Watchmen : Director's Cut (Blu-ray)
Back in the mid 1980’s, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons introduced the world to an alternate universe where superheroes have have been forced into retirement by the government. Twenty years later, in 2009, the film adaptation was released to become an instant success. With baited breath, fans of the film have eagerly awaited the Director’s Cut of Watchmen. Question is, should you get it?
As with most modern movies that are filmed digitally, the audio and video presentation of the film is very clean and with little to no issues. The picture has no obvious compression artifacts, while the audio is both deep and rich (as one would expect from a DTS-HD track). While the film might be too much of a mature “downer” to show off your home theatre, it’s definitely a perfect presentation.
When you buy the 3 hour 6 minute Blu-ray version Director’s Cut of Watchmen, you get 3 discs in the case. The first disc is the feature film itself with 25 minutes of additional scenes and footage. Basically most of it was originally cut for time, but what was put back in was both interesting and welcomed additional story. A majority of the extras (still gallery, featurettes and commentary) are all rolled into one thing called “Maximum Movie Mode”. During the film, a Picture-in-Picture of an extra will pop-up, but it’s actually a bit more than that. With the featurettes (in 1080p) on that disc, it will show a clip of it in the PiP, but you don’t have to view unless you want to. Same thing goes for the still galleries from the set. If you choose to view a gallery, you can view the pictures at your leisure, with some of the movie score playing in the background. Occasionally original panels from the graphic novel or the director’s storyboards will display, but this is done to compare. The most unique part of this “Maximum Movie Mode” is the commentary by the director, Zack Snyder. A few times, the movie will pull away from you to reveal the director literally pointing out a few things he wants to comment on. It’s an interesting way to provide director’s commentary, but it only happens a handful of times. My guess is that all these features are rolled into one mode since a 3 hour feature length commentary might’ve been too much to ask of the director. The last thing on the first disc is the BD-Live features. As someone who is both a fan of film and a home theatre enthusiast, I eventually get through all the extras of my DVDs & Blu-ray discs. However, BD-Live features have yet to live up to the hype. Normally, I wouldn’t mention the BD-Live features, but during the intro of the disc, Warner made it a point to advertise “community screenings” and submitting your own commentary, so I must comment on it. Most likely due to the DVD/Blu-ray release being so close to this year’s Comic-Con in San Diego, you can chat with the director during one of these “community screenings”. While it’s interesting to see them evolve the BD-Live technology to use your Facebook friends list, there was no sign of it in the BD-Live section. In fact, the only thing we could do in the BD-Live section was download and watch low-res trailers for other Warner Bros films.
The remaining two discs have the less hyped supplemental features. The second disc contains: three featurettes (each roughly 30 mins), the webisodes they released before the film, and the Desolation Row music video by My Chemical Romance. On the third and final regular DVD disc is the digital copy (of the 2 hour 36 minute theatrical version) you can copy to your portable media player.
Right now, you’re wondering if you should get it. I mean, hey, if you get it now you can watch the movie and chat with the movie director on July 25th. Run of the mill fans of the film may want to get this, however I have a warning for die-hard fans. The director’s cut does not contain “Tales of the Black Freighter scenes”. There is a 3 hour 25 minute Ultimate Edition coming out in the fall, said to have the Black Freighter stuff in it. For what it is, I would recommend getting this Blu-ray. For the uber-fan, if you’re reading this after July 25 2009, wait for the Ultimate Edition.
