With “Watchmen,”
Instead of spoon-feeding fans of the graphic novel with scenes and dialogue lifted directly from the original, he should have abandoned pleasing the purists and made a movie that paid more attention to theme and less to mimicry. The scenes lifted directly from Dave Gibbons’ panels were fun to see, but major “secrets” that play out subtly over 12 issues and 400 pages feel telegraphed and watered down on film. Alan Moore should have received a screenwriters’ credit since 90% of the dialogue was his (not that he’d take that credit, of course.) Sadly, in many instances dialogue that worked on the page turned into scene-stopping, cringe-worthy exposition when performed by the actors.
Elaboration, With Spoilers
Of course, Snyder’s not entirely at fault. The film was marketed as a dark superhero movie. The thing is, the film Snyder made isn’t about superheroes any more than was Moore and Gibbons’ original work.
Viewers expecting the clear-cut good-guy / bad-guy motif present in last summer’s big dark superhero movie (the one that actually had the word “dark” in the title) may be confused by “Watchmen.”
Here, the heroes are afraid, lost and terribly ambiguous. We have a woman defined by her mother and emotionally crippled by the men in her life. A man who can’t get it up without his costume and whose weekly high point is nostalgia sessions with the hero he copied. A broken psychopath whose lack of compromise isn’t admirable, it’s pitiful.
The villain… wait, there is no villain. He’s the hero, and the most tragic and noble of the whole lot, the guy who did whatever it took to save the world.
In the book, which was about interpersonal relationships and difficult moral choices and subtle connections and love and history and hope, all these complex, multi-layered characters were compelling, interesting and tragic.
But moviegoers were conditioned to expect a superhero movie. Put yourself in their shoes: The bad guy’s supposed to fall to his death at the end, not at the beginning. The hero might lose a sidekick or a girlfriend, but dude, the one guy who stuck to his guns got his guts ink-blotted all over the snow. That is absolutely against the rules of the superhero movie, and I’m betting it left movie-goers not just feeling confused but feeling cheated.
Strands From The Spaghetti Bowl, With More Spoiler Sauce
Like Moore and Gibbons’ “Watchmen,” James Ellroy’s “L.A. Confidential”
I remember reading Ellroy himself explain it. He said that the book was like a bowl of spaghetti. The film is made up of a few strands of pasta. It doesn’t try to be the whole bowl.. but it tastes the same.
Snyder tried to feed us the whole bowl of “Watchmen.” If he had been less faithful to the letter of the original and instead aimed to capture its flavor — its themes, its nuances, its movements — “Watchmen” would have been a much better film.
It would have been tighter, too. I could have done without Hollis Mason. I didn’t need the entire Dr. Manhattan origin, or the entire Rorschach one, for that matter. The Viet Nam bar scene with Manhattan and the Comedian could have been cut, I think. Much of the expository historical montages, fun as they were for fans, could have been left for the DVD. And spare me Richard Nixon, with the worst prosthetic nose since Gandalf.
Hollywood often assumes exposition is necessary to cater to the average moviegoer. Everything has to be spelled out, even at the expense of storytelling.
Hollywood also needs a bad guy. Somebody told Matthew Goode to play Adrian Veidt as menacing crazy guy, even though he should be the most sympathetic character in the movie. In the book, Veidt does what he does out of love and a sense of responsibility for his fellow man. When Moore and Gibbons’ Veidt says he’s made himself feel the pain of every one of his victims, you believe it. When Goode delivers that line, I didn’t believe it any more than I believed in the awful CG Bubustis. Another layer of complexity and depth lost in favor of appealing to the lowest common denominator.
Doomed
“Watchmen” was long thought to be the unfilmable graphic novel. Turns out it’s not unfilmable… it just shouldn’t have been filmed. Perhaps if it had been given the HBO or Showtime mini-series treatment, things would be different and more emphasis could have been placed on story. In three hours, choices and compromises had to be made for mass appeal, and that killed nearly everything important and grand about “Watchmen.”
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