Watchmen: Tales of the Black Freighter

Studio: Warner Premiere

Mar 30, 2009 Web Exclusive By Nick Hyman

Watchmen: Tales of the Black Freighter Blu-ray/DVD (Warner Premiere)

By now, the Watchmen movie has come and mostly gone. It was a decidedly mixed bag, ambitious as all get-out, but unfortunately crippled by its slavish devotion to the original source material, as exemplified by wooden dialogue and a cheesy sex scene—not to mention some of the lamest music usage in recent memory. In order to make back all the money that was spent on the movie, several tie-in products are being released to coincide with all of the hype.
     Perhaps the most important ones for fans of the book are the parts that were left out. Tales of the Black Freighter is the comic book within a comic book from the Watchmen graphic novel. Tales has been animated here, and unlike the feature film, is mercifully short. Gerald Butler, working again with his 300 director Zach Snyder, voices the lead Mariner who looks oddly like Dethlok’s Nathan Explosion from Metalocalypse. The Watchmen world is a world in which superhero/crime fighters are a reality that people turn to pirate comics to escape, so the graphic novel’s use of Tales is lost in film form, since the pirate story is shown as a whole instead of being interwoven throughout (and serving as a counterpoint to) the main narrative. Still, the animation is decent, and the ghostly scares and gore will appeal to the 13-year-old set.
     More interesting is the accompanying Under the Hood, a Watchmen-universe news-report documentary about the Watchmen and the premier group of superheroes who preceded them, The Minutemen. Watching the live-action characters (many of whom were barely seen in the film) fleshed out is more interesting than the animated main attraction, and adds another layer to the backstory that is interesting and revelatory. More Carla Gugino and Jeffrey Dean Morgan is never a bad thing.
     This full-price release is headlined by two segments that, put together, add up to barely over an hour. Throw in Story Within a Story: The Books of Watchmen, another (Warner Brothers-produced) documentary that explains why these two spinoffs are important, and you’re really paying for content that should really be (and might be) on the eventual DVD release(s) of Watchmen. If you can’t wait and were a fan of the Watchmen film, by all means pick this up, but if you were on the fence about the movie, you can probably skip what amounts to paying for a disc of what is essentially DVD extras. (http://www.warnerblu.com, http://www.warnervideo.com)