So Hollywood finally pulled the trigger on Watchmen, the landmark graphic novel, after twenty years in the making as a film. They got a lot of smart people to make the movie, but it doesn't seem like they thought about it the whole time we were waiting.
Watchmen lasts three hours partly for its liberal use of slow motion. Contrasted with the dominant action-movie style (Transformers or The Bourne Supremacy), which overwhelms with a violence of rapidity, Watchmen instead shows the result of each act, the picture of a broken bone or pool of blood: a violence of shock and distance. The action sequences hang on the screen like a slideshow.
In this respect, there is a great fidelity to the form, at least, of the graphic novel. At once dingy, gaudy and cinematic, Watchmen is far more successful at evoking the look and feel of its source material than most contemporary comic adaptations. Bryan Singer's X-Men films shoot every fight in close-up, playing out the battles on their players' faces like a TV soap; Ang Lee's Hulk with its proscenium of panels never lets the audience forget that the green Kong is comped into every shot. Iron Man and The Dark Knight succeed as action-movies by letting that genre supplant the comics' style. None of these undertook to render the symbolic power of individual pictures on the imagination in the way that Zack Snyder does here.
But Watchmen isn't important because it's the most beautiful or most violent book, it's important because it's smart, experimental, and very successful. The heroes that comprise the Watchmen (with the exception of Dr. Manhattan) don't have superpowers; they fight crime because their personal ethics incline them to it. So besides being gluttons for glory and punishment, each is an amateur philosopher. The Comedian's a nihilist and imperialist; Rorschach a moralist; Silk Spectre believes in love (naturally, she's the woman); Dr. Manhattan in science; Ozymandias in ideas. The story plays out a pre-Apocalyptic moment, humanizing the archetypes, pushing them to fight and to work together.
In telling that story, the movie breaks with its source. The adventures are so much more effective than the exposition, the characters are all but lost. The philosophical component of the filmed Watchmen mostly takes place in long soliloquies on Mars, and the characters back on earth are less as agents of their philosophy than agents of the continuity.
Jackie Earle Haley comes off best, since Rorschach's brand of justice most closely joins philosophy with violence, but Patrick Wilson's Nite Owl is so pathetic, it's hard to tell what drives him at all. We learn more about his goggles than his life. The style, which adapts the visual aspects of the comic so well, actually fights our involvement with the actors. (This was less important in 300.) Jeffrey Dean Morgan is caked in age makeup and costume design, but we never hear his Comedian deliver a joke. Billy Crudup is not actually in most of the film; he's just the voice-actor of a goofy-looking atomic avatar.
Although the movie delivers a tight if weirdly-paced narrative, the omissions of character amount to genuine flaws in the story. Silk Spectre, the only active female hero, goes perkily from Dr. Manhattan's bed to Nite Owl's within the space of fifteen screen minutes. We know little of the challenges she faces, as a hero/sex object and the heroes' sex object, and her reasons for adopting her mother's costume. Her kisses punctuate many important moments in the film, but leave the audience in a vacuum: is it even a problem for her that she's loving two men?
There has been a lot of press about audiences seeing the movie more than once, but that would really only reward aesthetes and those who found the basic plot incomprehensible the first time. Watchmen is complex but not rich: a spectacle of blue penises, slo-mo kickboxing and a really ugly giant clock on Mars. To a fault, it's consistently imagined--too simply to deliver on its ambitions.
In the end, Watchmen's superheroes are just symbols of other superheroes, and the whole enterprise has the effect of a world-destroying Commedia dell'Arte, whose nuclear MacGuffin becomes a metaphor for the entire film: an epic yet unserious misdirect. It's ironic that a director so ambitious with symbolic imagery--the nuts and bolts of all storytelling--doesn't appreciate that the heroes are constructs, and Watchmen's stories are the mechanism that deconstructs them (according to co-author Alan Moore, amongst others). This movie version just doesn't promote deep reading. Maybe they thought three hours was too little time to do the postmodern thing.
Dan Dreiberg is SUPPOSED to be pathetic, because his only real life was as a man in a mask. Otherwise his life was devoted to sitting in an empty house, alone, playing with silly hobbies. Only when he admits that he needs the mask is he able to reclaim his full sense of self worth. He's certainly no less pathetic in the comic.
Dr. Manhattan was done very well, I don't have any complaints or feel he needs explanation. Laurie's story suffered a bit from lack of screen time, but she was still excellently portrayed. I don't feel that the comic gave her romantic issues all that much more 'serious' treatment than the movie does.
I did think Ozymandias suffered slightly, I sympathized more with him in the comic than in the movie, but I think that is a function of Hollywood and don't have a complaint about it.
Ackerman's character had a scene earlier with Nite Owl. That was the set up for her staying with him. She was hardly perky about it, just putting on a face for Dan (Nite Owl). Dr. Manhattan left Earth, but he hadn't been there for Laurie in a long time, if ever. She hates the Comedian for almost raping her mother. She has issues with living up to her mom who pushed here to being a hero, having no real father figure expect for Dr. Manhattan, who she made her life after they all retired, and now she's realized was probably a mistake. Do we need to see silly scenes with her struggling between the two guys? Do you find all the previous details not contributing to character development?
As you and another commenter have mentioned, there are many little details in the dialogue that suggest the richness of the full Watchmen work. I agree, and that richness beyond reproach. My point was that the film does not illustrate that on its own. If it's impossible to do it justice in three hours, they should have made a miniseries.
the film acts as a holographic representation of alan moore's rich tapestry. this means the movie wasn't going to 'nail' the graphic novel's immense theme points but at the same time, the movie was able to successfully project the graphic novel's core within the given time frame of 168 minutes (to do the graphic novel justice would have meant a 6 hour film...). but synder's 'piece' lacks anything meaningful other than his predictable errors on his 'understanding' of watchmen when he doesn't begin to enter into that realm at all.
because the centre of watchmen can easily be found in the greatest line ever said by any comic book character: '..never compromise, not even in the face of armageddon...'. alan moore has created a very rich and complex story that reads on five different levels. i recommend you read the graphic novel and then see the movie again...
I totally agree that Jackie Earle Haley steals the show, and there is something to be said of the Rorschach phenomenon as an identity-in-crisis nihilist vigilante, as part of a larger, Joker-esque cultural force that is really interesting.
And ohhh, how lamentable was the representation of The Silk Spectre?! They did a good job of making her hot (Nite Owl's ass wasn't bad either) but her character's complex psyche was barely even acknowledged, and her sex-appeal-as-spectacle totally defines her characterization, which I find really troubling. Many of the character interactions seemed flat and reduced to a stylistic staged-ness rather than conveying the intense, contradictory psychological depth expressed in the comic.Thanks for this thoughtful post!
Re: Rorschach, I actually think there's a lot to say about the Joker and Ozymandias, as different "heroes" (really, terrorists) whose violence is politically motivated. He says, "I'm not a comic book villain," but it's kind of a meta-backfire because in the movie, yes he is! The Dark Knight, I think, is much smarter in unpacking political violence--Joker's demands, the conversion of Harvey Dent, etc. Rorschach's deposition touches it, but the rest of Watchmen doesn't really get there.
I agree that Malin Ackerman looks bangin' and I appreciate that Patrick Wilson gained weight and got naked for the role, but their lovemaking interlude is an ellipsis that has really nothing to do with the movie. Funny, maybe that's why it works. The triumph of being interesting-to-watch over actually being interesting.