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Watchmen-a-palooza, Pt. Deux

I'm less enthused by the early release of a "Tales of the Black Freighter" disc mere weeks after the movie's launch.

"Freighter" as a stand alone doesn't work for me (anymore than any cheesy pirate story would work for me as a separate story). However, the story has a number of specific SPOILERY tasks in the Watchmen storyline.
  1. The protagonist's POV monologue ratchets the tension in the story.
  2. The growing dread mirrors the advancing Soviet conflict that accelerates after Doc's departure.
  3. The comic underpins the relationship between the newspaper stand owner and the young, Black reader (for a dramatic Issue 12 payoff).
  4. It introduces the reader to the writing style of the author that Veidt used to program the mental squid bomb images.
  5. Freighter's twist amplifies the tough choice that Rorschach, Dreiberg, Doc and Veidt face in Issue 12.
  6. And the protagonist's increasingly twisted, albeit internally "justified" actions mirror Veidt's own dark motivations.
The completist in me is glad that Snyder cared enough to produce the stuff, but the Watchmen fan in me is glad that the motion comics maintain the comic within a comic structure that Moore intended.

Frankly, anything more than a motion comic treatment WEAKENS the idea of the Black Freighter story. The motion comics handle this conceit by amping up the newsprint halftone artifacts (which are absent in the Watchmen storyline).

I'll wait for the main disc (where hopefully the story is inserted in the Director's Cut) to see how Snyder handles it.

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