DVD: Watchmen -The Director's Cut, Blu-Ray 2009

This arrived from Amazon.com a couple of weeks ago and, having watched it once, I've put it up for sale on Amazon UK.

Surprisingly, it isn't because I didn't like it. I think it's an amazing film which just about scrapes by at doing the graphic story justice. It lacks many of subtleties of the graphic story but that is by way of the nature of the two very different media. Film moves, graphic stories create the illusion of movement but because it's an illusion a single moment in time can be studied in depth. One panel of the Moore/Gibbons graphic story (from now on:GS) can contain a vast amount of information which can not be shown in film and neither can it be depicted in prose. Significantly there has not been a novelisation, primarily because I believe that would be even harder to achieve successfully than a film. Watchmen the GS is a paradigm of what can be achieved in the medium which actually makes the medium unique as a genuine art form in itself. Thousands of words can be spent in analysing almost any panel of the GS.

So, Watchmen the Editor's Cut is almost uniquely successful in what it achieves. This extended edition, taking the running time to 3 hours, is just as riveting as that shown at the cinemas, though I can understand why it was shortened. It still doesn't insert most of the stuff which was originally left out instead adding 'beats', additional character moments and the like, mostly seamlessly.

In short, I loved it.

Which begs the question: then why am I selling it?

Simple answer. Although I have a blu-ray player on my pc which plays blu-ray discs, it doesn't play them to their best effect. I would have been better off getting the standard Region 1 disc. So I'm selling it.

And now I have no excuse for not buying the deluxe 5-disc set in December, but not the blu-ray version.