Watched-men

When I first read Watchmen back in 2004, it occurred to me both the potential it had to be made into a movie, and how incredibly difficult a task it would be to actually accomplish that. Five quick years later and we have director Zack Snyder’s take on the material, and the results are… well, a little bit mixed actually.

I could go on and on and on about this (and you all know I could!), but I’ll boil it down to this; I was surprised at both how incredibly faithful to the material the film was and how, when it deviated, how wild that deviation was.

Maybe I’ll go on just a little bit more…

Small moments of violence in the comic were magnified into entire sequences where compound fractures were dramatically and grotesquely depicted, where blood splattered like white water at Wet ‘N’ Wild, and where the two most relatable characters (Dan Dreiberg and Laurie Juspeczyk, aka Nite-Owl II and Silk Spectre II) come across as stone cold, murderous psychopaths.

It’s this level of violence that warps entire meanings of these characters, who themselves stand in now hypocritical judgement of the hyper-violent methods of vigilante Rorschach. At least, in the cinematic version, he makes no excuses for who he is and what he does, unlike the other “heroes” who call him unhinged and then go around stabbing muggers to death.

Combine that with Snyder’s extrapolation of a brief image of a couple kissing and undressing into a full-on, multi-position sex scene and you start getting the feeling that this is what it’d be like if a 14-year-old was behind the lens of the film, staying as close to the source material as possible, choosing only to delve deeper than the printed page when it came to the sex and violence.

Not to say I didn’t like the film overall; compared to most superhero movies, its moral ambiguities and uncompromising adaptation of the graphic novel means it’s a difficult movie to outright dismiss. There were quite a few moments where I was staggered – happily so – that they’d managed to keep a small, throwaway moment from the comic that I’d regarded as special, yet unnecessary to the development of the plot.

And the changes that are made to the finale help to streamline the story in such a fashion that you can’t help compare it to the original story and wonder whether or not it might have made more sense to come to the conclusion that the film did.

I even liked the music selection; what’s not to like about an opening sequence set to Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A’Changin”, or a fight scene to Nat King Cole’s “Unforgettable”, or a third act opener using Jimi Hendrix’s cover of “All Along the Watchtower”? Multi-million dollar studio films don’t get soundtracks as diverse or interesting as this these days, and that’s a downright shame.

I wouldn’t recommend it to a non-comic fan. Certainly not as a cinema experience. Better to wait for DVD, stripped of the artifice of a night out and the expectation of some high-octane superhero action. It is, instead, a slowly unfolding mystery film with a rich tapestry of characters, each of whom get their moment in the spotlight… but it’s also a flawed adaptation of a superior source, where the cracks in the foundation are so fine you don’t see them unless you know where to look. Otherwise, you’re too busy staring at the ceiling just as it starts to cave in on you.

Maybe it’d have been better off in the hands of Terry Gilliam, or done as the HBO mini-series that fans dreamed about for years. But it’s here now, and overall, it definitely could have been worse. It ain’t no Dark Knight, but it’s no X-Men 3, either.