Watchmen: Chapter 1, 2024.
Directed by Brandon Vietti.
Featuring the voice talents of Kelly Hu, Katee Sackhoff, Adrienne Barbeau, Grey Griffin, Titus Welliver, Matthew Rhys, Troy Baker, Jeffrey Combs, Yuri Lowenthal, Kari Wahlgren, Phil LaMarr, Dwight Schultz, Geoff Pierson, Michael Cerveris, Corey Burton, Jason Spisak, John Marshall Jones, Rick D. Wasserman, and Max Koch.
SYNOPSIS:
Watchmen: Chapter 1, which debuted in digital form a couple weeks ago, arrives on physical media with this 4K Ultra HD disc from Warner Bros. The film looks great, of course, given the fact that the animation was CGI, but it’s a bummer that the bonus features don’t dig any deeper than a pair of short featurettes. You get a code for a digital copy too.
I previously wrote about Watchmen: Chapter 1 when the digital version of the film was released a couple weeks ago. You can check out my review to get my thoughts in more detail, but I’ll run down a quick summary for you:
Overall, this is a pretty faithful adaptation of the classic comic book series (and my favorite comic ever) by writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons, with an art style that’s pretty close to the comic book and voice acting that’s in line with what I expected.
However, Watchmen: Chapter 1 clocks in at a mere 78 minutes, so it feels a bit rushed, without many opportunities to catch your breath before the next plot point happens. Given the expansive world that Moore created, it seems like a missed opportunity not to spend time exploring it the way the comic book does, especially with the supplemental material at the end of each issue.
Speaking of world building, that’s the subject of the first of two very short featurettes included on this disc. Titled Dave Gibbons and Watchmen: Worldbuilding, it runs just over nine minutes and features DC Comics Chief Creative Officer Jim Lee, editor Barbara Kesel, Gibbons, director Brandon Vietti, and others looking back at the comic book series.
That featurette mostly covers the kinds of subjects fans of the comic book have been well aware of for close to 40 years: how Moore and Gibbons were going to use the Charlton characters recently acquired by DC before being given free reign to create a new cast of superheroes; how the look and feel of the comic was a marked departure from what was in vogue at the time, with Gibbons mostly using nine-panel layouts (and thus using pages with fewer panels to denote major moments in the story) and the color palette departing from the usual shades; and so forth.
However, if you’re a Watchmen fan, you probably don’t mind a bonus feature that trots out the greatest hits everyone knows and loves, like an 80s rock band going on tour. Yeah, I would have loved a full-blown documentary that digs deep into the making of the comic and its impact on the industry, but I’ll take what I can get.
The only other extra is another featurette that runs close to ten minutes. It’s called The Art of Adaptation: Introducing the Story, and it focuses on the creative decisions that Vietti and his co-workers made when translating the comic book into animation. One bit that I thought was really interesting was the way the animation was created with CGI but in such a way as to evoke old school hand-drawn animation, right down to a sheen of film grain applied to the final image.
I don’t think Watchmen: Chapter 1 quite pulls off that effect — the animation has the fluid feel of CGI; it lacks the roughness you get from hand-drawn animation — but it’s still interesting that the creative team thought about things like that. Vietti also speaks to the way the narrative was rearranged here and there, which was a topic I wish had gotten more attention. The nuts and bolts of storytelling always interest me.
The only other extra is a code for a digital copy of the movie, which includes the pair of all-too-brief featurettes. Too bad there’s no commentary track or other in-depth materials, but maybe after Chapter 2 comes out, Warner Bros. will release a deluxe package that pulls out all the stops when it comes to bonus features.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Brad Cook
