Movie Review: Watchmen

This past Friday, I went to see Watchmen. Geekiness overruling common sense (and satisfying some practical timing considerations), I went to the 11:00 am showing. There was 25, 30 people, and I prefer small crowds, so that was good for me.

I don't expect films to exactly match their book sources. Honestly, that wouldn't be interesting -- no surprises, no creativity. As one recent and sterling example, Peter Jackson's The Lord Of The Rings trilogy was not the same story J.R.R. Tolkien wrote, but it was a very interesting, very immersive interpretation that held true to the source material in most places. Film is a different medium and it has different strengths, different weaknesses, different demands. As a film, and being familiar with the novel, I think Jackson essentially nailed it. A fisking comparison between film and book would be nitpicking pedantry; the existence of a film version does not invalidate, corrupt, supersede, or abolish an existing book. If done well, it simply expands the available experiential choices. If one does not like the film, the book is still, always, there.

That said, Hollywood has not been kind to Alan Moore's works, and Moore has developed a complete "hands-off, go away, do what you want, don't pay me" attitude because of this. I don't fault him this. I haven't read his The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but I am familiar with the quality of his works, and the film was dreadful all on its own. Likewise, V For Vendetta was an interesting story, but very little was Moore's story -- it was a different story told with some characters he had co-created.

And now we have Watchmen.

The original comic books -- a 12-issue series -- came out in 1986-87. I read them in real time. I don't care if this buys me geek cred or not, but the series arrived at a propitious time for me personally. I was almost done with college and, in some ways, I was almost done with comics. I had been an avid reader for most of my life to that point, and I think that my reading habits were very influential on me (it probably does explain a lot; those of you who know me will probably understand, though you're free to interpret the influence of comics on me any way you want). In a very short time, DC Comics published three seminal works, which collectively served as a personal coda, a way of saying Good-bye to comics and the universes I had known so well. (To be certain, I still read comics today, but far fewer than I did then. I was able to leave much of those worlds behind me. Of course, I still have the actual comic books.)

One was Crisis On Infinite Earths -- DC's attempt to "clean up" their primary multiverse continuity. It was a bold plan that, frankly, was too vast for the creators and the practical publishing schedule they had to work within. It was a good story, and well told, and it destroyed (or "rebooted") several universes into one which, while it was supposed to be coherent and unified, just couldn't quite get there. (DC has since rebooted at least once more -- which is fine -- but the original notion of "let's get rid of all this" really wasn't a very good idea, because the existing multiverse worked and worked well. Rebooting wasn't necessary.) But it closed the superhero continuity in which I had grown up.

The second was The Dark Knight Returns, a highly stylized, apocalyptic, and grimy "last Batman story". If Crisis closed the familiar superhero continuity, this showed where it was going to end up anyway, a dark albeit fascinating world, in which Batman's particular hard-edged and inflexible morality cut through a lot of noise. He did things his way and his way only... and it would all turn out all right, more or less.

And the third was Watchmen, a story which asked, what if there was one, just one, genuinely super-powered being in the world? What would happen? That being, Dr. Manhattan, was used as a political pawn to keep the world stage tilted in favor of the United States -- while Manhattan, since his transformative ascension to near-godhood, increasingly grows uninterested in the doings of humanity (neutrinos being more interesting) -- until dark plans remove him from the world, unclogging all sorts of military and political intrigues, and suddenly everyone is circling the drain and on the brink of nuclear war. The murder of one of his skilled but unpowered colleagues sets the others to try and discover if there is a conspiracy ongoing, and they find that Yes, there is, and so they try to stop it. Watchmen takes many of the tropes and traditions of superhero fiction and twists them into a more realistic world picture, and in the given scenario, it leads to disasters.

After Crisis, Dark Knight, and Watchmen, each of which delivered a different message, there just didn't seem to be anything left to be said about superhero fiction, not as it had existed up to that point, nearly 50 years after the debut of Superman. There's been plenty of good stuff since then, yes; but the convergence of these three series, each a complete story, and a transitional point in my own life, left me feeling like I had been given a rather good ending to my deepest indulgences into superhero works.

Foo, I still have said almost nothing about the movie. I'm not surprised -- Watchmen was a genuine landmark, and it has that sort of effect on readers, especially comics readers. And, yeah, I was there, man.

Watchmen was long considered "unfilmable", and I suppose that was based on two notions -- one, the requisite special effects were not available (though now are), and two, it is a complex and layered story, even generational, and so demands a lot of background in order to really grasp it in full. Moore was able to do this in over 300 pages; a movie, even approaching three hours, is a lot more challenging to accomplish and still deliver the goods.

Zack Snyder has filmed the unfilmable.

Watchmen is not perfect. A lot of the detailed work of the graphic novel had to be stripped down to bare minimums, or even sacrificed, in order to bring it to the screen (though a longer version will be available on DVD). That doesn't bother me; the core of the story is there, the primary characters are excellent in both casting and performances, and on the whole the film delivers on its promises. Watchmen the movie doesn't have to be the novel; it is its own work.

The story integrates Dr. Manhattan more tightly (albeit unknowingly) into the conspiracy. He is, to a degree, the world's biggest problem (or rather, how he is manipulated and used -- and he is used, because he doesn't really care much), and is cleverly turned into the world's best, albeit unimaginably harsh, solution, as well as made not a problem. Nite-Owl finds his groove again, after hanging up his tights years ago, both because of the murder of the Comedian and Rorschach's insistence that it hints at a larger plan, and his romantic reawakening with his developing relationship with Silk Spectre. There are flashbacks, a dream sequence, brilliant opening vignettes, Dick Nixon (in his fifth term as president), Lee Iacocca, and enormous amounts of details, visual and aural, that will reward repeat viewers time and again as they find more and more. The special effects are spot-on, particularly the appearance of Dr. Manhattan, who glows an ozone blue throughout, and builds a clockwork castle on Mars. Several major characters, and the world, experience reawakenings, climbing from the depths to reach for new and better heights.

There is violence, and it is extremely bloody and brutal (the audio, at several points, sounds like a deliberate assault on the audience). Indicative of a world that, perhaps, had to get that ugly before it could be purged and begin its redemption.

But there is also love (and loving sex) and true friendship and hope. This world is not yet a lost cause.

The soundtrack provides a number of well-known songs, almost like it is trying too hard to identify a point in time (which can confuse the unfamiliar, because of the many flashbacks). The selections work, but I think this aspect will have to grow on me, because some of them pop up without warning, an aural kick to the ear, and not a smoothly flowing experience. (Ah well, I can deal with this. I still consider Kubrick's bone-to-spaceship cut a masterpiece moment.)

Three and a half stars (out of four), but then, I'm a comics geek. Watchmen rocks.

This is not your father's superhero movie.

I'm gonna go see it again.