the audience applauded

Memorable, crazy movie

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

This is a 25-minute short film from six years ago and somehow connected to Zack Snyder's Watchmen movie. I have not seen this one, so I cannot go into more detail here about what exactly this connection is like. Anyway, there is a ship accident early on in the movie and everybody dies except our protagonist. Then, afterward, the Black Freighter, mentioned in the title becomes a crucial part of the story. Our hero tries to get home as quickly as possible on a raft, but realizes it is pointless to get there and warn everybody that the dead freighter is going to come as well, a ship packed with murderous undead pirates who are going to kill everybody. Yet, despite knowing he is too slow, he still decides to get home and see what happened to his village, to his wife and child. And he does succeed. but what is he going to find?I have to say I enjoyed watching this short movie. I liked how we heard the protagonist's thoughts (Gerard Butler's deep voice) during the entire 25 minutes. The animation is nicely done too and there is a final plot twist which wasn't really expected and that is also why you could watch this half hour several times. Recommended.

I've been a fan of Watchmen ever since I first saw the movie in March.I have since read the graphic novel, bought a Rorschach poster and watched this short.I personally did not care for it when it was in the original graphic novel, so I was skeptical about watching this.It's a short 25min animated feature about a man who'se crew gets murdered by these evil demonic pirates on a "black freighter"(hence the title).The pirates then go to the hometown of the man, to slaughter the people there, which include this wife and child.So, he follows them, intent on saving his family and taking revenge on the pirates.The animation is the best part of this short. It's simply excellent.The story is kind of hard to follow, and I personally never saw how it fit in with "Watchmen".It's decent enough, if you're a fan of 300, Watchmen or any violent animation, then this is worth a look.Apparently, this short will be inter-sped into the "Watchmen" film for the Ultimate Edition DVD.

A sea captain (Gerard Butler, 300 and RockNRolla) is the single person to survive a slaughter upon his ship by savage pirates aboard a black freighter, this 25 and a half minute animated adaptation of the secondary story in the Watchmen comic mini-series tells the macabre, heart-wrenching tail of his journey back to the Davidstown before the pirates can arrive there to pillage his homeland. While using a somewhat minimalistic animated stylization, the story as well as the visualizations work triumphantly and one can't help but be drawn into both. Not so much a companion piece to "Watchman" (although the case for that has been made ad nuaseum) as much as a brilliantly conceived piece that can indeed stand on it's own.My Grade: A DVD Extras:Under the Hood (a 37 and a half minute faux news interview with Hollis Mason about his book) a 225 minute featurette on the making-of; the first chapter of the Watchman motion comic, a first look at "Green Lantern: First Flight"; a prerequisite ad from Blu-Ray; and trailers for "Terminator: Salvation", "Watchmen" & the video game adaptations of Terminator & Watchmen

The Tales of the Black Freighter series in the book of Watchmen was linked to the actual plot of Watchmen with merely one line (I won't mention by whom, but it's by one of the main characters, towards the end) that ties into what and why the story is in the book thematically. But on its own the story and art in Tales of the Black Freighter is done in the source like a real old-style pulpy comic with the underlying lines going across the panels, touched up with some really gruesome images and a moral that is about next to none - the guy is sent to damnation. As a short animated film Zack Snyder and his team decided to up the ante on the style, to make it a 2-dimensional stand-alone effort with the translation almost identical to that of the source (save, perhaps, for Snyder's penchant for ridiculous amounts of bloodshed, which are more appropriate here than in the actual Watchmen film).The animation here is gorgeous, doomed, and totally haunted. It might be considered a horror movie in some moments - the main character is on a beach and ties a bunch of his fallen dead shipmates onto a raft with body parts falling off and gas rising out from the intestines - but it's also about insanity and an unamicable downward spiral. Even having read the book and knowing it was a sad and disgustingly surreal piece of work I was not prepared for how the animation kicked my ass, so to speak. It's a startling expression of a descent into hell, a poetic fever dream done with some striking flashes of color, character, violence, and the whole disjointed but logical mood of the sea itself; when the seagulls and sharks come around it brings some of the most memorably savage bits in recent memory anywhere. Only once or twice did the action feel a little stilted, as animation can sometimes be, but it overall was a kind of minor triumph (Gerard Butler, I should add, also did very well as the voice of the pirate).