Terry Gilliam managed to make a movie out of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, so he’s a guy who knows from unfilmable. Snyder’s mostly known for slow motion action sequences that turn into really fast sequences, which isn’t a trick that lends itself to a deconstruction of superheroes set against impending nuclear Armageddon.
Half Ass Movie Review: Watchmen (Mar 11)
True, the movie had to throw out a lot. After all, the series weighs in at 300 or so pages without a lot of fat. Some of the losses are understandable. Tales of the Black Freighter wouldn’t have worked in a movie anyway. Somebody reading a comic book works as a narrative device in a comic book, but not on film. The backstory of the original Minutemen is all but gone, condensed into what’s actually a very effective opening montage, set against Bob Dylan’s The Times, They are A-Changin’. At more than two and a half hours, it’s reasonable not to spend excessive screen time on characters who are dead before the story begins.
Sadly, though, some important characters and themes didn’t make the cut. Hollis Mason, the story’s link to the past and an important part of Nite-Owl’s emotional arc, is reduced to a simple cameo. The street corner newsstand? Gone. The New Frontiersmen? Almost entirely gone, except for the movie’s last scene. These cuts all matter, because they mean that Watchmen is entirely free of average citizens. The book has a masterful culmination of subplots seconds before they’re entirely derailed by the main action, while the movie leaves us with a bunch of nameless extras at the climax, with Rorschach’s psychologist being the only recognizable face involved. Without people, the stakes are lower. Nuclear annihilation becomes a plot point, rather than a nightmare. And if they’re not fighting for people, why do the superheroes matter? Even worse, “Who Watches the Watchmen?”, the Juvenal quote that makes for the thematic centerpiece of the story, is only barely glimpsed for a second. Instead the team of superheroes is called “The Watchmen”, thus justifying the title but making it seem less important.
These losses turn Watchmen into a character piece. Luckily, the characters involved are pretty awesome. Dr. Manhattan is just as unsettling on screen as on the page, and his habit of looking directly into the camera with his blank eyes leaves the viewer with the impression that Manhattan is watching them. Dan Drieberg, Nite-Owl, has to single-handedly carry the weight of the average man in the movie version, and he holds up surprisingly well. Despite the ad campaign, the movie really makes Dan look like a nerd playing dress-up, rather than some version of Batman. The Comedian is exactly the hateful bastard that he needs to be. And then there’s Rorschach. His handling here is comparatively shallow, and seems to miss that Alan Moore didn’t want you to sympathize with him. His racism and misogyny are not addressed, and his troubled childhood comes off as an origin rather than any kind of analysis. Take those away, and Rorschach is 100% pure antihero badass. While it’s disturbing to think that anybody walks away with the impression that Rorschach is the hero of the piece, you can’t deny that the movie makes him really cool. Maybe less interesting than in the original, but definitely cool.
Luckily, the meat of the story remains. If the focus is narrower and the insight is more shallow, at least the same things happen. In fact, many key scenes are taken straight from the graphic novel, word-for-word. Dr. Manhattan recounts his origin on Mars. Rorschach’s faces old enemies in prison. The Comedian fights in Vietnam. The iconic scenes are all there, and there’s something really gratifying about seeing them reenacted on a giant screen. The story beats are all intact. If events lose some meaning without the full context, at least the events are there. Unlike The Spirit, which bore no resemblance at all to its source material, the plot of Watchmen is surprisingly intact. (Fun fact: The screenplay was co-written by David Hayter, who voices Solid Snake in the Metal Gear video games. He’s kind of the Nerd Messiah right now.)
And to his credit, Zack Snyder is one heck of a visual stylist. The movie looks great. The streets of his alternate 1985 just pop, being both recognizable and just a little bit off. (The world of Watchmen loves blimps!) The action scenes, while reined in from his 300 excesses, are pretty stunning. Sure, those fight scenes go way over the top: A gunman taking a shot at Adrian Veidt turns into a killspree with multiple victims. I mean, Lee Iacocca gets shot in the face, and I did not make that up. The murder of the Comedian goes from being a crime scene report to a lengthy battle with the kind of collateral damage usually only scene in professional wrestling. A gang of muggers becomes an army, and some of them get hit so hard that their knees bend backward. But the fact is, the story of Watchmen is incredibly bleak, and this kind of thing helps liven it up.
The performances are a mixed bag. Billy Crudup is mostly replaced by CGI as Dr. Manhattan, but what you see and hear of him is effective. That’s Dr. Manhattan’s voice, all right. Jeffrey Dean Morgan doesn’t get a lot of screen time as the Comedian, but he makes the most of it, exuding pure sleaze. Patrick Wilson is impressive as Nite-Owl – as mentioned, he has to be the everyman, as well as dressing like a crimefighting owl. With the supporting cast drastically pruned, the movie hinges on his ability to seem like a regular guy who thought this would be a good idea, and he sells it.
Less impressive is Matthew Goode. It’s not a bad performance, but he doesn’t seem like Ozymandias. He’s the most famous man in America, the friendly, universally beloved face of the superheroes. Ozymandias needs to be a leading man, but Goode plays him as a character actor. He comes off as distinctly creepy and off-putting. It’s like having Steve Buscemi star in a Paul Newman biopic, frankly. And as Silk Spectre, Malin Akerman’s flat performance further marginalizes a character whose role was already deflated by the screenplay.
The most impressive performance comes from Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach. He’s been enjoying a comeback in recent years, and he just absolutely channels the character. His face is only rarely visible onscreen, so he has to convey the default hero of the story with his voice and body language. And when you finally do see him, he looks just the way Rorschach looked in the comic! It looks like Dave Gibbons drew him. It’s one thing when, say, Christian Bale comes along and you end up using him as your default image of Bruce Wayne. But here, it’s like Walter Kovacs was based on Haley. He’s really exciting to watch.
So there we go. The movie version of Watchmen isn’t perfect, but the positives outweigh the negatives. It remains an interesting story with fascinating characters. Heck, I’ll say it. Short of turning the graphic novel into a 12-hour miniseries, I can’t imagine how anybody could have found a way to adapt the book to film any better than Snyder did.
