Watchmen

Expect to see this a lot from now until Transformers 2 comes out

I’ll get this out of the way right up front: I enjoyed this movie a whole lot. If that’s all you’re looking for in a one sentence summation, then there it is.

I want to try and avoid becoming part of the inevitable flamewars that will ensue around this movie.  Forums and comment lists, their most deranged example being the hellish madness of YouTube comment posts, will most likely overflow with bile as fanboys of various stripe exclaim over “respect for the material” or more accurately “Zack SNyder sucKs mah dick LOLZ”.  I love the comic and I enjoy Alan Moore’s body of work, but the links and unavoidable comparisons between the text and the movie should be thought of as an extremely sharp double-edged sword.

My first impressions of the film itself are almost universally positive.  As a cinema experience I was certainly entertained and impressed by Zack Snyder’s execution of the story.  The liberties taken with the plot, the parts substituted, excised or referred to only in passing, seem necessary to me if only because leaving them in would have slowed down the pace of the action, or blown the film’s running time out by at least another hour.  A whole miniseries could probably be made out of the story of the Black Freighter all on its own.  As it is now, the film is still so saturated with references and nods to the original text that I’m looking forward to at least a second viewing just to appreciate them.

As an adaptation, Watchmen is almost unerringly faithful to its source material.  Most of the dialogue or voice-over is a line-for-line transcription of the text, and as he did with 300, Snyder painstakingly recreates the composition of the original panels in major scenes.  I think that for any director, especially a fan of comics who has made a name for himself with accurate adaption work in the past, this would have been inevitable in trying to bring Watchmen to the screen.  The comic itself is a recognised classic, both of the comic medium and storytelling in general, and its this similarity with longer form fiction that makes it difficult to compare Watchmen with other comic book adaptations.  Unlike comic book universes like Batman or Spiderman in which established characters and villains can be re-imagined in numerous storylines time and again, the fact that Watchmen exists as a closed, standalone piece of fiction means that there is a great deal less latitude extended by audiences who are expecting a re-telling of a cherished favourite.  No Jane Austen fan would be happy with a film version of Pride and Prejudice in which Elizabeth Bennett cuts her hair and joins up with the Royal Navy (and we’re sure to see worse than that now that IP has come out of copyright), no matter how well it might test with ‘tween audiences.  Watchmen is so enshrined within an established and vocal fan culture, that tampering with it too much would have brought screams of derision from fans and critics alike.

Whatever your position on how faithful an adaptation of Watchmen should be, translating this text to the screen means that the original is exposed to forms of interpretation that both enhance and detract from the experience.  For me the most enjoyable parts of this movie were what I hadn’t seen already in the comic.  The realisation of fight sequences was handled very well, the action punctuated by Snyder’s penchant for CG-accentuated bloodletting gave every fight scene a sense of the overwhelming destructive potential of superheroes, especially against mortal foes.  The film’s visuals use a much darker palette than the quite colorful original, but this only serves to emphasise those colours that are on display, the yellow that links the Comedian with both Silk Spectres, Rorschach’s ghostly white hood, and of course Dr Manhattan’s swinging blue trouser snake.

The dialogue was perhaps the only area where leaning heavily on the original actually hurt the film.  The dialogue that occurs in the comic does fine for that setting, but as screenplay some of it falls a little flat.  My favourite lines from the comic are almost all from extra-diegetic narration; Rorschach’s journal, Dr Manhattan’s perception of time (or lack thereof).  For the most part I felt the actors did an excellent job with what they had to work with, but it’s notable that some of the best lines delivered as dialogue in the film are lifted from narration in the comic.  Rorschach’s warning to the inmates in prison (“I’m not locked up in here with you.  You’re locked up in here with me!”) is delivered just right by Jackie Earle Haley, who deserves a round of applause for being compelling as a character whose only emotions are disinterested bitterness for most of the film.  A special mention should also go to Patrick Wilson for making an overweight, impotent superhero sympathetic as well as laughable, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan as the Comedian who brings just the right element of menace without being a caricature.

The most glaring change, the ending, will cause a huge amount of controversy all on its own.  For me this change probably best sums up what I perceive as the director’s philosophy behind this adaptation.  Snyder chose to reshape Watchmen in a way that brings it more in line with current cultural anxieties (“Who wants a cowboy for a President?”), and by doing so he managed to avoid what would have been a time-consuming task building in the clues to an eventual reveal of a plotline almost every single moviegoer would have already anticipated.  By avoiding the exact details of the original ending, but maintaining the overall theme, Snyder actually achieves a kind of surprise in what I expected to be a very foregone conclusion.

My only gripe with the experience of this film doesn’t even stem from within the text at all.  Quite simply the crazy amount of hype it received, combined with a storm of blogging and pre-release ‘making-of’ featurettes released on the net (frankly irresistible), meant that I not only knew this story backwards and front, but knew how shots were set up and effects achieved long before I ever set foot in the cinema.  But that is the nature of the hyperculture we inhabit.  Events are in a constant state of about to happen/happening/already happened, documented and refreshed every five seconds, then archived.  The experience of viewing a film is not isolated, and perhaps never was.