The Long-awaited Watchmen Movie: Two Different Takes / Joe Griffin, Ben Rockwood
The Long-awaited Watchmen Movie:
Two Different Takes
1. The Irish Take: Review by Joe Griffin
(Originally presented as an entry at Griffin’s blog, Moviedrome, Saturday, March 7, 2009.)
Watchmen, as I’m sure you know, is an adored graphic novel published in the ’80s that has finally (after many false starts) been adapted for our film-viewing pleasure.
Where to start? Okay, a quick overview of the plot: It takes place in 1985, but not the one we remember. Nixon is enjoying his 5th term in office (thanks largely to America’s success in Vietnam) and superheros, once a beloved troupe of vigilantes, are now washed-up, marginalised and deemed illegal. Most of them have hung up their capes, but the murder of The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan, pictured below) prompts some of his colleagues to return to the fray. These include token female Silk Spectre, geeky nice guy The Night Owl, megalomaniac Ozymandias, sleuth/sociopath Rorschach, and Dr Manhattan, a god-like man who’s the only superhero with actual superpowers.
That’s probably as much as I can tell without either giving away too much plot or clogging up the review with too much detail. Watchmen is ambitious and grandiose, and stuffed with plot and characters. Two hours and 40 minutes barely scratches the surface of Alan Moore’s novel, so what we have is a slavishly faithful adaptation of the central story. Some of it is inspired, some of it doesn’t work at all.
The casting is pretty spot-on. Not only are they all ringers for their comic counterparts, but for the most part they get the tone right. Morgan as The Comedian and Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach are especially good. And there are some really stunning sequences — I loved the Dr. Manhattan backstory and Billy Crudup’s voice work, and the Rorschach psychological incarceration sequence is splendidly gothic.
But the pacing is a little off. While director Zach Snyder is struggling to tell the vast story and fill us in about the characters, he simply hasn’t time to delve as deep as the graphic novel does. Author Alan Moore played with the comic medium by including pages of superhero’s biographies, news articles, a parallel comic within a comic, and police and psych reports. Without this flesh, there’s just (to quote Homer Simpson) a whole lot of stuff that happened. I’m beginning to agree with Moore that Watchmen was inherently unfilmable. It’s ironic that for all the money spent on superhero/comic adaptations, the greatest superhero movie of all time is based on an original screenplay. But a discussion of The Incredibles is for another day.
Still, Watchmen looks stunning, and the attention to detail in recreating the comic is meticulous. Overall it’s good, and occasionally brilliant, but ultimately a little unsatisfying. Sadly, and though many will not want to admit it, it’s probably the best film that could have been made from the masterful source material.
2. The U.S. American Take: Review by Ben Rockwood
(Originally presented as an entry at The Blog of Ben Rockwood, Saturday, March 7, 2009.)
I’m a comic book fan. I still read both Iron Man and Captain America actively. The following review is intended to contrast the movie with the graphic novel, and attempts to avoid spoilers.
First and foremost, let me say that the movie was an amazing translation of the book to the big screen. Everything looks just the way it should, more or less, and I was amazed they captured it so well. There were some small changes, most notably the costume design for Ozymandias and the design of Dr. Manhattan’s martian fortress, but both were minor. In fact, I thought the redesigned fortress was actually a good move, because it mimicked Jon Osterman’s watchmaking history, resembling clock cogs.
It was accurate to the point that I felt like I was watching a re-run and actually a little bored. Unlike a traditional novel, where you are interested in how someone else envisioned the source material, translating a graphic novel is a more straightforward process, and they nailed it.
Naturally, they chopped a lot of the sub-plots and condensed backstories in interesting ways, but all of them I thought were done in such a way that they didn’t leave the story lacking. The title montage, I thought, was a very clever way to fill in a lot of backstory, or at least glimpses of it, while saving on time.
The big issue was, of course, the “new ending”. If you hadn’t read the graphic novel, it would seem like only a minor detail, but I thought it was significant. Frankly, I didn’t like the ending of the graphic novel—I thought it was lacking. But the new one was yet even more lacking. Other than that detail, it was true to form, and all wrapped up in the same way. The ending bummed me out, but I doubt audiences could have handled the original.
During the film, I was surprised by the audience’s reaction. The brutality of the violence shocked many people in the theater, although anyone who’s read the graphic novel knows they only showed glimpses of the real brutality. More importantly, I didn’t think it really came through that, short of Dr. Manhattan, no one actually had superpowers. I think many viewers will just think they had really sucky powers, but powers none the less.
Personally, I think the real themes of the graphic novel were Facade and Futility: things aren’t what they seem, people are just trying the best they can but it doesn’t really matter at the end of the day. In regards to the latter, certain characters shine—those who have either fully embraced the futility (Sally Jupiter, the Comedian, Ozzie, etc.) or, more starkly, those who reject it entirely (Rorschach). However, I’m not convinced that those themes came through in the overall film. Frankly, getting that out of the graphic novel takes some thinking, which is the genius of it—trying to make sense of all this chaos, as a reader. The ends justify the means... even if it’s morally wrong.... I’m curious how many viewers who’ve not read the graphic novel will catch that. It’s still there, although not as pungently.
