It’s not usual for a film’s deleted scenes to come out on DVD while
that film is still in theaters. Not content with his three-hour-long,
hyper-dense feature, director Zack Snyder has executive-produced two
supplemental short films for DVD, both based on material absent in
Watchmen, but present in the comic books the film is based
on.
In Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen comics, two
meta-textual stories weave in and out of the core story. The first is
Tales of the Black Freighter, a comic within a comic about a
shipwrecked man driven to madness. The second is Under the Hood:
prose selections from the faux memoir of retired superhero Hollis
Mason. While the grim, lurid Black Freighter works as an
allegorical parallel to Watchmen‘s main narrative, Under the
Hood details the book’s meticulously constructed world.
Now, Black Freighter has been adapted to a 26-minute-long
animated short, while Hood has become a 40-minute-long, 60
Minutes-style news program from 1985.
Both of these shorts are on one disc, but Under the Hood easily overshadows Black Freighter. Despite a voiceover from
300‘s Gerard Butler and a pretty sharp use of Nina Simone’s
“Pirate Jenny,” Black Freighter‘s animation looks stiff and
cheap, and the film never captures the existential dread it should. The
campy Under the Hood, though, crafts an alternate history of the
United States through “interviews” with the film’s characters, mock
photos, and goofily surreal footage of events like superheroes
testifying in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Hood feels more like a cheesy curiosity than anything else, but
like most Snyder productions, the attention to detail is astounding,
and it offers an added layer to the experience of seeing
Watchmen in the theater.
If you’re looking for the real Watchmen experience, you’re
still better off with the book—but now, even more than before,
it’s impossible not to be impressed by the filmmakers’ dedication to
getting as much of Watchmen onscreen as possible.
