By now, many readers will have seen Zack Snyder’s adaptation of Alan Moore’s graphic novel, Watchmen. The comic fans among us went with bated breath, as atremble with anticipation and anxiety as a LotR fanboy/girl first approaching Peter Jackson.
Did you see it? Did you like it? Did you find it too faithful or did it stray farther than you wanted? Has it aged well, is its message still relevant? Comment freely, and the best comment will receive the usual prize—ten dollars, suitable for purchasing beer, coffee, or one of those fancy cigarettes Laurie smokes in the comic but not in the movie.
For the first third-to-half of this film, I was ready to give it a 10. I thought it was gorgeous, intelligent, exciting, and everything had a precise purpose (with the possible exception of Dr. Manhattan’s full frontals), mirroring the novel quite well. I was okay with cutting the pirate comic side plot and most of the chapter intermission material. My only real complaint at that point was how Adrian was given a smarmy demeanor and too-obvious hints that he was planning something. In the novel, Adrian wouldn’t have felt or looked “guilty” or “villain-like” for trying to, as he saw it, save the world.
The movie let me down as soon as it omitted the most important elements of one of the most important character’s backstory. Kitty Genevese was just so important to Rorschach’s characterization and motivation, as was the whole “seeing the world in black and white” part of his personality. The mask origin really should have stayed.
After that, hollywood decided to force its own opinion onto the ambiguous ending with Adrian getting beaten up and “lectured” on how what he did was bad, not good. The moment in the novel where he doubts his own morality and asks Jon if he did the right thing was glossed over in the film.
These points made me drop my score from 10/10 to about 6.5/10. The rest of the film was as smooth, elegant, gripping and painful as the novel. But I think they could have easily worked in the Rorschach mask origin instead of cutting it to make way for even more violence and gore than the novel already had.
Wish these comments had an edit option. Meant “Genovese.”
Haven’t seen it, but I’m totally unsurprised by the reviews. Moore’s work has not translated well to the screen in the past and the fact that Watchmen at least started off well should be cause for celebration.
The way I see it, and this is a gross generalization, is that it’s much easier to make a great comics movie than a great graphic novel movie. For the same reason adapting any novel to film is tough. Things are cut, changed, added, changed again, butchered, molested, retconned, etc in order to make it work as a movie. Most comics, long before their film rights are sold have been retconned, butchered, molested etc. by their own writers.
Point is, say you want to make a Batman movie. Get a great screenwriter to write a great script and there you go. You want to make a Sandman movie, well you’re stuck with the storyline as it is. You can’t say, ‘well, let’s reimagine Sandman as a younger omnipotent deity. And let’s write about his epic battle with Cthulu.’ Fans will murder you.
That’s my two cents.
I never read the book, so I had no prior assumptions when the movie began. And I liked it.
Did it have issues? Sure. I’ve read comments all across this great land of Internet which complain that the makeup looked terrible and the effects were cheesy, and especially in the case of Silk Spectre the Elder, that was true. But I was completely consumed by Rorshach. I loved what he was, who he was and how he got there. For me, the movie was his story and the rest of the folks, interesting as they might be, were just the window dressing.
Rorshach was also easily my favorite part of the movie, although I agree with Michael that keeping the origin would have added more. But he is also one of the best parts of the comic, imo.
I dunno, Michael Gordon. “The Crow” was based on a graphic novel, and being a fan of both, I think it held up on its own, despite being different. The sequels, however, are abominations.
To venture into the realm of blasphemy, I don’t much like Alan Moore’s comics. Watchmen was good, but I didn’t like the end. The WTF moment when Cthulhu shows up. Rorshach’s backstory was the most compelling part, also the Dr. Manhattan stuff. I couldn’t get into League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comic because of the gratuitous brutality and rape. V for Vendetta bored me to tears. I never read From Hell, but the movie was rockin’. But from what I read, and what I’ve seen (though not from fanboys), the movies did all right in their translation. It’s sorta hard to make a masterpiece out of something that isn’t that great to begin with, in my opinion. I’m sure the fanboy/girl hordes will now put a hit out on me for this.
I haven’t seen the Watchmen yet, but heard enough about the bones flying out of the broken limbs bit to think it was an insult to the audience’s intelligence. That was the beauty of the graphic novel, that the violence was plausible. No guys flying on wires, just folks that made a hobby of vigilanteism into a a career.
I’m calling it a Rental. And with a March release instead of a May or Summer release, I’m betting the studios knew it wasn’t going to be any “The Dark Knight” either. IF they believed this movie was going to be a tentpole, they would have held off two months. Hell, “Hancock” was a tentpole, and it wasn’t all that great.
Clint – fwiw, Moore’s Miracleman is terrific, as is his work on Swamp Thing, both of which came early in his career. I liked those both very much, but later work has left me cold.
Note: I’m responding because Cat told me too.
)
Suzy and I were surprised at how much we liked the movie. She more than I as I dragged her there for one of ‘my’ movies. I was really thinking it’d be more of a ‘V’ is for Vendetta kind of thangs, but in some ways it was even better. And the idea that a hero isn’t always a good person facinates me.
Cat, I’ll put Miracleman on my reading list. Thanks!
I’ll generally agree with CR– Rorshach’s the best part of the film, which worries me a little.
It felt like a lovely and carefully constructed simulacra of Watchmen. I’ll grant it’s ambitiousness and the amount of care that went into set design and production. However, overall it felt incredibly souless and hollow. There’s a lack of emotional center or sympathy in the film, except for carefully stage-managed bits intended to tug you in that direction. I don’t think that’s true in the original comic where the stories of each of the characters feels like it has depth and resonance. I’m not sure how to put that except that I felt distant from everyone on the screen.
Part of that comes from bad acting in parts: Silk Spectre is bad (even though it is good to see Lucy Lawless getting work), her mom is terrible, Ozymandius is terribly miscast. That last one bothered me– he’s so much…lighter…than he needs to be. I thought Night Owl was well-cast, but his performance kept shifting from good to bad. Nite-Owl’s probably my favorite character from the original, so I was more worried about him than anyone else. A lot of the secondary parts seemed to be filled by people who knew they were in a comic-book movie and sold their performance that way.
Ironically, the best performance comes from the guys wearing the mask for most of the movie: Rorschach. At first his voice bothered me, but eventually I got used to it. When we finally saw him without his mask, I bought it– I really believed in his character. (Although my brother did lean over and say that he thought Seth Green looked really bad…). I have a love/hate with the Rorschach character– in the book he’s great because he’s ambiguous– his actions are psychotic and sociopathic– and Moore deliberately tries to stay above pronouncing judgment on the character. The problem I’ve seen is too much Fanboy love for that kind of absolutist vigilante character– and I’d say taking R without any kind of consideration of the moral quandary led a lot of comics writers and fans down the wrong path for a long time. I think Snyder’s a little in that camp and R. get’s treated a little too heroically. There’s a great issue of The Question (who Rorschach is based on) where he reads Watchmen and tries to emulate R’s approach and methods and ends up rejecting them– that always stuck with me.
(Actually here’s an interesting take on R from The Hurting)
I laughed and giggled at the music several times– the last one I actually guffawed in the theater.
-The music track for the Silk Spectre/Nite Owl love scene…which I remember last being used in Shreck. And we had to hear the whole song, with its goofy opening verses?
-The music in the Mars sequence tries to lift from Philip Glass and does it badly. I don’t have any problem with composers lifting from others– Hans Zimmer and Basil P do it. But this was such a hamfisted take on delicate music that I started giggling.
-DEUS IRAE! DEUS IRAE! LOOK UPON OZYMANDIUS AND DESPAIR!
*sigh* On the plus side, the elevator music in the Veidt building was a muzak version of Tears for Fears “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”.
I think part of the problem, obviously, comes from the structure of the original book. Those chapters, so carefully constructed, don’t hold up to the kinds of squashing and rijiggering that Snyder does. He’s trying hard to keep things exactly the same in some places– where that becomes a straight-jacket and limits him. On the other hand, where he does change things up dramatically, I don’t like the results– the Veidt narrative in his building for example. I thought the Graveyard sequence was a shining moment in managing to translate the comic’s structure to the screen and I enjoyed that.
Blue Wang. Yes– apparently they had orders to keep it in the shot.
Other reactions:
*I liked Silk Spectre’s costume– I thought it worked. However, why did she need to have her thighs exposed like that? Wouldn’t you run the costume or the boots all the way up to the hips? Strange.
*Why does Nite Owl have to see Rorschach die? That’s a brilliant solitary moment of quiet desperation in the original book. The KHAAAANNNNN! moment that follows feels very fake– I don’t object to changes (like I can see why you’d cut the Black Freighter, the newstands stuff, the cops investigation etc) but that change didn’t add anything and in fact diluted the impact. I know some people who felt the not having Dan see this was a plot hole, but I didn’t.
*Ye-gods that was bloody– and gratuitously so in some cases. I don’t mind blood and bone crunch, but wow– and the electric saw…unnecessary.
*It makes me appreciate the framing– and especially the coloring– in the original GN.
*Do we have to see Rorschach menacing Little Figure in the bathroom through the swinging door? Do we have to see all the blood come seeping out? In the comic it is a much more subtle joke that works without going overboard or having to spell it out. That just felt like a horndog love-note to Rorschach fans and people who have to be told everything or they won’t get it.
*Not that they could– I can’t imagine coming into that film cold. How could you follow what’s going on?
My favorite scene from the book ended up being my favorite scene in the movie– the exchange between Rorschach and Nite Owl where R says, hesitatingly, “You’re a good friend Dan.” It is great exchange, really building on everything we’ve seen so far.
So overall: I didn’t hate it, I didn’t love it,– I just felt, well…meh…and neutral…like I was watching a documentary or a museum video. That’s despite some pretty interesting action sequences. Here’s a director who has clearly watched Oldboy over and over again.
Was the movie relevant?
During the rape scene (which I won’t elaborate on so as not to spoil the storyline), someone in the audience made a joke, which a large part of the audience laughed at. I didn’t hear the joke, but I caught the tone of it, and the laughter. It was not releasing nervous tension. It was base and unfeeling, along the “You know you like it bi%@#” lines.
Rorschach would have had something to say about many of the audience members that day, I think.
I can only assume many of them went to see the movie for the action, the violence, the special effects. The movie’s messages or conversation-worthy themes seemed entirely lost on them. If I had to guess, I’d say many of them probably left saying “The Comedian was bad-ass, and the Silk Spectre was freakin hot, but I didn’t get the ending.”
Now, don’t get me wrong. I love action, and am entertained by certain forms of violence.
But, for example, I also finally saw Death Race. And I think, similarly, the irony of this violent action movie’s premise being that audiences who want violent action would fuel live death races in the future was probably lost on many audience members.
I’d say we have not really evolved past the Roman mob. We just have the technology to fake the bloody deaths that they screamed for, to distract and entertain the mob through a shiny box rather than a coliseum. And it wouldn’t take much for us to go back to not faking it. It is not such a large leap from Nascar crashes and Ultimate Fighting Championship and death sentences for prisoners and Reality Television to having real Death Races.
Heck, our nation currently holds the proud honor of having more of its population in prison than any other major nation. We are facing an economic depression and record unemployment. The government is giving us bread. It is not such a leap to imagine they may also give us games at some point.
But I digress.
I’m glad they didn’t try to “update” Watchmen to make the nuclear threat be China or Korea or Iran. Or to replace the nuclear fears of the ’80s with the terrorism fears of the 2k’s. But just because the movie didn’t dumb itself down and try to clearly map to current events, it still maps pretty well to our human condition today, our fears and hopes, the struggle to balance freedom and security, the debates and differences over the Iraq war and the war on terrorism, etcetera.
To question and challenge the meaning and power of good and evil, right and wrong, forgiveness and sacrifice, of our obligations and responsibilty as humans and citizens, that should always be relevant.
Randy
Was Ozi the hero or the villain?
One of the most obvious questions that comes out of Watchmen is, would you kill 15 million people if you thought it would make the world a “better place?”
If so, how would you define “better place,” and why do you think your definition is more relevant than, say, a terrorist with a nuclear bomb?
And to what degree does the probability of imminent global annihilation affect that answer?
And then, where do you draw the line at sacrifice for the greater good? 15 million? 1 million? 400,000 civilians? 40,000? And how much of a guarantee of change, and what level of expected change, do you need in order to justify taking action?
PS – I saw the movie on IMAX. And all I’ll say about that is damn, you have to be brave as an actor or actress to get naked if you know you’re going to be displayed in all your high-definition nekkid glory 8 stories tall.
And while I thought Dr. Manhattan was well done, I’m glad he wasn’t in 3D.
Duck!
Yep, I think acting honours have to go to Malin Akerman’s hair and Billy Crudup’s penis.
As a comics geek fanboy of the right era (mid-20s when Watchmen first came out), I thought the movie broadly did as good a job could possibly be expected; the omissions were the omissions that had to be made, the changes were probably the changes that had to be made. But I had one HUGE beef with it, and that was: who the hell decided to make Ozymandias a homosexual pedophile?
When Nite Owl opens up the computer, there is a clear folder labelled “Boys”, and there’s no doubt what it’s there to imply.
I would have no great problem with Ozymandias being portrayed as gay (though I don’t think there was any such subtext in the comic – I felt he was simply asexual, seeing himself as beyond normal human concerns; a counterpoint to Dr Manhattan, who actually had moved far beyond human (wherease Veidt merely deluded himself that he had) but was unwilling to accept it). But to conflate homosexuality with pedophilia just gets my proverbial goat. That’s a standard gutter journalism smear tactic (in fact, most pedophiles are straight, just like the rest of the population, and most gays aren’t pedophiles, just like the rest of the population) and for me it had NO place in this movie.
Wow, Brian, I didn’t catch that. That seems….a poor choice indeed.
This may be a case of TMI but in gay culture those who are submissive are often referred to as boys regardless of age. It may simply be suggesting that Ozy likes to be on top. I remember seeing that folder and wondering what it was there for, but the suggestion of pedophilia did not come to me at all.
Overall I thought the film was successful in doing what it needed to do, which was condense an extremely complex story into a little under 3 hours without horribly mangling it. Those of us who were familiar with the graphic novel did not have to sit through something that perverted the original, and those who had no experience with the comic could watch the movie, enjoy it, and become intrigued over the source material, perhaps enough to try it out.
I agree though that the two biggest disappointments were how quickly Rorschach’s background was covered, and how the movie was settled. Dr. Manhattan’s statement to Ozy “There is no end.” is an essential part of the picture, and having someone else say the words in another context really destroyed the power of it for me. A lot of the moral ambiguity was lost, but there was really no helping it considering the time restraints the movie was given.
I would have left out the sex scene, which had our audience in stitches. I understand that the movie to an extent wanted to show the connections between violence and sex, and how giving into the costume ends Nite Owl’s impotency, but having the audience laugh out loud kinda ruined the entire point.
I didn’t like Ozymandias at all, if for a different reason than Brian is stating. My group and I did notice that Oxy had been changed from what we remembered as a basically asexual character to a gay man, but we missed the pedophile connection. My issue was that I thought Ozy lacked the “yes I’m a jerk” charm needed for the role; he had no charm whatsover, which made his achievements and his scenes completely unbelievable.
*** spoilers and hints of such ahead ***
I don’t know if it was entirely the proper thing to do, especially when evaluating a movie, but I went into the theater fully intending to treat the movie as a video supplement to graphic novel, knowing full well that some things would be cut (the news stand, the Black Freighter, parts of the psychiatrist’s story, etc.). Taking that approach, I think I enjoyed the movie more than if I had tried to evaluate it exclusively on its own (so am I quietly leaning toward a bad review now?). I found that some of the scenes they did focus on expanded on the original versions fairly well, and added some intensity (some people have complained about the violence in the movie, but I thought some of the scenes in the graphic novel seemed oddly sanitized — although my imagination tended to fill in while I read it).
One thing I found simultaneously effective yet somewhat infeasible was the change in the false flag operation near the end, with Dr. Manhattan framed for the attacks. On one level, it made sense, because it’d be easy to see how people could conclude that Dr. Manhattan would do such a thing, considering his freakout incident in the studio. But I was also left shaking my head at the fact that Dr. Manhatten seemed, perhaps, to decide he’d quietly acquiesce to his new status as bogeyman since he was leaving the galaxy anyway, because this scene brought up a question in my head: would an absentee bogeyman be as effective as a present one when it comes to uniting the populace? (I suppose Adrian could always launch another Dr. Manhattan-style attack if he needed to.)
And maybe that could lead to an idea for another super villain…
ABSENTEE BOGEYMAN
“Oh! Woe is us! Our formerly united peoples are breaking off into their old factions! How can we live in a state of peace and mutual cooperation if our comm
on enemy has abandoned us? Where, oh where are you, Absentee Bogeyman?”
The trick for the superhero in the story will be to get Absentee Bogeyman to show up.
I agree with Mari about the sex scene. It’s so wonderfuly underplayed in the comic, and I felt that the full-out sex (and porn music) took away from the point, which was the connection the two characters had.
I think my main problem with the movie is that it was done, ultimately, as an action movie. I never think of Watchmen as an “action” story. So the action movie cliches, like a big sex scene and tons of extra gore, felt extremely out of place to me. I think of Watchmen a lot more as a mystery/character study. I did feel the movie was good overall, but some stylistic choices threw me off.