Book Review: Watchmen: The Official Film Companion

March 25, 2009 by Parka

Here's a look at Watchmen: The Film Companion, one of the three tie-in books for the Watchmen movie. The other two being Watchmen: Portraits (Amazon link) and Watchmen: The Art of the Film. The copy I have is a paperback version, but there's a hardcover option as well.

The content in the book is split into six parts, namely, Pre-production, World of Watchmen, The Characters, Production, Post-production, Making Manhattan. The pictures included and mainly film stills and set photos. Some images overlap from Watchmen: The Art of the Film but not to the point I would complain.

The section devoted to character introduction is sizble, and includes the lesser known characters from Minutemen and some villains, oh, and Richard Nixon (no JFK though).

I'm actually more interested in production stories. The production writeup talks about the casting, costumes, sets, filming process, using of computer graphics for special effects, motion capture with Dr Manhattan and other stuff. Interesting bits include knowing that the film was actually short from start to end instead shooting all set-based scenes first.

Overall, I felt the writeup could be more because the movie is 160 minutes. But this is not totally a "making of" book anyway.

For viewers who want to find out more about the Watchmen and the movie, this is the book for you, especially so if you've never read the original graphic novel.

Special thanks to Kelvin Chan for providing the book for this short review.