it can out of its hottest property of the year, Warner’s Watchmen motion comic sounds like a great idea and does indeed look pretty nice, but damn, it’s loooooonng! Clocking in at nearly six hours, the Watchmen motion comic takes the panels from the original graphic novel and animates them ever so slightly (sort of like the Marvel cartoons of the late ’60s) into 12 half-hour chapters. The flowing narrative with very little animation moves at a measured pace, but begins to feel deathly slow after the first hour. Also sort of uncool is the voiceover by Tom Stechschulte. He sounds fine when he’s doing narration or male characters, but this definitely doesn’t work when he does the voices of women, children, etc.

Shelf Talk: You don’t need us to tell you that Watchmen is this spring’s most talked-about film, and there is certainly a substantial segment of fans who will jump all over anything that carries the Watchmen logo (including the Warner Premiere title Watchmen: Tales of the Black Freighter and Under the Hood, due on March 24). The program runs nearly six hours, but it’s still a little pricy considering it’s essentially a minimally animated comic book and the standard DVD doesn’t have any substantial supplements.

Action, color, NR (mature themes, violence, language, sexual situations), 351 min., DVD $29.98, BD $34.99
Extras: BD: Watchmen theatrical video journal, BD Live first of Watchmen
Producer: Zack Snyder
First Run: iTunes, July 2008