Cricket Movie Review: Watchmen

(A warning, before I begin: This is a fairly long entry.)

Watchmen.

A book that’s often considered one of the greatest graphic novels yet written. While I do refute that claim, it’s nonetheless a personal favourite of mine. Alan Moore was one of the first to really deconstruct the notion of a superhero and, in a way, make us sort of glad they don’t exist. It took a couple readings for it to grow on me, and sometime after that I found myself dressing up as Rorschach for a convention and sporting a blood-spattered comedian pin on a favourite old jacket decorated with other comics-related pins (which I refer to as, logically and affectionately, my “comics jacket”). So needless to say I was excited about the adaption, to see how it panned out.

It’s also long been considered an “unfilmable” book, and the history of its being made into a film has been a long and arduous one filled to bursting with problems. There’s been tons of various scripts by just as many tons of screenwriters and directors, with tons of different perspectives an adaptations. It’s something that’s boiled in development hell for years, and don’t even get me started on the legal disputes that embarked during the development of the version that’s finally made it into theaters that, for a time, looked like it might keep it out of them. So on one hand, I certainly recognize the challenges associated with the conversion. Think about it—think about audience alone, when you decide to make a movie based on a very dense and layered piece of writing that’s highly admired by until recently a fairly niche population. A movie will attract a wider range of people than a book potentially will, and all this has to be accounted for. In the audience there will be uberfans, casual fans, people vaguely familiar with the work on some level, people who aren’t aware there was a work the movie is based on, people who didn’t even like the work but hope the retelling redeems it for them somehow, and even more. How do you create something that will appeal to all these? That will contain enough winking inside references, charactorial correctness, and major plot detail inclusion to sate the fanboys/girls but present things in such a way as to not be confusing or exclusive to people that are less familiar?


I ask all this and think about all this because I wanted to be as objective as I could when I was analyzing this movie. I wanted to be sure I was (am) reviewing it as a film adaption of the comic, not as the book in movie form, as a film adaption. As related as they are through the use of panels in particular, comics are a different medium from film, and some things that will work for one might not necessarily work for another. I wanted to make sure I didn’t end up nerd-raging over really minor details, because I want to be more useful of a reviewer than that. (That said, bits and pieces of fanboy-rant will probably inevitably pop up here and there. Ignore these as best you can.)

So.
All that in mind then, I think I’ll do this in my usual review format.

Basic, non-spoiler plot synopsis

In an alternate mid-80s where Nixon has managed to swing extra presidential terms, the threat of a nuclear war between the US and Russia looms. This is also a world where superheroes—or at least costumed vigilantes, Dr. Manhattan is the only one with true superpowers—exist, or once existed. A bill called the Keene Act has made superheroes illegal unless they work for the government. Threat of nukes aside, life is relatively decent until a man named Edward Blake, formerly known as The Comedian, is murdered, piquing the interest of the one vigilante who laughed at and ignored the Keene Act—the conspiratorial and now-psychopathic Rorschach. His attempts to investigate The Comedian’s murder and warn his former friends and crimefighting partners of his theory of a “mask killer” will eventually lead all of them to a grim exploration of how far an obsession for justice and peace can push someone. In addition to this, the book at least, less so the movie, was an exploration of superheroes themselves and the kind of psychology it takes to put on brightly coloured spandex and go beat up other people in brightly coloured spandex.

The Good

As Snyder proved he could do with 300, Watchmen is a very visually pretty film. There’s lots of eye candy to be taken in and lots of little background elements that will put little knowing smiles on fans’ faces. A surprising amount of the story is preserved, and is mostly tied together with coherence. A fair amount of Moore’s dialogue is also preserved, though I do sort of wish there had been more of it. There was a lot of noise made over the costume redesigns (Nite Owl’s, Silk Spectre’s, and Ozymandias’ looks were all changed for the film) but this was something I was mostly fine with (the exception to this will be, of course, under the “bad” section). I like both versions, really…the comic’s designs for the outfits work for it but would look sort of clunky and silly with modern sensibilities of superhero costume design when applied to a movie screen and vice versa for the comic.

Most of the characterization was also spot-on for the majority of the time (exceptions will again be noted in the “bad” section), which was actually something that surprised me. The previews really did a bad job of capturing Rorschach’s dialogue especially, and I was worried he’d come off too “tough-guy” and not enough “distant, mumbling crazy with conspiracy theories.” It takes Jack Haley a little time to get it right (and there’s one major characterization hiccup in his role I’ll address), but for most of the film he’s a very true-to-spirit Rorschach (and his mask looked awesome: good job, CG department!). Billy Crudup also does a far better job as Dr. Manhattan than I was anticipating. His flat, cold delivery and matter-of-fact tone of voice, almost but not quite entirely devoid of emotion (something that’s normally considered a bad thing in a movie), lent a perfect air of unsettlingness to the so-superhuman-he’s-inhuman character. There were some complaints that he looked too CG, and while I do agree there are moments of this, he is supposed to be a character that sticks out visually anyway—he’s a big blue glowing nudist, for crying out loud (Ah yes, something I should add as an aside to non-readers: they pull no punches on Dr. Manhattan’s nudity, something I personally appreciated because he would have looked weird as an androgene and it was done respectfully, but if you have understandable issues with glowing blue genitals, you’ve been warned). Patrick Wilson makes for a wonderfully milquetoasty Nite Owl—a man who’s a lovably awkward geek without his costume. Jeffery Morgan’s role as the Comedian has some issues, but they seem mostly script-related, he definitely gets into the character with what he’s given.
The Bad

First against the wall is Snyder’s music choices. Many of them are just baffling, others ill-considered, and this may be the first time I’ve seen music choices actually hurt a film. Many of them add unintentional humor, and others just seem to be there to restate “hey guys, it’s 1985!” As a couple examples, “99 Luftballoons” seems thrown in there for literally no reason, and the now painfully cliché “Ride of the Valkyries” backs one of Dr. Manhattan’s scenes of decimation in Vietnam.
Next to be addressed are the characterization issues. While the scenes Jeffery Morgan are given as The Comedian are very in-character, he becomes entirely unlikeable. Part of the magic of Moore’s original writing of The Comedian is that while he was undoubtedly a jerk, a monster even, that did terrible things, there was still enough humanity in his presentation that you could sympathize with him. A lot of that humanity is lost here. The one “sympathy” scene they kept—his drunken, rambling apology to former supervillain Moloch—is also sort of botched due to an almost complete monologue rewrite that hardly makes him seem remorseful or worried at all.
While Jack Haley’s role as Rorschach is mostly faithful, his first several lines in the movie come across as ridiculously melodramatic, even in the light of a character who is by nature melodramatic.
Malin Ackerman’s performance as Silk Spectre mostly works, but she can’t seem to decide whether she wants to be the outspoken tough-girl of the comic or something a bit girlier.
And then there’s Matthew Goode’s rendition of Ozymandias. That one in particular has gotten a lot of venom from reviewers, and honestly…I have to say I kind of side with them. Part of it I’m hoping is script-related, but Ozymandias comes the closest to being characterized wrong. In the comic, Ozzy certainly came across as a bit pompous, but here he practically sneers. A man who should be a well-intentioned but slightly snobbish celebrity genius becomes here essentially as a B-list Bond villain. The forced German accent that he keeps slipping in and out of doesn’t help that perception either. And in what is admittedly mostly a nitpick, I can’t say I care for his costume redesign. Granted his original one looked silly even in the comic, but here he looks like some sort of odd rendition of Robin. And as long as I’m mentioning costumes and visuals, I’ll add in another nitpick: Nixon’s nose looked ridiculous. It had to be said.
Then there is the “mystery” aspect of the story. The book’s main plot is a whodunit for its first two-thirds or so, The Comedian being dead when the story starts, and when the killer is discovered it’s a genuine surprise in the first reading. Here, a lot of the mystery is sucked out—granted, I knew who the killer was already, but I’m pretty sure with all the rather blunt hint-dropping they do before the “big reveal” that people who don’t know the plot will be able to figure it out long before the characters do.
Actually, that sense of bluntness pervades a lot of what themes the movie decides to keep from the book, which I think stems from sort of an over-attempt to make sure the largest number of possible moviegoers “gets it.” The Comedian’s perspective on humanity, in particular, is all but bashed over our heads from the mouths of half the characters in a manner akin to Zack Snyder sitting next to us, jabbing us gleefully in the ribs and going “get it? Huh? Get it?” Both Julie’s discovery of her father and the Dr. Manhattan-as-possible-literal-god seem to be given more importance and emphasis than they originally had, while minor details that would have helped a lot with overall audience comprehension, such as the fact that Dr. Manhattan perceives time as a single simultaneous moment (which is where many of the flashbacks stem from) and lending more weight to the Keene Act than just a brief passing mention (because it’s the reason a lot of the characters are the way they are). Another, more minor one is the inclusion of Ozymandias’ mutant pet lynx Bubastis, despite his experiments in genetics being all but nonexistent to the film’s plot, in a move that can only amount to fanboy pandering but will very likely confuse pretty much everyone else.
This bluntness of some elements and removal of some small-but-important details contrasts sharply with some of how Snyder has chosen to present the film’s plot. This is less of an address for people who’ve read the book and more as one I perceive for people who hadn’t. The film’s constant flashbacking and jumping from one scene to the next—something that worked just fine in the comic—might come across as jumpy and confusing to people unfamiliar with the story, and may be a case of Snyder being too faithful to the original material, forgetting that film and comics are different mediums. If you go see it before reading the book, bring a friend who has in case this disorientation does happen.
One thing I almost forgot—a lot of moaning has been done over the slight changing of the ending, or to be more accurate, the climax. Honestly, the climax was something I had a few beefs with in the book as well just because of how bizarre its situation was. The infamous “giant squid” of the book was tough to swallow even though it worked. And here, the changed ending makes sense in the sense that it delivers the same results while being very slightly more plausible…but the overall results actually make less sense than they did in the book when you stop to think about it. I’m sorry that’s vague, I want to avoid spoilers.
Lastly here, I’ll cover sex and violence, two things that actually worked as elements in the book that I was afraid would be too Hollwoodized for the movie…and yup, they were, alright.
Let’s talk action sequences first. For some of these, it seems Mr. Snyder is either still in 300 mode or has been watching too much Eli Roth (who for the record I think should be incarcerated, but that’s another editorial for another day). Criticizing something based on Watchmen for being too violent feels sort of like criticizing a war movie for being violent, but even considering the violence ever present in the book there are parts here that Zack somehow felt the need to exaggerate, and frankly at those moments he just goes too far. Many of them were moments that were violent in the book, but in different ways, in less extreme ways. I could easily accept the gore added to Dr. M’s power of “make people explode by pointing at them”…that’s just realism. But at least three other moments where violence was amplified left a bad taste, not the least of which involved what I consider a gross mischaracterization of Rorschach (a scene where a murder he commits—his first one and the very one that drives him insane—is changed from handcuffing the criminal to a chair, setting the room on fire and leaving into *hacking him into pieces with a cleaver.* While Rorschach is no stranger to murder as criminal justice and some degree of torture for information purposes, that is NOT how he does death. The comic clearly portrays him as usually preferring quick, efficient methods of murder, not some Saw-esque collection of slices and splatters. You fail here, Zack. Fail). There was nothing wrong with how the violence worked in the book. It WORKED in the book. When amplified as they are, they become just gross-out moments. Cringe moments. This was easily my biggest problem with the movie, actually. It might seem minor to some people but I’m usually pretty aware of what makes violence work in fiction and what makes it thrown in.
Sex was also a definite presence in the book’s themes, due primarily to an entire subplot dealing with Nite Owl’s frustrations. And again, like the violence, it WORKS in the book, and adds more characterization and “unusual-things-to-think-about-regarding-superheroes” exploration. Zack trips over and embarrasses himself here. The sex scene between Nite Owl and Silk Spectre onboard his “Owlship” is a pivotal point for the characters in the book. In the movie it’s nothing short of a farce, being heavily overextended and cheesier than the nachos I was eating. A friend of mine aptly described it as being “like something out of a bad romantic comedy.” So congrats on handling Nite Owl’s sexuality like a middle-schooler, Zack.

Some last thoughts

I’m now painfully aware that my “Bad” section runs around twice as long as my “Good” section. Does this mean I disliked the movie? Actually, no. For all the bashing on Zack Snyder’s directorship I’ve done, especially towards the end here, for all the complaints I have to present both in and out of this review, I still respect the effort. The book will, as is almost always the case, be better. That’s unavoidable. But there are definitely a lot of things the movie does right. For the most part, the biggest situations and most prominent character traits and interactions are done justice. But I see now why Alan Moore has long opposed the book’s being made into a film…you really NEED a lot of the details present in order to convey the truest spirit of the book, and I’m concerned for some spots that could misconvey it, given that a film is often something that thrusts a work that was previously not known by many out into the spotlight of the public consciousness.
Overall, my thoughts on the movie were mixed. I did like it, but Snyder’s treatment of the violence and sex aspects, as well as a smattering of some of his other worse choices all across the board, kept me from loving it. I would see it a second time to reanalyze, but I doubt I’d buy it unless the extended edition that’s already been promised fixes a lot. I remain an enjoyer and supporter of the book, if nothing else, and will continue to keep my Comedian pin on my comics jacket for that purpose.
A few brief recommendations for moviegoers: Do not bring the kids (if some of the elements I’ve covered haven’t come through, this movie deserves every inch of its R rating), and please please please, if you have the time beforehand, read the book or bring along someone who has. The movie, for all its attempts at balancing, still seems tilted towards the readers, since so many of the attempts at wider appeal or condensing come across as a bit ham-fisted.

Final Judgement

Watchmen balances out to a slightly-above average 3 out of 5 crickets. A good-intentioned movie that’s nonetheless riddled with issues and has trouble standing up as a work separate from the book.