A mixed bag, but the mix keeps slipping further towards "suck" the further I get from it. The Hayter/Snyder Watchmen seems to have been made by people who do not, on a basic level, understand the original series. Or if they do understand it, they do their best to suppress the parts of it that make it ambiguous, the parts that leave the audience asking questions, rather than sitting comfortably with provided answers. It's not all bad, mind you, but there's a lot of "bad" to go around.
To start with obvious, the film changes a lot of things in the book. Now to be clear, this is not one of those reviews that says "it's different, ergo it sucks." I like when adaptations actually adapt the material. Jackson's Lord of the Rings did that, and for the most part, did it very well (with one exception, while I'll lave aside). The changes that the Watchmen film makes, however, are very different. They are not in the service of adapting a very comic-book story to the film medium (if only the film had done that more!), but instead to adapt a very anxiety-inducing story to the Hollywood standard in which character motivations are clear and morality is fixed.
Sally Jupiter tells her daughter precisely how she feels about Edward/Comedian, instead of leaving unclear why she would sleep with the man who attempted to rape her. Dan makes very clear that Ozymandias' plan is ethically corrupt, instead of going along with it out of his belief that he has no choice. Even the costume fetishism that Dan and Laurie share is gone, excised in favour of an extended sex scene that, though an improvement over it's 300 counter-part, is rendered empty without Dan's "coming out" at the end. Jon's comment that "nothing ever ends" is downplayed by placing it into Laurie's mouth, in a different scene, and only hypothetical.
There are elements of these changes that I don't mind. I do think Dan's right about Ozymandias' plan. It wouldn't create peace at all. It would create a fascistic military-industrial complex that focuses all resources into building a standing military "defence" force, with Ozy's corporation reaping the benefits and perhaps himself as Emperor of Earth. However, the flaw, there, is with Moore/Gibbons' plotting, I'm sorry to say, and not with Movie Dan's outrage. It is a terrible plan. But the film doesn't explore that, or something like it. It just codes Ozy as the villain, even as Dick Cheney/Haliburton after the attacks on New York, and he's actually a more complex figure than that. I also do not understand how making him ever so slightly gay is any improvement to the film, unless you're just a homophobe (and considering 300, that might be the best explanation, sadly).
The one thing I do like about the plot changes is that instead of a genetically-engineered squid, we get Dr. Manhattan as the nuclear threat that Ozy tricks the world into fearing. This actually makes perfect sense. It clears a lot of dead wood out of the script, and it gives the plot a certain tightness, a unity (in Aristotle's sense of drama). It also explains why Jon would just go ahead and make himself scarce at the end of the film, instead of sticking around to help, given his revelation that all humans are "miracles," a scene that I've never really bought in the book, and wasn't played particularly well in the film.
The other major change is the level of violence of the film. I honestly have mixed feelings about this. While I was watching it, my immediate reaction was that the film attributed super-human violence onto these so-called heroes as a way of commenting on film violence, and supehero violence in particular. In order to survive the kinds of situations that they found themselves in, these characters would have to break necks, toss people off of roof-tops, and the like. Lethality would be a part of it, which works quite well with the general tone of Watchmen, that there's something basically wrong at the heart of the superhero as generic figure, something essentialy unethical within this paragon of justice. The choregraphy was over-the-top, certainly, and without superpowers to explain away their levels of agility and strength, the movie loses a sense of suspension of disbelief, but while I watched it, it felt as if the director and decided that to recreatethe sense of violence that book depicts, it would have to make that violence more extreme. When Watchmen was first published, the kinds of knee-to-the-groin, broken-nose violence that it depicted was shocking, but not so much any more. Snyder et al. simply updated that shock factor.
But then I realise that this is the man who gave us 300 without a hint of irony, and that attributing to him the ability to level a commentary on film violence was simply not reasonable. And regardless of intent, the film never actually follows up on things like Laurie beating up a prison guard for no good reason, even though at the time I read it as an indication that they just get off on violence. Dan and Laurie are never held accountable, either by or within the story, for the death that they cause, and in fact are even less ambiguous in thier supposed heroism than in the book. What I had hoped was a commentary on violence turned out to just be revelling in violence. I wouldn't be surprised if someone, somewhere plays the "social commentary" card in defence of the film, but I'm pretty sure it's a retroactive determination, just ass-covering, really. So much for adaptation.
As a film by itself, Watchmen also has some problems. It relies far too heavily on pop music montages, but ironically it fails to really use its 80s setting. There is, for example, no real call to use Sound of Silence over Comedian's funeral. The song adds nothing to the scene, which would have been far more stark without music at all. In fact, I can't help feeling like most of the music in the film was picked for its catchy chorus rather than for its actual content, or even for a match between the music's rhythm and pace and the pace of the editing in a given scene. On the flip side of the same problem, the music in the film is all over the place, historically, even though the film is set in the 80s. If you're going to set a film in a time that had such a recognisable musical style, and a lot of realy good music (if you sift through the shit), why not use that music, and use it well?
There is one example of what I'm talking about that should have carried through the whole film. While Ozymandias dresses down a room full of America's most powerful industrialists, the speakers in his office very quietly play "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" by Tears for Fears. It's the perfect, historically located, compliment to that scene, especially since it ends with Ozy conveniently using his corporate competition as a human shield against an assassin that he hired! If only the film had actually taken advantage of more 80s music for similar effects, instead of reaching back to the 70s or 60s, like "All Along the Watchtower," or wasting songs on transitions between scenes, like "99 Lufballons," which is after all and anti-war song. Someone else had to point out that "Watchtower" is quoted in the book when Dan and Rorschach arrive at Ozy's antarctic station, "two riders were approaching/ a wild cat did growl," but that doesn't mean that Snyder had to use it for the film! He should have made choices that made sense within his film, instead of just using songs with cool guitar riffs. I see a great opportunity to meld cinema, historical fiction, and music wasted in this movie. Sad, really.
Finally, and I think most damningly, the film has no room to breath. The pacing is awful. It's been cut so close to the bone that we get all the plot details about these characters that we're supposed to have, but without much by way of caring about them. Yes, we get Dan and Laurie's love story, but it's so sandwiched in that it doesn't seem to be a triumph of love over circumstance (and a story of nerdy Dan getting the girl of his dreams), but instead something vaguely predictable. I would happily trade a minute or two of Dan/Laurie thrusting for that dialogue about fetishing their costumes. Same for Rorschach and Manhattan. Although we have Rorschach's flashback to the dogs, we don't get the full picture of how he slowly degenerated from "Walter" into "Rorchach." We have Jon's memories on Mars, which are mostly held together by Crudup's haunting voice-overs, but without seeing him transition from full-on superhero costume to buck nekkid, and losing half of the back-and-forth play that makes that issue of the series really work, we don't end up thinking much of his decision to save humanity. Again, it seems like that was going to happen anyway. There is no great risk.
That pacing problem pertains to individual scenes, as well. With a plot that has this many deliberate twists and reveals, you need to understand both the pretence (the false story) and the true solution, but the film steps on all the reveals, to the point where they make no sense or just feel like no big deal. Oh, Ozy contrived the whole plan? Well, he doesn't seem too excited about it, so why should I care? The film's pacing as a whole is problem in the editing room, but the manner in which the dialogue is just tossed away is a directing problem on-set. Snyder clearly doesn't know how to work with people, to get performances out of actors who seem like they'd otherwise be up to the task. He's cast most of them of their match to Gibbons' art, and subsequently had them costumed and made-up to look identical to the book, but there's nothing going on under that polished surface. This machine has no heart.
I think that's part of why the Dan/Laurie love scene can, ironically, get away with being so raunchy. Thrusting pelvises and full-body shots are usually reserved for NC-17 or even X-rated films, but this one is so lacking in emotion, in presence, that it's a bit like watching cartoons do it. I will say this, though, at least this sex scene actually shows a man enjoying himself! Most of the time, usually, men are off-screen and the camera slavishly focuses on the woman, flailing and screaming and (seemingly) having penetrative orgasms the entire time. Male pleasure is cut out of the scene, almost literally, because sexual pleasure makes people look vulnerable, and Heaven forbid that an action star should ever be vulnerable.
When I walked out of Watchmen, I thought it wasn't too bad, that a lot of it had worked, and a lot of it does work (Can I gush about the opening title sequence? No need. Everybody has. It's brilliant!), but the bits that work barely connect to one another. It's not a movie, really, but instead a whole lot of individual recreations of the comic book, some of which stand on their own to feet, most of which do not. Sad, really, I don't think we'll ever have an Alan Moore comic book turned into a movie that doesn't inevitably pale by comparison. Maybe we could all just go around and read/view his comics instead? How would that be?
Posted by orion at April 13, 2009 2:04 PM