Having not read the 12-part comic series Demme, you will be more satisfied when you sit down to read it.

I also agree with your theory of less is more in reference to the violence in the film.

You make a fair point, Rick, and I can’t really argue. I guess what I was trying to get at was that far too many superhero pictures try to have it both ways. They want to be in-your-face with their grittiness, but they still want to be shiny, fun, and not overly transgressive — to make sure that they remain palatable to the masses, and thus fulfill their bottom-line obligations. They also seem blissfully unaware of the fact that a film about a guy in a rubber suit is inherently silly, and thus can never be truly gritty on the level of, for instance, a Wilder noir.

That’s why I have to give Watchmen at least a little bit of credit. It wasn’t trying overly hard (or even at all) to be palatable to the masses — it was a sick, twisted film about sick, twisted people who did sick, twisted things to each other. The most effective scene (aside from the opening montage, of course) was, in my opinion, the part where Rorschach threw hot grease on one of his fellow prisoners. It established his character as some sort of pathetic inversion of a Nietzschean Ubermensch. If they had just implied it, it hardly would have had the same impact — we may have gotten the general idea of what he was capable of, but we wouldn’t have been forced to stare unblinkingly into his soul.

And I don’t think graphic-violence can be equated with grit. Just ask Billy Wilder or John Huston or any Welles or any director of classic noir (for example), who managed to be plenty gritty. If “Batman Returns” wasn’t gritty it wasn’t because it wasn’t graphically violent, it was just a lousy movie. I’m with Joe: graphic violence is a lazy way of acquiring what a weak script and anemic direction — both in evidence in “Watchmen” — doesn’t provide.

(Good to see you all back, Luke!)

That said, I have to disagree with you, at least to a point, regarding the violence. To me it felt a little bit refreshing to see a film that took the “gritty superheroes” thing to its natural conclusion. After seeing the wishy-washy “OMG WE’RE SO GRITTY, BUT WE STILL NEED A PG-13 RATING” blandness of the The Dark Knight (*ducks, lest there are any Batman fans reading*), this felt refreshingly honest to me. There were moments when it was over-the-top to the point of feeling pornographic, but at the same time, that felt true to its world.