Most great comic book movies—Spider-Man 2, The Dark
Knight, X2: X-Men United—respect their source material
but tell stories that could only be told on a movie screen. They are stellar adaptations. Watchmen leans more toward recent
movies like Sin City and Zack Snyder’s own 300 in its
slavish devotion to the source material; if you were to freeze-frame
the movie at certain points, you’d have a giant reproduction of panels
from the comic. On one level, it’s incredibly satisfying that the
director takes comics that seriously. But on the other hand, Snyder
seems to miss the point of what makes Watchmen such an amazing
comic book.
You can’t explain the plot of Watchmen (in a world on the
verge of nuclear Armageddon, a band of retired superheroes gathers
together to avenge the murder of one of their own) without doing the
book a disservice. This is because there are two remarkable aspects to
Watchmen, and the plot isn’t one of them. First, and perhaps
most importantly, it’s a marvel of symmetry, and that gorgeous,
intricate structure amplifies the story; one of the characters is a
watchmaker’s son, and another is the ever-
scheming World’s
Smartest Man. In copying the structure of the books, Snyder has
produced an oddly paced film, and the inevitable time constraints smear
the symmetry into something unrecognizable.
Second, Watchmen made it impossible for almost anyone to
write a great superhero comic book for nearly two decades afterward.
Using clever satire and well-placed logic, it deconstructed the
superhero genre in such a profound way that the best writers are just
starting to shake off Watchmen‘s influence now. For this to be a
truly great adaptation, it would have to render every other superhero
movie silly and small in comparison. It decidedly does not.
Part of the problem is in the acting: Malin Akerman as the Silk
Spectre, particularly, seems carved of wood (although she’s a beautiful
sculpture, and her nude scenes are awe-
inspiring). Patrick Wilson,
as the dorky, impotent Nite Owl, brings a human heart to the bombast,
but he falls flat at the very end of the film, when he has to hit all
the superhero marks—screaming, grimacing, talking tough—in
15 uncomfortable minutes. Billy Crudup plays the God-powered Dr.
Manhattan as a giant nude blue Charlie Brown sulking on Mars because he
stopped believing in miracles (between Crudup’s impressive blue wang
and Wilson’s bare ass, there’s a lot of male nudity in Watchmen,
which is rather refreshing for a mainstream major studio film). Only
Jackie Earle Haley—with his face covered for nearly the entire
film as the psycho vigilante Rorschach—manages to transcend the
dialogue, which reads so perfectly on the page but smacks of
artificiality when spoken aloud. His Rorschach both parodies the
right-wing wish fulfillment of crime fighters like Batman or The
Punisher and speaks to a vulnerability that very few tough guys, with
the exception of Clint Eastwood, are able to display on-screen. It’s
troubling that Rorschach, so obviously an unhinged wing nut in the
books, comes across as more of a sympathetic character here—the
audience burst into applause when Rorschach tortures and maims
criminals in a way that is supposed to be more horrifying than
inspiring.
There’s a lot of ambition: Pat Buchanan, Henry Kissinger, Annie
Leibovitz, and Lee Iacocca were never characters in a Batman movie. The
World Trade Center looms, self-importantly, in the back of quite a few
shots. The 163-minute running time passes quickly, and the special
effects are beautiful. But without spoiling anything, the ending of the
movie, which completely differs from the comic, seems superficially
smarter at first, but falls apart under the stress of a few seconds’
consideration.
After Watchmen was published, comics got a lot more explicit,
violent, and crass. This was the understandable reaction from mediocre
writers who couldn’t re-create Watchmen‘s complexity. Snyder,
likewise, doesn’t seem to understand the difference between mature and
explicit: Hands get lopped off and bones pierce skin in splattercore
scenes that go for the plain and simple gross-out. But that wasn’t
Watchmen‘s point. Nobody ran in slow motion from a fireball in
the comic-book version, and Snyder can’t resist throwing in a good
seven or eight of these sorts of clichéd action scenes into
Watchmen. He can’t trust himself to be subtle, and instead he
batters the viewer half to death with symbolism (especially in the
soundtrack: “The Sound of Silence” over a funeral scene, “All Along the
Watchtower” in the lead-up to a climactic showdown). If this were any
other superhero movie, it would be a serviceable bit of eye candy. But
because it’s called Watchmen, it’s got to be considered a
failure. 
i saw it today at cinerama and was pleasantly surprised. my expectations were that it was going to be pretty awful. as it turns out, i liked it more than i anticipated. sure, it’s flawed in some big ways, but i’m more impressed by “watchmen” than i was by “the dark knight returns,” and in many ways, i see both of those movies as occupying very very similar territory thematically and aesthetically. “watchmen” was the more interesting of the two.
Paul,
After seeing the movie, I mostly agree with your take on it. Though I appreciated seeing some of the action scenes beefed up to movie-tasticness (prison riot, the glass structure shattering on Mars), the slow motion and gratuitous blood were a bit much.
Manhattan’s blue wang should get an award of its own.
Could you explain why the ending fell apart for you?
Word for word exactly what I thought. I didn’t like it for exactly those reasons. I mean it was like, sure I could watch this or I could just read the book, which is better.
@Casey: If you can read Watchmen in 163 minutes you should contact the people at Guinness. This isn’t an either/or situation. The book and the film are not mutually exclusive.
Hey kids,
Too many questions for me to address directly (I do have to say, though, that my education is a year and a half as a part-time student at University of Southern Maine, so I had to laugh at the “five-figure education” comment; my education barely scraped four figures, if that. ((And now all the “how could you let a state college dropout review a movie” comments will begin.)) I do want you all to know that I appreciate how someone could love this movie.
Hell, I’d probably see this one again just because it was so fucking pretty, and it’s clearly the best Alan Moore movie adaptation as of yet (which is damning with very faint praise.) And I will watch the (hopefully four-hour) Director’s Cut when it’s released, for sure.
But I stand by my review one hundred percent. I hope people will work out their feelings for this movie in this thread, because it’s surely more than just a straight “Loved it/hated it” proposition. It’s a monster of a movie. These sorts of threads work really well for that kind of communication, and this is a movie to communicate about.
Oh, and P.S.: I love Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake so much it hurts, and anyone who says The Stranger never publishes positive reviews should read my review of Coraline, which was an adaptation of a book and which I loved, both as an adaptation and on its own merits.
Paul,
That is fucking awesome that you went to USM. I knew there was a reason I liked you.
I spent about 8 years or so in Newport. My folks took me to a black bears football game, and some retahhhhhded kid pulled a knife on me and my friend.
We laughed at him and said, “Ah U kiddin’? This is fuckin Maine.”
Wicked awesome!
I now live in LA and write shitty screenplays that you may one day hate.
Much love,
Selena Gomez
@Paul I loved his Dawn of the Dead remake too! I didn’t like 300. So it’s not like he’s some sort of magic director.
I also just got back from seeing Watchmen a third time (friends were going, I’m not a psycho, leave me alone) and I still enjoy it. However, after a third viewing I noticed that the ending did drag more than it did on the first or second views. I do think it is due to Veidt’s lengthy exposition. I’m not sure what the right way to get around that would have been. He clearly explains what he did, like a Scooby-Doo villain, in both the comic and the movie. Hrm.
Also, so far 1 friend (who tried to read the graphic novel but quit 10 pages in because it was boring) HATED the movie, 2 that haven’t read it did not like it, 1 that has read it did not like it, 1 that has read it loved it, and 3 that have not read it loved it. Paul is right, this is a fascinating conversation piece.
A common thread in all cases is the fourth act (the end). However, others loved/hated events inside and outside of that. Not a single person would have preferred the squid though, which I was relived to hear.
Also, I would have never guessed Paul had a five figure education.
OH SNAP! 🙂
Paul, I went to see the movie yesterday as part of a work event (there were at least a hundred of us) and was dreading it, to the point that I was keeping to myself my secret hope that the movie could possibly be anywhere near as great as the original comic was in the mid 1980s. Somehow, I felt like the movie failing or succeeding would reflect on me if anyone realized how much I was geeking out at the prospect of a movie adaptation I never had a right to expect to see when I was reading this comic miniseries an issue at a time in art school.
I think the movie was mostly well-received by my coworkers (mostly the ones that would have ever watched the movie to begin with, even if it hadn’t been free and got us out of work for three hours – don’t think it won any new converts), though almost all of them I heard from thought the final third was the weakest, the point where the “supervillain’s evil plan” kicks in.
I think the ending in the movie is no more or less valid than the one in the original comic. In fact, the comic’s ending would have made no sense in this movie without a rewrite of the entire script. I think I may even like this ending better, given the entire film’s slow build of Manhattan as a fearsome, Godlike being and the theme of a disengaged God unwilling to interfere in human affairs no matter how gory. It’s more “Day The Earth Stood Still” than “Outer Limits: Architects of Fear” than the source material, but in the movie it’s valid.
The problem is the same in the movie, though, as the comic — that whole plotline is nowhere near as compelling (or deftly done) as the filling in of character backstory and alternate worldbuilding. And this is where the movie almost matches the comic — with the possible exception of Laurie (I disagree that Ackerman was wooden, though — I thought she was fine; she just didn’t get enough story attention), the characters and their world are beautifully fleshed out and revealed in the course of the film with so much more material from the comic packed in than I ever expected.
One thing I definitely agree with you on is that the violence and gore were gratuitously over the top (the nudity, too, for that matter) and unnecessary. The scene I really viscerally disliked the most was the alleyway fight scene where Dan and Laurie stabbed and maimed their way through a crowd of thugs, casually murdering them as they went. I couldn’t shake the feeling that Snyder put a lot of that stuff in the movie to intentionally insure an “R” rating.
I think any fan of the original comic or superhero comics in general owes it to themselves to see this movie. It’s not really for everyone, and won’t have anywhere near the mass appeal of The Dark Knight, but I think it’s a surprisingly effective and powerful adaptation of the inarguably superior source material. Granted, it’s completely unnecessary, but at the same time, it’s pretty darn good.
I liked the movie, and have not read the graphic novel (though I might). I had no problem absorbing the back story, and thought the way it was presented is a strong point of the movie. The blue wang was indeed impressive, but so was all of Crudup’s digitally enhanced physique. Squid or not, diehard fanboys were never going to be satisfied with a film screen version of the seminal comic.
decent review. but a bad watchmen adaptation can stand up to your average superhero blockbusters and outweigh them easily. it’s like a steak dinner where the cuts are a little overcooked, in comparison to a qwik-e mart microwaved burrito. Thats right Hulk and Punisher, I’m talking aboot you. Movie coulda been better, but it could have been a LOT worse, and it wasn’t. Plus the first silk spider with her 1940s big hair? Hot. Also the goth-lezzie. schwing? no? too retro?
All this smack talk of comics and their inevitable movie adaptations and not once has anybody mentioned “Tank Girl”.
How penile of you, Paul.
I saw the movie today. Yes it omits some of the content of the book, But speaking as an informed fan: The Movie Freakin’ Rocked! Better ending than the book. Don’t listen to this Douchebag,fake movie critic. This movie is worth watching on the big screen.
I saw the movie yesterday. I hadn’t yet read the novel, but thought I would after the movie. But, I HATED THE MOVIE. I walked out of it; it’s the first movie I’ve ever left midway through. I still want to read the book, but I think I’ll have to wait a while, until the memory of the movie leaves me…
Deeply loved the book. Lightly loved the movie. My feelings for one are not based on the other. They are two different things.
One of my biggest problems with the movie vs. the book, for instance, is that the movie portrays Laurie and Dan as murderers. This robs them of the heroism they have (and their colleagues don’t) in the book. But, in the movie Zack Snyder made, I have to admit it works. Because the movie is not the book.
You simply barely reviewed the movie, and then only through the lens of the book. The movie succeeds much more often than it fails and it doesn’t fail in ways that are fatal. That makes it better than the vast majority of films most of us will see this year.
And I’ve disliked everything Snyder has done before, by the way. But those films aren’t this film, either, any more than this film is the book.
Finally, since others have commented on the word-of-mouth, everyone I know who’s seen this film so far (at least a dozen people of different types, most of whom had never heard of Watchmen before) loved this movie, too.
Oh please… this movie was pretty horrific. The movie, as a separate piece, judged by the standards of which movies are judged by (not the graphic novel on which it’s based on) was not well done. Asides from the opening scenes, most of it was oddly paced, displayed bad editing choices (the soundtrack in particular; the songs themselves were good songs, but when paired with the imagery, they were laughable) ideas in which may have been explained in the book, were overly simplified and/or used cliches in order to get the point cross. And don’t even get me started on the blue penis, and awful sex scene. Really the only good thing about this movie was the portrayal and look of Rorschach. I think Paul hit all the right spots in his review, especially the one about subtlety. Fans of the book need to be able to make the separation between the movie and the book, and understand that when one is criticized, it does not always reflect on the other.
-1 disagree
I read Watchmen as a kid (loved it), picked it up again as an adult (loved it), and felt this movie adaption was overall just fantastic (loved it). Crudup’s Dr Manhattan exhibits more humanity that I thought possible. Of course, Haley’s Rorschach blew my mind, especially his last scene.
I have a couple questions for you, Paul, that I want to throw out before I go trying to post my own review. First of all–When someone admits that an adaptation follows the letter of the source material, then criticizes the architects of the adaptation for failing to properly capture the “spirit” of said source, is he not simply making the “spirit” of the work into another letter, or another aspect of the letter? In other words, are you not just finding another crucial detail (a personal favorite crucial detail, at that) that the adapter was supposed to “get,” presumably at the expense of something else the filmmaker found more compelling?
A sub-question on that–is the content of a work like Watchmen (the book) determined by the author(s–and it’s worth noting, here, that I don’t necessarily think Gibbons and Moore were entirely on the same page as to the content, which means any dissonance Snyder added to the work was folded into an already dissonant work), or by the reader(s)? I’m slightly less postmodern than the next guy, probably less so than The Stranger judged as a whole entity (I think Charles Mudede will be “Exhibit A” in Foucault’s trial for crimes against humanity), but I DO tend to subscribe to the notion that the “meaning” of a work has more to do with the subjective relationship between audience and “author function” than with the stated intent of the author-in-fact.
Another thought–Could the vid-game styling and gleeful graphic violence of the action sequences be considered Snyder’s own attempt to play with cinematic conventions in the way Moore and Gibbons played with comic book conventions? Music videos and video games, after all, are an inescapable part of modern cinematic language, as much as formal purists hate for it to be so (I say that as a part-time, somewhat reluctant formal purist), and are particularly integral to the recent evolution of the superhero movie . . . no?
If you haven’t already gathered, I’m coming out on the positive side of an internal struggle about the film. I’m impressed with how much of the plot they crammed into the movie; how the length, the male nudity, the graphic violence, and the complexity of the plot defied the laws of big-studio filmmaking; with the sheer, raw beauty of Haley’s performance, which, for me, eclipses Ledger’s turn this last summer to become the finest supporting performance in a comic movie since . . . well, ever.
I was so prepared to hate Ackerman that she pleasantly surprised me by being more or less adequate. I thought she was miscast–too young, too pretty (though really not my type; for both better casting AND being more my type, I’d have gone for Maura Tierney). Wilson wasn’t much better. Goode had the right manner, if I didn’t quite buy the notion that he was that physically powerful. Morgan was perfectly cast. Crudup was . . . enhanced. I liked his detached, soft-spoken manner, in any case.
The violence WAS a little over-the-top, fetishizing what I think the book was critiquing. But cinema really can’t help but fetishize violence, can it? Besides, by making a fetish of the violence, it seems to me that Snyder almost plays right into Moore’s critique despite himself; the violence in the movie is part of a vast, culture-wide suffusion of pornography and fabricated gratification that the book critiques (even as Moore casts a jaundiced eye on his fellow critics–grudging empathy for the reactionary view, perhaps?).
I haven’t seen Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead; I’m too sentimental about Romero’s. 300 was like one of my bad trips back in college (which I didn’t finish, either, Paul, so maybe neither of us is qualified to make these kinds of calls)–a somewhat regrettable experience, but preferable, at least at the time, to a sober weekend.
Watchmen? I liked it. A lot. Maybe even loved it, for all its flaws. Snyder, it seems to me, is neither fish nor fowl . . . or rather, he’s both fish AND fowl: geek and jock; fanboy and frat boy. I can sympathize with that, and I can appreciate the tension it brings to his films, perhaps unintentionally (which is how B-movies usually expose their complexity). Maybe Watchmen needed the next John Sayles, rather than a journeyman John Carpenter, but it’s hard for me to complain that it got the latter.
Overall I have to respectfully disagree. I for one could not stand the dark knight and felt that the only thing that saved it was Heath Ledger’s acting. I grew up with comics, especially batman and its length and overdone lines made me want to flee the movie theater as soon as possible. I will agree that I felt the watchmen movie was compacted to fit into its time constraints but we have to remember that snyder is making something that many have called unfilmable. I think that within the set parameters he did well. Though he told the story well, I still feel as if something was lost on the screen from not reading the novel. However the point of these movies is to adapt the story and that is what he did. To expect the movie to bring to life the glory that is a comic book is not going to happen. Like anything else people that read comics get it and those that don’t, just don’t. It was adapted so that the general public who are not going to read a graphic novel or not understand what is so great about it, will come off with understanding of why it changed comics for good.
100% wrong—with disrespect.
I agree that the WTF moment at the end of the comic totally makes sense in the story of the comic but would have been off-putting given the structure of the movie. I think I understand what our reviewer here means though when he talks about the final point falling under a few seconds of consideration.
I agree that there was some severe splattercore that was a bit too disturbing.
Part of the problem of adaptation is maintaining truth and connection to the source material while making it meaningful to an audience who doesn’t feel a need to put up with the soap-opera antics of evil twins, fake deaths, alternate universes with children of current heroes, random space alien sagas, and everything else the X-Men have put us through in the past 30 years. The Dark Knight and Batman Begins did a fantastic job of taking its source material and incorporating meaningful moments from the comics (like Arkham’s blowing open or Rah’s Al Ghul’s plot to destroy Gotham) into the story in a new, inventive narrative. By comparison, I felt that V for Vendatta failed here: it was an admirable attempt to graft the new ideas of post-9/11 terror onto Alan Moore’s book, but something made it all a little superficial (at least, for a superhero movie).
There is a place that the Watchmen movie failed, and I would say it is in finding this new and meaningful dimension to the story first told in the comic. The movie was crafted well and did an excellent job of maintaining its commitment to the source material, something where movies like Superman Returns and the new Punisher: War Zone failed (IMHO). However, I didn’t walk out of the movie and say to myself, “Wow, I had never thought of Dr. Manhattan in that way before” or “they really did a good job of showing why the Silk Spectre went back to the Comedian” or “that extra scene between Dr. Manhattan and Ozymandias really added depth to the story.” For me, this would have pushed the movie from a quality faithful adaptation to rock-out, slam-bang winner. Despite this particular lack, the movie was an honest and careful retelling of a great story and worth the money to see it on the big screen.
Funny thing…
I HATED the graphic novel, but LOVED the movie. Figure that….
Soupytwist is right. Films should be judged on their own merits. Film is an inherently different medium than comics and “Watchmen” the film must be judged as a thing-in-itself. Besides, the most salient point of the comic to me has always been the inherent dangers of the superhero idea, and the film does a good job of distilling that one.
just got back from the film…
Did anyone else notice that the intro… the first five minutes of the film was such an excellent mind fux, I haven’t had my brain jarred in a theatre like that since training day. I would have payed twice admission to see it.
Also nogs at TANK GIRL, but it seems that you can’t separate film with it’s attendant cost and production value from era as well as some other media. It was good for the nineties.
Also…big ass nogs to the big blue wang… long may it hang!
S
Anyone saying, here or elsewhere, that the film was too violent needs to read the book again and pay attention this time. Then shut the fuck up.
I do think it’s interesting that one of the complaints about the film I’ve seen from numerous reviews is that it’s too faithful to the book. This is a glaring contradiction, and must be the first adaptation in history to be reviled for not deviating enough from the source material.
Stop bloviating and just admit the movie rocked.
There was a blue penis in this movie!
I really would have appreciated seeing that specified next to the “R” on the poster.
I don’t want to look at some other guys wang!
Only gay people look at that.
My review can be read by clicking on my screen name below.