Watchmen

Yesterday we went up to the city to see Watchmen on the IMAX screen at the Metreon. This was actually the first film I’ve seen on an IMAX screen, although other than being really quite big, it didn’t feel very different from watching a movie on a regular screen.

I read the comic book by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons when it came out back in 1986-87. It was a big deal then, as Moore was probably the hottest – and arguably the best – pure writer in comics at the time, and Gibbons was a highly-regarded artist. Moore has said that the series was intended to be experimental and rule-breaking in many ways, and as far as how to use the form of sequential art to tell a story, it was. Few comics before or since have taken such a, well, cinematic approach to storytelling, while also mixing in the things which make the form unique. Gibbons eschewed the traditional approach of using visual effects to convey movement or emotion and instead the series depicted the progress of time in a simple panel-by-panel approach. At the same time scenes blended into one another, linked by dialogue from different scenes. While individual elements of Watchmen was been mimicked or used elsewhere, I don’t think anyone else has managed to quite capture the unique feel and nature of the book.

(The story, by the way, concerns a world in which superheroes emerged, changed the world – especially the big one who had actual powers – and were then forced into retirement. A decade later, one of them is killed, setting into motion a chain of events to learn why he was killed, which brings many of the surviving heroes back to solve the mystery and come to terms with their pasts and present.)

That said, the book is certainly not without its flaws. Steven Grant wrote an interesting critical account of the book which I recommend reading. I agree that the story by-and-large isn’t terribly novel, it’s how it’s told that’s fascinating. The story is also rather let down by a very hard-to-swallow ending, which Moore tries his level best (which is extremely good) to sell, trying to cajole and trick the reader into buying it, but it doesn’t quite work. (He manages to paper over most of the unbelievability with a compelling final page, but it’s just a papering-over, as if he doesn’t quite buy it himself.) But in sum its complexity, nuance, and believable characters make it one of the better graphic novels out there.

Making a movie of it: Hoo-boy.

The comic is strictly episodic in nature – using the periodical nature of the original comics for its own purposes as a chapter structure – with each issue featuring its own encapsulated segment of the story, its own tone and characters, and often its own resolution of a sort. It’s also a very low-key story, with only the occasional moment of action. Much of this is at odds with how superhero movies – or heck, any blockbuster movie – is constructed today.

Director Zack Snyder and screenplay writers David Hayter and Alex Tse give it a good try. With a running time of 163 minutes, that gives them about 13 minutes per issue (plus 7 minutes for credits), but of course it doesn’t work out that way. Naturally they cut the stuff that absolutely had to be cut (the “Black Freighter” sequences, which are not without their interesting elements but are ultimately the least essential part of the book), and pare down the issues that can be pared down. That still left them with some difficult decisions, and I think they cut some important material, but I went in knowing that Watchmen is probably impossible to film faithfully in a mere movie-length film.

The expected problems with the adaptation aside, the film starts going wrong in its focus on the violence of the story. Where the comic doesn’t exactly flinch from showing the horrible things that happen, it also rarely does so directly unless necessary, leaving some of the worst moments to the reader’s imagination – usually a good choice. The film emphasizes every punch with an extra-loud sound of impact. The heroes – most of whom have no true powers – get the living daylights beaten out of them and come back for more, quite different from how they’re portrayed in the book. There are some extremely gory scenes, some in which the camera lingers lovingly on the blood. The violence is mostly gratuitous, and only truly provides value in one scene, when two of the heroes are fighting their way through a gauntlet in a prison.

The film’s other big problem is the climax, in which everything is revealed, though it’s somewhat different from the book, but not really any more effective or believable. The book is full of moral ambiguity and goes to great lengths to try to portray every character as having both admirable and ignoble motivations and actions. The film mostly casts the characters as either “more good guys” or “more bad guys”, which sucks a lot of power out of the ending.

To the extent that the film works, it relies on the portrayal of the psychopathic Rorschach and his portrayal by Jackie Earle Haley. The acting is unexceptional throughout the film (none of the major actors are familiar to me), but Haley carries the day with an intense and spot-on performance, growling his way through the film in a full face-mask (whose constantly-shifting pattern is the film’s greatest visual triumph). With a lesser performance in this pivotal role, the film would have been limp indeed, violence or not.

The picture also looks impressive, although perhaps a little too art-deco and artificial in its appearance no matter the era being shown (it takes place in 1985 and has scenes dating back to the 1940s). This works well in the opening sequence, a series of nearly-still images (a neat effect in itself) about the history leading up to the main story, but gets a little wearing towards the end. But the characters and many of the settings and scenes look like they were lifted directly from the book; smartly, many of the iconic images are closely replicated in the film, sometimes to an uncanny degree. Considering how often films deviate across the board from their source material, this in itself is quite impressive.

Overall, I’d say Watchmen is a “pretty good” film – certainly not in the same league as the book. I do think it could have been a better film, by toning down the violence and sticking closer to the book in some key areas, but I appreciate that it’s a very challenging book to adapt. Perhaps I’m being too demanding, but I think the film’s greatest flaws were entirely correctable, yet they seemed to be conscious deviations to make the film more “exciting”.

Watchmen the movie is worth seeing once (if you’re not too squeamish about gore in movies), especially if you’ve already read the book. And if you’ve seen the film, though, then you definitely owe it to yourself to read the original. But I don’t think it’s going to hold up under repeated viewings.

4 thoughts on “Watchmen”

  1. I came here from Scalzi’s Whatever, and thought I’d repeat a little of what I said over there.

    I really liked the movie, even tho I hadn’t read the book. And I do want to see it again, either before or after I’ve read the original material. And, at least right now, I plan to purchase the DVD when it comes out. How those plans hold up once I’ve read the book, well, I don’t know…

  2. The problem with your review of the MOVIE is that half of it is a review of the Book. That’s a big problem, and frankly it’s just not fair. You have to put the book down, and examine the movie as a whole entity unto itself, and not as an annoying skin-tag on the book. Snyder does not suggest using the book as cliff-notes to the movie. Why do you?

    This isn’t a review. This is a comparison of the book with the movie. and in such comparisons, the movie ALWAYS comes out on the losing side.

  3. Djin: Considering that the movie is an adaptation of the book, and indeed goes to some pains to closely recreate certain scenes from the book, I think it’s entirely appropriate to compare the movie to the book.

    The problem with adapting print fiction to video form is that print fiction tends to contain a lot more story. I don’t mean “a lot more story per minute spent experiencing it”, I mean just a lot more story. So adaptations have to cut a lot of the story out. And that’s a big problem with Watchmen, since not only is a big part of the point of the book the approach Moore and Gibbons take the storytelling, but the story itself is quite subtle and nuanced, and one that Moore had a hard time pulling off. It didn’t survive compression to movie form very well.

    Does the film fare well on its own terms? Well, without the connection to the book, what is it, really? Alternate reality period piece? Violent action film? It’s not a very thoughtful film, it seems to be struggling between clear-cut morality and artsy ambiguity, and can’t quite go in either direction. The ending doesn’t hold up. But the visuals are pretty nice, and the guy who plays Rorschach is quite good.

    The problem is that having read the book, I can’t fail to make comparisons between them, nor should I try to avoid them, I think. It would be easier if the movie were a significant departure from the book (as some movies are; Howard Hawks’ adaptation of WIlliam Faulkner’s To Have and Have Not, for instance). But I think the film missed some of the key points of the book, and that made it a lesser movie. Which is annoying because I think it’s flaws could have been pretty easily fixed.

    (Contrast with The Lord of the Rings films, which are decent adaptations of the books. Or – better yet – Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which pared down the story to a manageable size but kept the best parts intact while being a stylish film in ways the other HP films are not.)

    I still think it’s a “pretty good” film. If it had toned down the violence and had a different ending then I think it would have been a considerably better film.

  4. You might be better served as a consumer of these sort of media if you didn’t “do your homework” before going to see the movie. I read the series when it came out originally, but haven’t even open my copies of it since then, and I found the movie to be very strong and compelling. It was much better than most of the other fare that’s come out of the “artsy” comic book genre, standing head and shoulders above movies like 300 and Sin City.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *