When Zack Snyder announced that he would be taking on the seemingly impossible task of adapting “Watchmen” for the big screen, the only question that was asked more than “Will the squid be in it?” was “What about ‘The Black Freighter’?” The graphic novel’s story within a story is one of the most famous things about Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s groundbreaking comic because of the parallels that can be drawn between the journey of its unnamed protagonist and several of the main story’s characters. It’s all about a shipwrecked mariner (voiced by Gerard Butler) trying to make it back home to Davidstown in order to save his family from an impending attack by a demonic ship called the Black Freighter.
With the film already clocking in at 163 minutes, however, it just wasn’t conceivable to include “Tales of the Black Freighter” in the final cut, and so Warner Bros. decided to release the animated tale as a direct-to-DVD supplement to the film. Unfortunately, when viewed out of context, “The Black Freighter” loses any relevance it might have had to the story. Instead, it’s just a 21-minute pirate cartoon that, while it still retains its basic meaning, fails to serve the purpose it was originally intended for. The addition of a faux news program about Hollis Mason’s autobiography, “Under the Hood,” is a fun little extra that would work great as a DVD special feature, but as the B-side to the main feature, it’s hardly worth paying for. That pretty much sums up the disc as a whole, because if “The Black Freighter” really was as essential as many would lead you to believe, they would have included it in the film. Not even the most diehard fan should waste their money on this cash grab – especially when it will be included on the Special Edition DVD the way it was meant to be seen.
