Jeffrey Dean Morgan as The Comedian in Zack Snyder's film of the Alan Moore graphic novel "Watchmen"
I went to the Jordan’s IMAX Theater to see Watchmen last Sunday night and the experience has left me feeling kind of strange. I can’t stop thinking about the movie, and even dreamed about it a little bit — although I can’t remember the context of the dream, only that Watchmen was in my head while I slept.
(Let me say first off, in case anyone actually reads this post, that I’m obviously going to be writing about the film here, although it may take a while to get to it. That means there may very well be spoilers and the like, so if you haven’t seen the film and don’t want to know anything about it until you’ve seen it, don’t read any further. )
Leading up to the release of the movie, I wanted to know as little about it as possible so that I wouldn’t taint my experience by building up expectation. I did let myself check out the trailers, and I made the rule that it was okay to read coverage about the reviews, but not the reviews themselves. The trailers seemed to paint the film as a meditative and seductive take on the superhero genre, and proudly proclaimed that the greatest graphic novel of all time — the one that it’s own creator famously proclaimed “unfilmable” — was being turned into a movie by up and coming acclaimed filmmaker Zack Snyder, the guy who directed 300.
I had seen 300 in the theater just like everyone else, and I liked it a great deal, just like pretty much everyone else. I own a copy and it sits on my DVD shelf. The movie is a solid, though fairly mindless, thrillride. It’s entertaining and looks pretty darn good. It’s based on one of my favorite comic series by one of my favorite comic creators at the top of his game. But, the film didn’t strike me as the work of a director that I’d need to keep tabs on.
As a counterpoint to that observation, when I saw the movie Pi, I instantly became a fan of Darren Aronofsky. When I saw the movie Memento (and then went back and found Following), I instantly became a fan of Christopher Nolan. 300 made me a fan of 300, but not necessarily of Zack Snyder. So, looking ahead to the Watchmen film, I was excited but also somewhat ambivalent.
In February 1986, I was in 6th grade and trips to the comic store were a weekly experience. I would head to the store on Fridays, after school, while my mother went to the fabric store or K-Mart, and I’d peruse the racks and pick up what looked cool — as many as I could for $10. One week, I saw the first issue of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns on the shelves. Gorgeous artwork by Frank Miller, inked by Klaus Janson and colored by Lynn Varley (who also, coincidentally, colored Miller’s 300 and was brought in to work on the backgrounds for Zack Snyder’s film version). I had missed the first printing because I hadn’t known about the book coming out, but I snagged a second printing of issue one and immediately added the series to my pull list, to be certain I’d have first prints of the remaining issues. I was smitten on the first read-through because this book spoke to pretty much all of my sensibilities at the time.
The Dark Knight Returns wrapped up in June ’86, and in September everyone in the stores was talking about the next great series that was just starting, called Watchmen. That’s a stupid name, I thought. I can remember people saying, “It’s the next Dark Knight,” or something similar. I picked it up off the racks, and flipped through. It didn’t seem like The Dark Knight at all. Dave Gibbons’ art was nothing like the kind of art I was seeking out at the time. I liked Frank Miller, I liked Mike Zeck (the Punisher mini-series from Jan ’86 to May ’86), I liked John Byrne (whose “Man of Steel” 6-issue retelling of Superman’s origin had thrilled me from July to September of ’86). And, there were pages of text, another big turn-off. I really didn’t get the look of Watchmen, I didn’t recognize the characters, I didn’t know anything by Alan Moore, and I didn’t buy it.
Over the last twenty-three years, I’ve sometimes regretted that. I’ve had friends recommend it. I’ve read over and over about the awards its won, and the new ground the series broke, how comics changed forever after it was published. I’ve read interviews with Alan Moore where all the interviewer wants to talk about is how the movie should never be made and how Terry Gilliam tried, twice, and gave up. I’ve read countless interviews with comics creators who all, at some point, mention Watchmen as their favorite book of all time. The thing even won a Hugo Award and was in Time Magazine’s list of All-Time 100 Novels. All of these things should have been enough reason to just go buy the darn book. For some reason, though, I just could never get to it.
As the excitement in the media and on the web built to a fever pitch leading up to the release of the movie version, I kept finding myself in bookstores, holding a copy of Watchmen in my hands. The book seemed to be everywhere, calling to me. I decided to resist the temptation yet again, and continue my media blackout leading up to the movie. I didn’t want to know anything more than I already knew. I didn’t want to be one of those guys going into a theater with every single detail of the original in my mind, constantly analyzing and comparing as I watched. I wanted it to be a fresh, untainted viewing experience based on the film and the film alone.
One thing that I couldn’t help but absorb, though — since it was practically hammered into our heads by every news source on the planet — was the sense that director Zack Snyder treated the original material as a sort of shot-by-shot Bible, constantly working from and going back to the details and panels of the book to inform his decisions as the film was being made. By all accounts, he was working towards the the most faithful representation of the book possible, trying to capture every nuance and subtlety just as it was presented by Moore and Gibbons. His production video diaries and blogs showed panel to screen comparisons of shots and bragged about the meticulous detail they were putting in to capture just the right image of New York based on the comics. Snyder wanted to do the book justice by recreating it detail by detail on celluloid. It sounded like the film was going to be amazing.
And yet, as I walked out the theater and drove home this past Sunday, I realized that as noble as that approach sounds, it really isn’t the way to make a good film.
I’ve been struggling since I saw the movie to figure out exactly what I thought about it. I suppose that the simple fact that it’s stayed with me means something about the merit of the movie, but the more I think and consider, the more flawed it feels.
Overall, the story arc of the film is a fairly compelling one. The U.S. and Russia are close to nuclear war as a result of Russia feeling outgunned by the United States’ use of superpowered individuals (particularly the near-god Dr. Manhattan) to end the Vietnam conflict. At the same time, one of those costumed heroes turns up murdered and the other members of his old team begin to investigate who was responsible and uncover how it all may tie in to the impending conflict between nations, all the while nursing their own neuroses, quirks and perversions.
Plenty of room for good stuff, but somehow it doesn’t quite work in the film. And I think this is the crux of what I’m struggling with as I keep thinking about it. It should have worked, but didn’t. In some ways, it feels as though striving so hard to be faithful and exacting left little room for the filmmakers to react to what they were creating.
It feels to me as though the filmmakers behind Watchman were trying so hard to make something that literally translated every aspect of the graphic novel into film that they forgot that they were making art of their own. Perhaps that was their goal, to not imprint any aspect of their own artistry out of some reverence and high regard for the source material. If that’s the case, that’s fine, but there’s a danger there of leaving everyone else out in the cold if they don’t share the same level of reverence.
The book has always been typically referred to as a “deconstruction of the superhero mythos,” which essentially means is that it’s a dark and brutal examination of “heroes” with questionable morals. In 1986, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen were the first comics to really take that approach, and they changed the genre.
But in 2009, it’s the flavor of the week as far as superhero films go. You only need to cue up last year’s Dark Knight, Hancock, or The Incredible Hulk to see darker takes on heroes struggling with their inner demons (literally, in the case of the Hulk) and sometimes doing very dark things indeed. The first third of Iron Man, a film that was praised as being a return of the light-hearted superhero flick, brings us a tense origin sequence involving torture and graphic imagery not for the squeamish (care for a nice hole in the chest, anyone?). Hellboy II, itself a pretty light film, has an entire sequence of carnivorous mini-demons devouring people alive.
It’s not Watchmen’s fault that this darkness seems rather ho-hum. It’s simply the climate of the superhero film right now. Chalk it up to bad luck and bad timing that what originally set the graphic novel apart just makes the film seem like one of a bunch.
One major misstep of the movie is in it’s musical choices. The score itself was fine, but the soundtrack was a mess. Every single song used in the film felt so superficially tacked on that it was difficult to take them seriously. There wasn’t a single piece of popular music that felt natural or appropriate in the situation it was used, and some that seemed to forced as to be laughable. The closest to “non-laughable” that the film came with it’s somg choices was the use of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin” during the opening credits, but even that was not an easy pill to swallow.
The cast overall was fairly harmless (and unmemorable), but there were a few standouts. Jackie Earle Haley was very, very good as Rorschach, the ruthless vigilante of the team (as opposed to all the other forms of vigilantism the others reflected…). Jeffrey Dean Morgan was very good as the Comedian. Dr. Manhattan and Ozymandias were completely miscast — Billy Crudup, when he was actually on screen, seemed too soft and Matthew Goode as Ozymandias was too young looking, and wore too awful a wig, to be taken seriously.
Effects-wise, the film mostly had some nice fight shots stealing the stop-and-spin camera approach straight from Snyder’s 300, but the CG of Dr. Manhattan was pretty terrible. His hands were consistently misshapen, his mouth moved strangely and something about his much-talked-about glowing blue penis just looked off. Not that I was inspecting it all that closely.
I’m still struggling with what exactly I thought of this film, but the summation of all of this seems to lead towards, “Didn’t really like it.”
Going into it, I was thinking I would rush right out and buy the graphic novel to compare Alan Moore’s vision with Snyder’s end product, but now that’s feeling like a less exciting prospect. A film that could have lead the masses to the comic stores to devour The Greatest Comic of All Time, I’m afraid, will instead convince them that it’s something they still don’t really need to read.
Which, I fear, is what the film did to me.
