WATCHMEN deleted scene: THE DEATH OF HOLLIS MASON

As Warner Brothers gears up for the July 21st DVD and Blu-Ray release of Watchmen, they've released a deleted scene featuring the violent death of Hollis Mason, the original Night Owl. You can see it below.

I was very ambivalent about the film. I could respect the effort that director Zack Snyder put into trying to make a seemingly unfilmable book into an actual movie, but the result felt long, lumpy and lurchy, with too much attention devoted to the wrong stuff and not enough to the parts of the story that mattered.

The death of Hollis Mason is one of the most moving and horrifying scenes in the book. But in this clip we just get more of Snyder's beloved ultraviolence, with endless slow-mo, and crashes and thuds so loud that they probably gave some overworked foley artist a bad case of tinnitus. Had this scene been included, it would at least have bookended Mason's earlier role in the film, and made that subplot work better. But it also would have added even more story to a movie that was already groaning at the seams.

Snyder accomplished a lot of impressive things with this movie: he made the Owl Ship believable, he cast the perfect Rorschach, he actually got the movie made after other directors had spent decades trying. But for me, his most surprising achievement is that he actually made me not give a damn about the death of Hollis Mason.




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