Do you seriously think I’d explain my master stroke if there remained the slightest chance of you affecting its outcome? I did it thirty-five minutes ago.
– Adrian Veidt
And now with the movie on the horizon, we have to ask whether Watchmen is even filmable. Weighing in at more than three-hundred pages with almost no fat, it’s a daunting prospect at best. Terry Gilliam made an attempt before deciding it was impossible, and he’s the guy who figured out how to turn Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas into a movie.
One of the most impressive aspects of Watchmen that will no doubt be lost in translation is the way the creators controlled the pacing. In a comic book, the pace of the story is at least partially dependent on the reader, but Moore and Gibbons structure the page in such a way as to pull the reader along or force them to linger. They use a very controlled nine-panel grid on most pages, so the reader develops a rhythm. Then, whenever that format is broken, the reader slows down. Like it or not, you’re going to spend as much time on a silent panel that takes up a third of the page as you would on the three panels that you would ordinarily encounter in that space.
And like it or not, there are aspects of the story that will hold more resonance for people familiar with comic books. For example, a subplot about the world’s great creative minds disappearing to a secret society of their own mirrors a plot thread from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Artist Steve Ditko, an outspoken proponent of Rand’s Objectivism, created the characters who served as basis for three of the Watchmen leads. Knowing that, the reader will focus on the subplot more, investing it with more importance than the text itself implies. We pay particular attention to those scenes so that when it turns out to be important, we’re all caught up.
On the one hand, superhero movies are prevalent enough now that the genre might be able to take some deconstruction. Most of the archetypes of Watchmen have been presented, in one form or another, in successful movies. However, the early trailers don’t give me much hope. 300 director Zack Snyder seems to be applying the same style to Watchmen, which just can’t work. 300, in its original form, was nothing but a 180-page fight scene, and the movie even managed to dumb that down. Slow-motion shots of Rorschach stalking through the shadows, or scenes where Nite Owl looks more than a little like Batman miss the point entirely. Rorschach is weird and creepy. Nite Owl is pudgy and out of shape. The “real world” aspect seems lost.
Obviously, we can’t judge a movie that hasn’t come out yet, unless the trailer includes the phrase “From the writers of Scary Movie”. Still, the length and complexity of Watchmen, as well as a look at Snyder’s previous films, don’t exactly give much reason for hope. Even more disturbingly, producers have announced that Tales of the Black Freighter will be released as a companion DVD, missing the point entirely. Black Freighter isn’t a standalone story – it’s meant to illuminate the main plot. On its own, it’s just a melodramatic story about a shipwreck. It’s worrisome, I’ll admit it.
But if there’s an upside to the movie, it’s those million copies of the book being printed this year. I actually heard people talk about Watchmen in the grocery store. Even if the movie is terrible, people are reading Watchmen who’d never heard of it a year ago. That’s what I call a clean win.
