Yet another Watchmen blog post

It’s been couple of weeks since I went to see the Watchmen and it’s taken me this long to work out how I feel about it. As a bit of background I have read the comic, but only once, and I thought it was very good.

However this isn’t a review of the source material, but the movie that was made from it. I think that’s an important point about Watchmen – The Movie. It is not based on or inspired by the comic, it’s made from it. It has tried to so lovingly recreate the book that in many places it seems to have stifled the end product.

Now don’t get me wrong, I didn’t hate it. I though that it was extremely well done, and as Nick says in his post, if they were going to make a movie of the comic, this was about the best movie you could make. However despite the obvious homage and great casting and respect held by the director and everyone involved it felt kind of souless to me. The fight scenes were fun but the under current of darkness and hopelessness that flowed through the comic just didn’t seem to be there for me. It also leads me to wondering why they had to make a movie of it in the first place. Comics by their nature often seem like very well actualised story boards, and in Watchmen it’s like they skipped that part of the movie making process and just used the comic (with the exception of a few scenes).

I’m also starting to kind of understand why Alan Moore might get so pissy about these movies mad from his comics. After all they don’t really add anything new, so why bother?

I also have to say that while I generally love comic book movies (even the bad ones) I am starting to get a little tired of the fan boy, wankfest sex scenes that always turn up. I’m just saying…

Despite that though I find myself wanting to see it again, though I might wait for the DVD. So I guess I didn’t hate it that much.

Watchmen – I watched them.

So last night I finally got to see Watchmen.

It was good – not great, but not horrible and certainly the best Alan Moore adaptation so far done. While totally overscored, the acting was pretty good, the look/design of the film was astonishingly loyal to the comic, as was the casting and direction. Most importantly, while the plot was shorn of side stories, it was also (with one fairly major exception) ripped almost entirely from the page.

But that’s a big part of the problem. When you film a book you are interpreting prose description visually – one of the reasons that the Lord of the Rings movies were so loved by so many people was because they managed to make our imaginations live on screen. the Watchmen film just took the pointers from a visual source and recreated them on screen. And ultimately that seems a little empty. Why bother to do that? I’ve already seen the comic and the illustration that accompanies the plot – I don’t really need to see it again, especially when there is so little reinterpretation of anything – themes, characters or story.

Where they did change things, there were mixed results. The comic is much less violent than the book. At least one major and brutal fight scene in the film is covered in four cells in the comic and the violence is largely implied. And from the evidence of the comic, Laurie doesn’t stab a gang member in the neck with his own knife and then use his body to shield herself from gun fire.

The violence in the comic is much more sparing and with the exception of Rorschach and the Comedian’s sections of the story, actually fairly tame. It’s two-fisted silver age superhero comic book stuff, not the sort of violence that came after Watchmen. And violence in the movie is graphic – to me, it seemed out of character for Nite Owl and most of the other characters. The violence was well done and fun to watch (in the fight scenes at least – Rorschach and the Comedian’s violence was largely horrifying), but it jarred with me thematically.

That leads me to another point. To me, Watchmen is largely a mediation on what the world would be like if people really had dressed up in costumes and fought crime. What sort of people would do something like that? And what effect could it have on the world, especially if some of them really did have super powers? Perhaps necessarily, the movie doesn’t delve into that, but there’s not a whole lot of mediation on the thematic themes of the story.

One thing I did really like about the movie was how much it made me appreciate the comic. I’m now three ‘chapters’ in to my reread and I’d never previosuly noticed how filmic some of the scene changes and the like in the original work were.

It also did manage to take a sprawling, complex and dense plot and par it back to essentials. The ending, as has been widely reported, has been changed. It needed to be because the original ending is reliant on pages and pages of foreshadowing and sie plotting that needed to be cut form the film, but the new ending is clever, well put together and thematically appropriate which was probably the biggest surprise of the whole evening.

Watchmen was a good action film based on vastly better material – as Ciaran said as we left ‘if it had to be done, I’m glad it was done like that’. I’m glad I saw it.

More Watchmen linkage

For someone who has forsworn the movie, Alan Moore sure is getting a lot of coverage out it! And he’s selling lots of comics too. Here’s some of the more interesting Watchmen links I’ve seen in the last couple of days:

Salon.com have run an interesting, intelligent interview with Moore (you’ll have to get a site pass) – he’s in pretty good form right now! Despite promising to ‘spit venom‘ all over the film last year, he’s been pretty even-handed in his discussions in the interviews he’s been doing.

The webcomic PvPonline has been running a Watchmen parody called The Ombudsmen (that’s part one of 5). It’s pretty funny, if you like PvP’s sense of humour, and uses characters from the newspaper comic pages to riff on the ideas in Watchmen.

Saturday Morning Watchmen is a flash movie about what Watchmen would have been like as an old school Saturday morning cartoon. I haven’t seen all of it yet, but I will!

Finally, on slightly different note, is Anthony Lane’s New Yorker review of the movie but also the comic, Alan Moore, his fans and comics in general (with a few black and white exceptions) and it’s safe to say he doesn’t like any of them. It’s an incredible exercise of missing the point and letting your pre-conceptions colour your published work. For example:

The problem is that Snyder, following Moore, is so insanely aroused by the look of vengeance, and by the stylized application of physical power, that the film ends up twice as fascistic as the forces it wishes to lampoon.

I haven’t seen the film (yet) but lots of reviews are leveling similar criticism at it – that it revels in the violence of the story. But as Tasha Robinson at The Onion AVClub‘s ‘Book vs. Film‘ feature on Watchmen points out, Moore doesn’t revel in the violence of the story. The violence in Watchmen isn’t supposed to be all ‘kick ass cool’. It’s supposed to show how de-humanised these people have become. Lots of readers have seemed to think that some of the more violent characters in the comic are pretty cool (much as skinheads adopted A Clockwork Orange) but Moore certainly doesn’t and the fact that Lane thinks he does demonstrates how poorly he understood not just Watchmen but Moore’s entire body of work. Best of all he basically says ‘of course the fans will disagree with me on this’ in his opening paragraph saying that

Fans of [comics] are masonically loyal, prickling with a defensiveness and an ardor that not even Wagnerians can match.

Whatever dude – when you’re wrong you’re wrong and on this, you’re really wrong.

"These days I can see half a million Orcs coming over a hill and I am bored"

In Wired here.

I can remember Willis O’Brien’s King Kong. I can remember being awed at the artistry that had made those things possible. Yes, I knew how it was done. But it looked so wonderful. These days I can see half a million Orcs coming over a hill and I am bored. I am not impressed at all. Because, frankly, I could have gotten someone, a passerby on the street, who could have gotten the same effect if you’d given them half a million dollars to do it.

In his own writing on these subjects, and any other chance he gets, Moore can be a bit ranty. But Adam Rogers keeps him nicely on track, while allowing him to speak his own mind – maybe he just got him on a good day? Anyway, Moore speaks about Watchmen, movies in general, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, cultural criticism through differnet mediums and a few other things besides.

Watchmen

So, while Sophie has been getting excited about Dollhouse, I’ve been quietly waiting in anticipation for the Watchmen adaptation that’s coming out next week in Australia, at least. There is no doubting that Watchmen is the greatest superhero story of all time. It redefined the genre, helped make Alan Moore one of the most admired comic book writers of all time and generally has the most incredibly compelling and sympathetic cast of raving lunatics I’ve ever seen. It even made it into the Time magazine top 100 novels of all time!