Watchmen

In advance, I expected that I'd be giving the Watchmen adaptation all kinds of leeway to please me. After all, everyone agrees that the book isn't the most adaptation-friendly material so for it even to get Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' classic partly right would seem like a really neat feat. But while the first sight of a black Warner Bros. logo against a yellow background had me feeling that I was in for something special, as it turns out whatever slack I was willing to cut director Zack Synder and co. evaporated awfully quick - like by about the twenty five minute mark. There's so much I disliked about this movie, it's hard to pinpoint what turned me off the most but ultimately I just never felt involved with anything happening on screen. It felt more like a comic book than the comic book itself, a work so artificial and stylized that it was impossible to see its characters as real. And in condensing the comic's sprawling storyline, Watchmen the movie becomes too cramped with incidents to have a natural flow to its narrative and because of that, nothing that happens ever has any weight to it - not even the threat of doomsday.

Among the bigger issues I had with the movie was its violence. I'm all for gratuitous cinematic bloodshed but the adolescent glee that Zack Synder shows here for bone-breaking and meat cleavers to the head only points to why he was the altogether wrong choice for this film. He gets off on the fight scenes (every hero here is some kind of kung fu master, by the way - which might make some viewers unfamiliar with the comic wonder if all of these costumed characters are supposed to have superpowers) and the gore - but whenever someone isn't being beaten, dismembered or scalded, there's a lack of conviction. Even worse, for all the violence in the film he's unable to portray any of it as being truly harrowing. Rorschach's origin, which should close on a true heart of darkness moment, instead ends with a splatter gag that belongs in a Friday the 13th movie (a damn good Friday the 13th movie, yes, but a Friday the 13th movie nonetheless). Synder even caps the climatic death of a major character with a gore punchline. Several reviewers have cited the reflective Dr. Manhattan on Mars sequence as proving that Synder has more up his sleeve than just an eye for stylized violence but outside of the fact that this sequence is recreated almost verbatim from the comic - leaving little room for Synder to contribute his own vision - I feel that sequence missed capturing the original life-affirming poetry of that celebrated issue. Like the rest of the film (save for Jackie Earle Haley's indelible performance as Rorschach and Jeffrey Dean Morgan's equally strong turn as The Comedian), it feels wooden.

And although one of Moore's key points with Watchmen was that these self-styled superheroes were actually pathetic (as Dr. Manhattan remarks at one point: "...friendly middle-aged men who like to dress up..."), Synder is unwilling to be totally true to that. It may be hip to love Watchmen now but it's always been a story about uncool people and I don't think Synder understands how to do uncool. Under Synder's direction, a character like Laurie Juspeczyk aka Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman) is portrayed as being what her comic book counterpart can only imagine she is - slick, sexy, dangerous. As Moore wrote these characters, they didn't turn into conventional superheroes when they put their costumes on. Moore showed psychological acuity, revealing his characters to be ridiculous in how they used their super ID's to compensate for their (sometimes literal) shortcomings. One of the lines of the comic that always stuck with me was the observation of a policemen while Rorschach was being arrested that "the runt wears elevator shoes!" - it showed Rorschach's arrest to be a personal humiliation, tearing away his mystique as a fearsome vigilante. It's those moments that made the book and it's the absence of them that keeps the movie from coming to life.

Before seeing the movie, I thought everything about it looked terrific, that Synder clearly understood the book. But his take on the material is a limited one - the work of someone who is in love with the surface of Watchmen as a book that was racier and more violent than other comics of its era. While the graphic novel was a leap forward in maturity for the comic medium, the movie - for all its technical proficiency - is a case of arrested development.

Waiting For The Watchmen

As the release date for Watchmen sits just a week away, I just realized why my anticipation for this landmark adaptation has been just a little muted - I can't quite believe that a Watchmen film actually exists. Sure I've been following its progress with a mix of curiosity and anxiousness but it still seems unreal that Watchmen has finally been made into a feature film - much less one that looks to have such fidelity to the source material.

It's been well over a decade since I last re-read Watchmen so unless I get a chance to read it again before next week, I'm sure there'll be plenty of details Synder left out that won't even register with me as missing. And that's fine with me - although I expect if this movie is as faithful as it's reported to be, every frame will bring back a flood of memories, jarring my recollections of the book as it goes along.

I first read Watchmen in monthly installments when it was released in '86. Even though I was a high school senior then, I still think the series was just a little over my head at times - or maybe it was just such a different experience than anything else I had found in comics up to that point. Even the way it was packaged was dramatically different in which each cover was a detail from within the issue (a trophy, a Rorschach blot, etc.) and not the traditional style of comic book cover that emphasized action or character.

When I finished reading issue #12, I didn't think of the series in terms of it being a masterpiece or a classic - I just knew that I had loved the story and that it had gripped me straight through the year-plus change that it took to be released. I certainly didn't expect that nothing else in comics would ever come close to it - which is probably the saddest part of Watchmen's legacy, that it stands alone in the history of the medium. Many wonderful comics have come along since, some of them classics in their own right (everything from Sandman to Y: The Last Man to Alias to Preacher), but none of them have been the singular achievement that Watchmen is.

Even though I'm extremely excited to see the film, I agree with writer Alan Moore's unhappy assertion that Watchmen is so specific to the comic book form (thanks to such artistic choices as reserving the use of splash pages until the final issue to reveal the dramatic destruction of Manhattan) that to take it out of its home medium is taking a large part of its impact with it. On the other hand, as director Zack Synder has pointed out, mainstream movie audiences have become fluent in the tropes of superhero fiction in a way they weren't twenty years ago thanks to the popularity of superhero movies so that a Watchmen film can more readily comment on the genre in a way now that it couldn't when Watchmen the book was first released. Had this been made in the late '80s, as initially planned, with Sam Hamm writing and Terry Gilliam directing, it would've been a nightmare. There would have no confidence that audiences would be able to keep up with the material without making drastic changes to get mainstream viewers up to speed.

Speaking to Comics Interview in issue #70 about the then pending release of Batman, Sam Hamm discussed the challenges of adapting Watchmen, saying "...I couldn't see how anyone could turn it into a movie because 1) there's too much sprawl in the story, too much time shifting and flashbacks, and 2) there's too much expositional material to get across." Hamm also said of his resulting screenplay (which jettisoned the beginning of the book, its ending and the entire history of the Minutemen, keeping only the present-day characters) that "I feel like what I came in to do was essentially the writerly equivalent of what Kodak used to do, take elegant technology and dumb it down for mass consumption." I've never read Hamm's screenplay (or if I have, I've long since forgotten it) but remarks like that illuminate how much things have opened up in mainstream culture for even the most geek-centric material. To make Watchmen the way that Synder has approached it would've been an impossible sell twenty years ago - it would've been unpalatable for a wider audience - now it seems inevitable that this is the way it had to be made, if it were to be made at all.

I've only skimmed a few reviews so far and at this point I'll hold off on looking any further into other's opinions until I've seen the film for myself. Even if I walk away feeling that Synder got Watchmen 90% right, I'll consider it to be some kind of triumph. It doesn't have to be 100%. In the end it really can't be - that's what the comic is for.