Product Details

• Actors: Gerard Butler
• Format: Animated
• Language: English (Dolby Digital 5.1), English (Dolby TrueHD 5.1)
• Subtitles: English
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 2.40:1
• Number of discs: 2
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Studio: Warner Home Video
• DVD Release Date: March 24, 2009
• Run Time: 26 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (42 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B001QTWC00
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #15,297 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "Watchmen: Tales of the Black Freighter & Under the Hood [Blu-ray]" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

Studio: Warner Home Video Release Date: 03/24/2009 Rating: R

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

86 of 93 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Watchmen bonus features., March 24, 2009

By 

trashcanman (Hanford, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Watchmen: Tales of the Black Freighter & Under the Hood (DVD)

Is "Tales of the black Freighter" a very cool animated short film and a fantastic companion to the Watchmen film? Yes. Should it have been sold as a separate full-priced DVD altogether? No way. What this is is essentially a disc of bonus features marked up to the price of a feature film. This is no bueno. I was looking forward to a fleshed-out version of the story with tons of great material, but unfortunately there is very little on this release that you haven't seen if you've read the graphic novel.

The feature tale is 25 minutes long, looks cool, and has all the brutality of the comic and maybe even more. But God, do I hate me some roaring sharks. Filmmakers, take heed: SHARKS DO NOT ROAR! That aside, the film is good and would have made an amazing bonus feature on the double-disc DVD release of "Watchmen", but packaged by itself, it just isn't enough. Even when thrown together with a 37 minute live-action interview featuring cast members from the film discussing the original Nite Owl's tell-all autobiography "Under The Hood" it's not enough. The contents of "Under The Hood" is mostly just a reiteration of things from the graphic novel and even some redundancy from the film. Again, an outstanding bonus feature, but not worth a lot by itself. It's nice to get more Carla Gugino without that awful aging makeup, though. Also featured is a half-hour documentary about the projects, and a 10 minute preview of the promising "Green Lantern" animated feature. All good, but one more time: it all amounts to nothing more than a disc of bonus features that should have been saved for the "Watchmen" DVD release.

If you are a complete rabid maniac over anything "Watchmen"-related then by all means, pick this up. But know what you are getting. This is not a feature-length release that will substantially enrich your appreciation of the film. It's more of a cash-in to scrape some capital from the hardcore fans while they await the real DVD. I would recommend a rent for this if you're really itching to see it like I was because I for one would have been seriously bent if I'd spent $15 on it. It's definitely worth seeing because it is a very well done animated version of the comic within the comic, but as a full-priced standalone release it reeks like a boat built out of corpses. If I were you, I'd wait until it's packaged with the film before buying.

2 1/2 stars, rounded down for taking advantage of the film's supporters.

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Borne on the Naked Backs of Murdered Men, March 21, 2009

By 

C. Sawin (TX) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Watchmen: Tales of the Black Freighter & Under the Hood (DVD)

Tales of the Black Freighter was a story within a story in the Watchmen graphic novel. A young black man visits a newspaper stand everyday and reads comic books without paying for them. A pirate story bled through the pages and introduced the reader to a man who had lost his entire crew thanks to the attack of the Black Freighter. He decides to head home in hopes of warning the people before the Black Freighter makes it to his town. After making his way back to shore, he uses the corpses of his crew to make a raft and sets out to sea. He winds up going mad in the process as the Freighter impairs his judgement of what's truly fantasy and what is actually reality.

The storyline was almost identical with the source material in this animated feature. The only issue I had was the character design. Everything else looked fantastic and was animated beautifully. The sky was incredibly vibrant the entire time and the sea looked almost lifelike at times. The characters were animated rather poorly, in my opinion though. It may just be the design, but their quality looked poor and their animation wasn't up to par in comparison to everything else around them. Reminded me a bit of the character designs in Aeon Flux. All in all, it's well worth seeing. But it's rather short as it only clocks in at around twenty one minutes without the credits.

Under the Hood is the autobiography of Hollis Mason, the original Nite Owl. It's basically his version of the events that transpired during the time he was a superhero and was a part of the Minutemen. There's a feature devoted solely to this autobiography on the Black Freighter DVD.

The feature is basically a live-action documentary of Hollis Mason/Nite Owl being interviewed about Under the Hood and everything he included in his book. It also focuses heavily on the Minutemen, the original team of superheroes from the thirties. Sally Jupiter/Silk Spectre and Edward Jacobi/Moloch are also in it quite a bit. There's even a brief cameo from The Comedian. It's really just a companion piece to the film that sheds a bit more light on characters that were only briefly touched on in the actual Watchmen film. A must see for anyone who was a fan of the film.

Rating: 7/10

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Promise of Storytelling Beyond Linear Narrative, June 30, 2009

By 

Leo "Katphish" (Norwich, NY, United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Watchmen: Tales of the Black Freighter & Under the Hood (DVD)

A nice companion to the film itself that deepens and expands upon the underlying themes of the story by adding further layers of richness and texture to what can only be described as a meticulously fleshed out fictional reality. That fictional universe becomes more and more relevant to our own the more thought and time one is willing to commit to Watchmen, and the more one is willing to deconstruct aspects of the real-world and the comic world and dwell upon the insights and observations that Watchmen so vividly and artfully convey.

The Black Freighter takes the form of an animated parable, a story-within-a-story, that draws upon and mirrors the main plot in a haunting fashion. The animation is quite good and different enough to stand on its own. The other feature here is "Under the Hood", a TV news show documentary that was made to be part of the film and features interviews with some of the characters and gives various additional plot queues and further develops not only the characters themselves, but the history and context of the alternate world (and alternate timeline) they live in. I'm reminded of the way Robocop used in-movie faux news broadcasts and commercials to bring its vision of a not-so-distant dystopic future to life while also making certain cultural criticisms of the film more readily apparent. In a similar fashion, Under the Hood and Black Freighter take Watchmen beyond the limits of mere narrative story-telling, and use this power as a means to heighten the story's core metaphors and analyses--namely, the moral and social deconstruction of "heroes" (super and non super), the paradoxical relationship between human ethics and human nature, and the seemingly irreconcilable relationship between the individual and modern mass society. The struggle to maintain order and emotional or even philosophical consistency within a chaotic and often irrational universe and the meaning and value of the human experience in such a universe is a critical problem that the story continually brings to light and examines, and these features further expound these ideas with both creativity and elegance.

These features were removed from the theatrical release due to concerns about running time, which is a real shame considering that they represent such a considerable artistic effort, attention to detail, and a most impressive commitment to staying true to the original graphic novel. Whether they are worth viewing by themselves will depend on how much you liked the film and how interested you will be in seeing more pieces of that world fall into place. There's some nice documentary content covering the creation of these pieces and their removal as well, and fans will appreciate that.

Supposedly, these features are to be reunited with the film in the director's cut version due out shortly. I suspect that this might be too much for some more passive viewers, while those more impressed with the original will appreciate the extra depth they provide. But it is yet to be seen whether the editing will he able to include these features in a way that feels "natural" as a part of the film. I would therefore recommend seeing both versions, once available. As a movie buff, however, I'm really excited to see someone pushing the envelope this much in terms of what this medium is capable of and how fiction can be much more than just a linear narrative. I'm not a fan of Zack Snyder (I hated his other work), but he deserves significant props for what he's undertaken here, as any typical director would have simply cut such extraneous material without a second thought and watered this film down to something much simpler and much less interesting. The theatrical release of Watchmen was engrossing enough as it was, but the addition of these features transcends the traditional limitations of film as a medium and elevates what was merely a very good movie to a level of storytelling that can only be described as a completely immersive fictional experience. After watching this DVD, I cannot wait to watch the film a second time and I'm even more excited to see how the director's cut comes together and these materials are returned where they belong. While I withhold judgment on the success of that reassembly, I expect and hope the whole will be much more than the sum of its parts, and with such loving care and so much attention to detail given to the creation of the parts themselves, the resulting whole has the potential to be a cinematic accomplishment of the highest order.