Review: Watchmen

Watchmen

OPENING: 03/06/2009

STUDIO: Warner Bros.

TRAILER: Trailer

ACCOMPLICES: Official Site

The Charge
Who watches the Watchmen?

Opening Statement
They said it couldn’t be done. They said it was unfilmable. They said it was impossible, a project doomed to development hell, a property too complex to translate to the silver screen. Now, after countless changes of direction, writers, directors, studios and lawsuits, Alan Moore’s seminal graphic novel has been made into a film—and it is everything fans of the original material could have hoped for… for better and for worse.

Facts of the Case
In an alternate 1985, the United States teeters on the brink of nuclear war, locked in a never-ending conflict with the Soviets. The police investigate the murder of Edward Blake (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a former superhero named The Comedian who, after the government outlawed all superheroes in the seventies, worked with the CIA for black operations. His identity is known to no one, except for his old superhero friends in the Watchmen, who have long since retired and gone civilian, each coping with retirement in different fashion. Well, except for one.

Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) is an unflinching sociopath who refuses to hang up the mask. He prowls the streets at night, a felon, hunting the unjust. His pursuit of justice is merciless, uncompromising, and he deduces that someone is gunning for ex-superheroes. He tries to rouse support from his old teammates, but no one seems particularly concerned. The nuclear deterrent science experiment-gone-awry Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup) works for the US government and his growing omnipotence draws him further away from the concerns of humanity—including those of his girlfriend, Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman). Adrian Veidt (Matthew Goode) revealed his secret identity to the world and used his success to become a wealthy and influential businessman. Night Owl II (Patrick Wilson) lives a civilian life, his crime fighting apparatus lay dormant and dusty in the basement, and he struggles with his own inadequacies. None believe Rorschach’s claims… until an attempt is made on Veidt’s life and Rorschach is framed for murder.

As the world teeters closer to nuclear war, America’s deterrent against nuclear holocaust suffers a crisis of faith. Dr. Manhattan departs the Earth, leaving the world undefended. Silk Spectre finds a new friend in Night Owl, and both secretly admit they miss the old life. Donning the costumes again, they set out to rescue their teammate from prison and unravel a complex plot of deception and betrayal—one that will have catastrophic consequences for a world slipping ever closer into World War III and total annihilation.

The Evidence
Staggeringly faithful to its source material, Watchmen is as close to a perfect adaptation as fans of Alan Moore’s comic could have ever hoped to see. Let’s just get that right out of the way now. When you consider the number of hands this project has traveled through over its two decade journey through development hell, the fact that director Zack Snyder (300) has been able to produce something this accurate, faithful and true to the spirit of the original material is nothing short of a miracle. This film is a triumph of intertextuality, a sublime erosion between the barriers that separate the art form of the graphic novel and the comic book, a meticulous adaptation of a source material that defies every attempt to be quantified and reproduced. Based on these merits alone, Watchmen is a fantastic achievement. Indeed, it may very well be the most faithful and literal adaptation of a comic book ever put to film.

Watchmen is exactly what fans have been hoping, nay praying for; a film uncompromisingly respectful to its source material as its primary goal, regardless of any narrative pitfalls or conceptual curiosities that fail to make the transition from page to screen. Die hard fans will note some trims have been made here and there (spoiler alert: no squid) but these are minor detours at best; the heart of the film remains intact, the moral ambiguity and complex superhero archetypal destruction, the alien detachment of Dr. Manhattan, the Cold War nuclear war paranoia, the brutal objectivist fury of Rorschach, the superheroes getting off by their own adrenaline and making mad passionate love in a flying vehicle—every element of the film fans feared would be truncated by Hollywood has emerged intact, trimmed only for content to make the film clock in under three hours. In many ways, Watchmen is unbelievable: a $100 million love letter to fan boys and girls the world over during a time of economic recession. Who would have ever imagined such a thing coming to fruition so bright and so beautiful?

And yet, despite the almost laser precision in which Watchmen lives up to its hype, in which it creates a world many thought would be impossible to reproduce in any other medium besides the comic book page, the film is not perfect. So meticulous in its vision to remain one hundred percent faithful to its source, Watchmen takes an almost reverential view of the graphic novel that it eschews any attempt to rein in its own mad vision of a dystopic world run amuck. In keeping the fans happy, something gets damaged, something inexpressible and indefinable, the subtle life and magic of cinema that makes films worth seeing. Translated to film, Watchmen feels lanky, overdrawn and ponderous if examined on its own merits. Had this not been a hallowed text, a holy Alan Moore Holy Grail of comics, but a simple script handed in by a Hollywood screenwriter, there is almost zero chance of Watchmen being made in this current incarnation. No director in the world would touch this project without making some serious alterations to the film: cutting out a good hour of its runtime, changing key plot points, altering its direction dramatically. I am glad it did get made this way, but one must acknowledge that some things simply get lost in translation.

Call it a conundrum of cinema; a perfectly executed film in style and form emulating its source material that will struggles to engage and capture new audiences as a motion picture. Everything that needed to be perfect in bringing the property to the big screen is perfect; the casting, the design, the direction, the plot points, the dystopic tone, all intact—but take somebody off the street who has never seen the comic before, sit them down in front of Watchemen, and watch their face contort in confusion. What translates so well to the comic book medium somehow fails to make the same impact on the big screen—but not for lack of trying. Zack Snyder takes extreme pride in how visually similar his film is to Dave Gibbon’s original artwork, and in this regard, there can be no complaint; many sequences are near shot-for-shot recreations, as if the original comic became the storyboard for the film itself.

Challenging technical elements, like Rorschach’s shifting inkblot mask and Dr. Manhattan’s eerie blue detached naked body hovering through the air are superbly executed. Art direction, costume design, special effects, all perfect. Snyder films his action sequences in exquisite slow motion, similar to battle choreography in 300, and while it may run against the grain to the comic itself, it is so well executed we hardly care. There is more satisfaction in watching Night Owl systematically bust up unnamed thugs in a two-minute sequence than Batman ever delivered in the entirety of The Dark Knight. The casting is perfect— Jackie Earle Haley is a terrorizing figure as the short, ugly and uncompromising Rorschach, Malin Akerman is stunningly beautiful as Silk Spectre II, Billy Crudup is ethereal and detached as Dr. Manhattan, Patrick Wilson is dweebish as a civilian gone soft and strikingly intimidating as Night Owl II. The only casting that feels slightly so-so is Matthew Goode as Ozymandias; he is a bit too effeminate and nebbish compared to his comic counterpart.

For fans, this is as perfect of an adaptation as they come on the surface, but it cannot be helped that the film lacks the emotional gravitas of the graphic novel. We must remember that Watchmen is twenty years old, a product of Cold War paranoia and comic book deconstruction that at the time was revolutionary and groundbreaking—a product of another generation of thinking. At the screening I attended of Watchmen, I was but one of a handful of attendees older than the source material itself. Think about that for a minute: can this new generation of internet-savvy teenagers be appreciate the subtleties of the Cold War and nuclear terror as anything other than a kitsch alternate reality, where Richard Nixon runs unopposed in election after election? In the eighties, this was terrifying stuff; today, it seems Lilliputian. But I am glad they lost the squid. Trust me—the new ending is better. It makes more sense.

How the uninitiated will interpret this film is the biggest area of pitfall for Watchmen, because there is so much subtlety to character development and plot that go unmentioned in the film—subtlety that gets filled in by the brain of the audience familiar with the text—that an unbiased opinion may be impossible. If you loved the comic, you will absolutely love Watchmen and its pure, fanatical devotion to the heart and soul of the source material. I am grateful and thankful that Zach Snyder made the film that he made, if only to prove to the world that yes, it can be done, the impossible project can be made possible. Alan Moore may have written off all association to the project, having been burned too often by Hollywood and lackluster adaptations of his work, but this might be the first film that does his material the justice it deserves.

It is exceedingly challenging to separate the graphic novel and the film into didactic elements and give them praise and criticism on their own merits. I keep trying to put myself into the head space of someone totally unfamiliar with the source material, and I keep failing, like running full force into a brick wall expecting to pass through it unharmed. Perhaps the reason Watchmen was considered an unfilmable property was not the technical challenges of constructing a Cold War alternate reality, of nuclear blue men who can deconstruct the world with their hands, of a surly costumed vigilante with a shifting mask, but simply that if anyone was brave enough or daring enough to make a film that would satisfy the fans and remain true to the source material, the end result would be… complicated. Watchmen is everything fans wanted it to be, but we’ll have to wait and see how the world accepts its dystopic vision.

Closing Statement
Flawed but unflinchingly and unapologetically faithful to Alan Moore and David Gibbons’ seminal work, one cannot help but admire the sheer chutzpah in Watchmen for its own Rorschach-esque refusal to bow to compromise. It is a beautiful conundrum; a faithful adaptation of a property considered unfilmable. Without a doubt, this is the movie fans have been waiting for, capturing every element of the source material in near-perfect detail—so much so that the film lives up to its own promise of being a property that defies cinematic adaptation. It occasionally sabotages its own cinematic integrity for authenticity, but fans wouldn’t have it any other way.

The Verdict
It is easy to admire and love Watchmen as a faithful adaptation of a fantastic creative work; it is slightly more challenging to love Watchmen the film for its own merits. A beautiful cinematic conundrum, Watchmen fulfills its glorious, imperfect destiny.

8/10

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