Opening sequence review for 'Watchmen'

We assume at the beginning, that the opening sequence starts with a freeze frame, until we see slow movement between the two rivals, as one of them pulls the trigger and shoots, the other character punches tried to punch him. The whole sequence itself has a slow flow to it and tells the audience the pre-story, by incorporating as minimal action as they can. Although each scene that they show in the beginning looks like a lot, it not only tells the story but it also gives a sense of the film and merges the titles in.


Camera - The sequence shows a variety of shots that implement the storyline, for example, most of the shots used are either mid-shots or long shots. The long shots are used in this sequence to set the scene and allows the audience to understand the background story behind the movie itself. The whole opening consists of short snippets of clips that create a generic storyline of the pre-story, the director, Zack Snyder we assume made this in order to give the audience a feel of the type of movie that they are going to be going into. Most of the shots have either a zoom in, or a zoom out to show the detail or see a clearer picture of the mise en scene.

Mise en scene - It is difficult to evaluate how the director decided to conduct and show the mise en scene, as there are so many shots that include so much detail and precision behind them. We can see how each scene has a completely different scenery, each set has a different element to it. For example, it is clear to the viewer that the location of this movie is probably going to be in New York City, as we see the sky scrapers in the background and also the New York Times magazine popping up in almost every scene, this indicates that these so called 'superheroes' are famous and get gratification for what they do to the society.

Sound - Throughout the whole opening sequence there was one single song playing on top of the action, it was a diegetic sound track. At some point the lyrics matched up with the action happening on screen, for example, when we hear 'for the times they are changing', a couple seconds later we see how a woman and another woman are hugging, implying that they might be lesbian. The song itself was by Bob Dylan, called 'The times they are changing'. In a couple of scenes we here mumbling of the characters as they are speaking to each other, this was done for the audience to understand that they might be having an argument.

Editing - Most of the scenes were snippets of these superheroes lives, it created a nice base storyline for the audience to see before the actual movie starts. Throughout the sequence, the scenes are all in slow motion, it allows us to focus on all of the facial expressions of the characters and the whole situation on the whole.