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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I have not read the Watchmen comic/graphic novel, so, take what I say with that in mind. I whole-heartedly agree with Matthew in that the film was incorrectly marketed as a superhero movie. In fact, the very name “Watchmen” can imply a superhero group watching over the world, and it’s clear, from the marketing that it is that protector interpretation of “Watchmen” that the marketers grabbed onto.
However, there is another interpretation to Watchmen. Rene Descarte, through his philosophy, attempted to reduce the world to a series of mechanical parts, idealized in a watch. From there, some have argued that, if a watch was discovered by a people, we would assume that the watch had been designed by someone else. From this perspective, if we create the watch, then, in a sense, we make ourselves equal to God. (Rene Descarte was a Christian and so the notion of God is intrinsic to his logic.)
With that in mind, a “watchman” becomes either the watch itself, or more likely, the creator of the watch. By virtue of creating, they are then free to establish their own morality. So, “Watchmen” ceases to be about a group of befuddled superheros and starts to be about a group of people determining for themselves what is good and what is evil.
From that perspective, all of the character criticisms become, not poorly developed characters but people doing their best to work out a cohesive morality, thereby determining reality for themselves. Hence, the villain becomes the true hero because he does what is best. And, the heroes (other than poor Rorschach) come to side with the one we thought to have been the villain. With this interpretation, Watchmen not only is a very well-done movie, it is an excellent philosophical exploration of the nature of morality.
The Descarte angle is almost certainly one that Alan Moore was exploring when he wrote the book. The idea of the watchmaker being a god is embodied in the character of Dr. Manhattan. It’s spelled out in both the book and movie during Manhattan’s origin flashbacks and when he mentions leaving this galaxy to go and create life somewhere else. Dr. Manhattan is (barring tachyon interference) omniscient, omnipotent and not above interceding in mortal events — all parallels with the god of Abraham.
Even if you watch the film without “superhero movie” expectations and treat it as a character-driven drama, it still suffers from poor pacing, dump trucks of exposition, clunky editing (why show Lori throwing away coffee cups after the tenement rescue when they cut the scene where Lori and Dan serve that coffee to the people they rescued?) and poor performance choices from the actors, notably Matthew Goode as Adrian Veidt.
Since you got one of the underlying philosophical points Moore and Gibbons made in their original work, you’ll get a lot out of reading the graphic novel, Jon — I can’t recommend it enough.
I regretted watching this movie. I regretted even more that I dragged my wife with me, who is slowly starting to accept the sci-fi/fantasy genre I’ve adopted as my favorite to watch and read great stories created from it. I too, was led to believe that this was a superhero movie…even touted it as such to my wife. Having, also, not read the novel I had a false sense that the movie was presented as a complex and multi-storied presentation of the flawed personalities and historical account of their poor choices and crippling situations they’ve dealt with.
The movie was way too long, spent entirely too much time being expository in its depiction of superheroes who either have lost their perspectives on what it meant to be protectors of those who cannot protect themselves, or have developed such a warped and dimented picture of the world. It didn’t have to take nearly 3 hours to tell me that.
I was dissappointed that my wife had to see such a really kewl story be so sorely mistranslated and misinterpreted on the big screen…just like the fate of so many sci-fi/fantasy stories before.
Don’t let your wife be dissuaded from the genre just because of this train wreck, Monterio! Keep the faith!
Interesting.
I actually enjoyed the movie quite a bit. That said, I LIKED that it wasn’t the typical superhero movie (or really much of a superhero movie at all).
I knew zilch about the Watchmen prior to seeing it, so I had absolutely no expectations going in. Given the heaps of crap they’ve been passing off as comic-book movies as of late, I’ll admit that it was fairly easy for the Watchmen to impress me. I’m also rather taken with Rorshach. Though my political leanings don’t quite line up with his, I can certainly appreciate not letting the ends justify the means. Also, the “I’m not locked in here with you, you’re locked in here with me!” scene was just cool.
I will DEFINITELY be checking out the graphic novel.
Even without comparisons to the source material, I thought the film was poorly paced, poorly acted and too loaded down by exposition.
You will enjoy the graphic novel. It’s a layered, meta-textural, brilliantly conceived and executed work. Read every page, slowly.