Watchmen
In general, I agree with most everything Spencer Ackerman says here. I’ll add that I wasn’t thrilled by the decision to use so many famous and iconic songs in the soundtrack. I don’t see any real basis for that in the original material, and it’s somewhat distracting. It also poses some weird questions about the nature of the alternate reality we’re witnessing. One of the pleasures of Watchmen is seeing all the little things that are different about the world—airships, the popularity of Indian fast food, etc.—but it’s strange to think that the different historical trajectory would still have left us with a completely identical “99 Luftballons.”
Beyond that, the main thing to say is that I think it’s pretty clear that the Watchmen people have been seeing this weekend isn’t the real Watchmen. The film was clearly crafted with a great deal of respect for the original work and its fans. And that’s great. But still, certain concessions to basic reality had to be made in terms of tolerable length. But there will be a Tales From the Black Freighter animated DVD. And there will be a longer “director’s cut” version of the film. Eventually, perhaps you’ll see the longer version of the film with the Freighter animation intermingled between chapters. Obviously, normal people wouldn’t want to go see that in a theater. But I’d definitely buy it on Blu-Ray. And the ultimate test for the work will really be how good that is.
All-in-all, I’m torn between immense admiration for the film and regret that it was done as a movie at all. In retrospect, I kind of wish we’d instead gotten a 12 part HBO maxi-series that was really uncompromising and didn’t leave anything out.
78 Responses to “Watchmen”
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March 8th, 2009 at 8:51 am
Did it seem to you like a serious version of The Incredibles?
March 8th, 2009 at 9:01 am
In response to ae: Yes. I think we’ve got a great case here of an influential classic that is now hard to perceive freshly precisely because it *was* so influential.
The “destroy New York in order to save the world” plot now seems like a more melodramatic version of Heroes season 1.
March 8th, 2009 at 9:01 am
I wasn’t thrilled by the decision to use so many famous and iconic songs in the soundtrack. I don’t see any real basis for that in the original material
Did you not notice that every issue/chapter of the comic takes its title from a specific song, which is then quoted again in its context at the end of that chapter? The only one that survives into the movie, I think, is All Along the Watchtower (Chapter 10, “Two Riders Were Approaching).
March 8th, 2009 at 9:01 am
That would have been a more successful response without my italics fuckup, though.
March 8th, 2009 at 9:03 am
People in my theatre cheered when they shot the hippies protesting the Vietnam war, and when the Comedian shot the anti-hero protestors. Seriously.
The Smashing Pumpkins song is perfect though.
March 8th, 2009 at 9:07 am
“…He tried pulling that on Rorschach and Rorschachthrew him down an elevator shaft.” Classic.
March 8th, 2009 at 9:08 am
Oh, and The Incredibles definitely stole not only the theme of de-legalizing the heroes — which is broad enough that I didn’t mind — but (SPOILER BUT YOU’VE SEEN THE INCREDIBLES SO IT’S OK) the idea of a character getting killed because a cape gets caught up in stuff, which seems way too specific to be cool, somehow. (It’s a throwaway flashback character in Watchmen, “Dollar Bill”.)
March 8th, 2009 at 9:11 am
But in some ways that just makes the film more interesting. I think Spencer A. is right that being made into a film amplifies the self-conscious riffing on pop culture that was already latent in the original work. And in a weird way it’s more interesting now because the comentary works not just backward (Night Owl -> Batman) but forward (to the Incredibles or what have you).
In some ways I think the choice of iconic music — which Matt complains about — is in keeping with that aspect of the film. It did cross my mind, “What, Nixon is president but they’ve still got neuner neunzig luftballoons or whatever?” But overall — and with the exception of “Hallelujah” which was just cheesy — I thought it sort of worked.
What it did, anyway, whether you like this or not, is deliberately date the film as a gigantic artefact of 80s culture. I kind of liked that. But then, I was able to read Watchmen in the 80s, whereas Matt — if I recall rightly — was reading Dr Seuss.
March 8th, 2009 at 9:11 am
I’ve never understood why fans of Watchmen have so desperately insisted it needed to be made into a movie. Surely it was clear from the start that any movie adaptation would be disappointing at best, and more likely terrible, wringing any subtlety out of the comic’s juiced corpse: Hollywood’s history with superhero films has been pretty spotty, and its history with Alan Moore adaptations has been dire.
But there’s this assumption on the part of fans – encouraged and fostered by the movie industry – that film is just an intrinsically more valid medium than prose fiction or comics or anything else, and that great works in other media should naturally “graduate” to film adaptations. This assumption greatly benefits the movie industry, whose job is to swallow and regurgitate the same old ideas as often as possible, but it doesn’t benefit the works they’re chewing up in the process, or those who admire them.
Did anyone, after reading the book, really need to see a computer-generated Dr. Manhattan in order to understand what the character was all about? Did Watchmen, as a work of fiction, benefit in any way from the hundred million dollars’ worth of big-budget studio work put into it? Was there anything about this book that made you think, “my experience with this will not be complete until I see it as a lame action movie with a shitty soundtrack”?
March 8th, 2009 at 9:16 am
Back one more time to say that I just checked it out, and only about half of the titles are from songs, so that’s my error. (Also, my original issues only have the contextualizing end-of-chapter quotes starting with #8 or 9; I think the graphic novel edition was revised to put them in each chapter, but mine is out on loan and obviously my memory ain’t what I thought it was.)
March 8th, 2009 at 9:16 am
Did you not notice that every issue/chapter of the comic takes its title from a specific song
No, it doesn’t. Each chapter takes its title from a quote, which is only occasionally from a song. There’s a quote from Einstein in the Dr. Manhattan chapter, for instance, a quote from the Book of Genesis the chapter before that, a quote from Carl Jung after he decides to return from Mars, and so on.
March 8th, 2009 at 9:20 am
I thought the movie was pretty god d*** impressive and the use of songs was highly amusing.
March 8th, 2009 at 9:24 am
Ditto, ditto, ditto, to everything Matt Y. says. I will offer the following limited defense of the movie: The songs, it seemed to me, were designed to anchor the film in the 1980s, which served some purpose (if it was pretty much punctured by the time “Hallelujah” was played over a love scene), and there was probably no way a film version of Watchmen could ever match the printed form, what with all its intertextuality and Moore’s really, really stunning script. Criticisms of how the film failed to match the source material are valid, but they implicitly ignore the sad truth that no hypothetical film adaptation, no matter how many mistakes it avoided that were indulged in this particular adaptation, was ever going to really pull off the trick.
That said, bring on the six-hour director’s cut!
March 8th, 2009 at 9:28 am
I don’t get why comic book fans care about details.
Having read comic books my whole life, after seeing retcon after retcon, after seeing like 4 versions of the Joker’s back-story… I just don’t care about the details anymore. Certain things need to stay the same: Bruce Waynes parents have to be killed by Joe Chill, Clark Kent has to be raised in Smallville, Spider-man has to refuse to stop a mugger in a fit of spite and have that mugger kill his uncle ben; that stuff has to happen. But most everything else just needs to get the broad strokes right.
Watchmen already did what it had to do: it made comic book writers grow up. I don’t need this movie to be as ground breaking as the book was. I just need it to get the story-line mostly correct and portray the characters correctly. What needed to be said was said 20 years ago.
March 8th, 2009 at 9:29 am
no hypothetical film adaptation, no matter how many mistakes it avoided that were indulged in this particular adaptation, was ever going to really pull off the trick.
Which simply supports the notion that the film should never have been made in the first place.
That said, bring on the six-hour director’s cut!
So it can suck just as much for twice as long?
March 8th, 2009 at 9:30 am
I loved the comic when I first read it 20 years ago. I was never one of those fans clamoring for a movie adaption given that Watchmen was long, and not particularly well suited for a movie given its construction.
That being said, I loved the movie. It did about as good a job as could be done. My biggest problem was the movie’s pacing. It was just so slow. Too many scenes in slow motion. That saps the emotional impact. Tighhten up the scenes and the movie could have been 30 minutes shorter. Leave the long version to the DVD and the slow-motion to people who want to use their pause button.
Oh, and I loved the new ending better than the original ending.
March 8th, 2009 at 9:34 am
Logorrhea strikes again.
March 8th, 2009 at 9:35 am
I found the film to be far less satisfying. The superficial fidelities Matt and Spencer are focusing on are dwarfed by a dramatic misunderstanding of the comic’s very point, which is evidenced nicely in the sorts of “curious cheers” people notice at moments that should not be cheered. None of these people are supposed to be heroic; none of them are supposed to be “heroes.” The whole point of Watchmen is to make heroes impossible.
The result is worse than a dumbing down, it is a flattening out, a hollowing. In a myriad of minor but impactful ways Snyder’s version is incapable of the irony and ambiguity of Moore’s original and so the film is (as other reviewers have said) shiny but lifeless. Matt’s half right — if it wasn’t going to be a twelve-part HBO series it never should have been filmed, and really it probably should never have been filmed.
Even on the level of raw directorial ability — terrible music! an utterly laughable sex scene! super slo-mo everywhere! — Watchmen deserved much better.
March 8th, 2009 at 9:37 am
guachi, I talk about the new ending at the link too. The problem there is not some fanboy’s complaint that they changed the delivery mechanism but that they changed the fundamental logic of the plan, in a way that painfully undercuts the story.
March 8th, 2009 at 9:37 am
I just need it to get the story-line mostly correct and portray the characters correctly.
But it doesn’t portray the characters correctly. In the book everyone but Rorshach goes along with Ozymandias’s plan, and this isn’t some minor quibble, it makes the only character with an uncompromised moral stance a psychopath. In the book, Ozymandias isn’t supposed to be some scheming black-clad villain – his plan is supposed to have some sort of appeal to the reader, and in order for that to happen he can’t be dripping eeeeeeevil all the time.
In the book there are also well-fleshed-out characters who aren’t costumed crime-fighters at all – the news vendor, the cabbie and her girlfriend, the psychiatrist, etc. – all of them are glossed over or ignored in the film, which kind of misses the point of the source material by a mile.
March 8th, 2009 at 9:39 am
None of these people are supposed to be heroic; none of them are supposed to be “heroes.” The whole point of Watchmen is to make heroes impossible.
This is very right.
March 8th, 2009 at 9:40 am
strasmangelo jones, exactly right. Snyder turns a psychopath (Rorschach), a sad sack (Nite Owl), and a fundamentally broken human being (Silk Spectre II) into generic action movie badasses. That wasn’t what Moore’s story was about.
March 8th, 2009 at 9:46 am
Snyder turns a psychopath (Rorschach) … into generic action movie badasses.
What really brought this home for me was Rorschach’s scene in the prison cell: in the comic, he’s weak and somewhat pathetic, cowering in the corner, even though his ingenuity saves him. In the movie he’s a scary badass. The fact that one of his attackers just happens to die the same way as he did in the comic once he’s already been beaten down seemed to be just a shout-out to fanboys.
Still, I liked it.
March 8th, 2009 at 9:57 am
Do the “heroes” ever get referred to as “the Watchmen” in the original book? Do they get referred to as “the Watchmen” in the movie?
If it is anything like LXG, my guess would be that the answers are no, and yes, respectively.
March 8th, 2009 at 10:04 am
Glaivester, you’re right about that. They’re the “Crimebusters” in the original and “the Watchmen” in the film. Which has led a surprising number of people to refer to this film as The Watchmen.
March 8th, 2009 at 10:27 am
I thought the first half or so was a decent adaptation, up until around the end of the Manhattan-on-Mars sequence (also thought the actors playing Manhattan, Rorschach and The Comedian all did a great job). But then it totally lost any dramatic momentum when it became a bad relationship drama involving Dan and Laurie, with occasional interruptions for Rorschach-in-prison scenes…there was no real attempt to create a lingering fear of the impending nuclear apocalypse aside from those Nixon/Strangelove scenes which were too comical to take seriously. The final part with Ozymandias just seemed disconnected from what had gone before, and with most of his explanations of his motivations removed–no thoughtful analysis of the world situation and the need to “cut the gordian knot” like Alexander, no discussion of the horror of what the “end of the world” would really mean (see pages 21-22 of chapter XI in the book), no desire to prove the Comedian wrong (which in the book was a nice way of tying the end back to the original death-of-the-Comedian plot, as opposed to making his death into a pure MacGuffin), no “I did it!’ with tears running down his face–there was really no drama or resonance with real-world fears of nuclear war in the ending (and if you watch from around 4:40 to 6:40 of this interview with Alan Moore, you’ll see that fear of nuclear war was one of his main inspirations for the story), it just came across totally superficial and “Hollywood” compared to the book. And of course the slow-mo was way overused, the violence fetishized as opposed to realistic, and Tyler Bates’ musical score tended to emphasize “dramatic” moments in the cheesiest way possible, all of which added to the “lame Hollywood adaptation” feeling.
March 8th, 2009 at 10:37 am
I’d argue that there were a lot of Watchmen fans (myself included) who desperately insisted that there shouldn’t be a movie. But otherwise I think strasmangelo is spot on, and in the past couple of years this has become an increasingly large pet peeve of mine. Due to historical/economic/whatever factors, feature film is locked-in as the prestige format for filmed material, which means that people feed a lot of stories into the format even though it’s incredibly ill-suited to handle them. People should not make movies from novels. Also, biopic films are kind of a stupid idea. The most recent bug up my ass is that I’m in the middle of watching a BBC series from a few years ago called State of Play. It’s quite good, and it’s six hours long. It’ll be coming eventually to a theater near you as an American film adaptation roughly one third the length, which could be a very good or very bad film in its own right, but is guaranteed to not be nearly as rich and complex as the original series, because again: it’s going to be one third as long.
Just write an original screenplay!
March 8th, 2009 at 10:40 am
I think the weird pacing and feel of the film is a manifestation of problems with the source material.
The central story of The Watchmen is really interesting, but in both the novel and the film there’s just way too much complexity to deal with and it results in snippets of taut, brilliant storytelling interspersed with people standing around explaining shit. You can get away with a certain amount of “I’ll explain shit while something cool is onscreen for you to look at” – the Mars sequences, for example – but in the end the film is going to seem too long and yet too rushed at the same time.
If you look at, for example, Lord of the Rings, the story in LoTR is really not any more complex than the story of the Watchmen, yet since it was split into three long books, the three long movies wound up being about right in terms of pacing.
With Watchmen you had an overdense novel made into an overdense film. The HBO series idea is interesting, but the reality is I’m not sure it’s fixable. You either have to allow the exposition, which is boring, or write in bits of story that weren’t in the original, which will cause fanboys to plotz.
I’d also say that the main problem with the music choices were that they set the bar really high with “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” which thematically actually had something to do with the film, and then followed that up with a bunch of cool-sounding songs that didn’t make a lot of sense once you thought about them for two seconds.
March 8th, 2009 at 10:54 am
Anyone who goes into an adaptation hoping that all of the key themes of the book will be preserved is setting themselves up to dislike the movie.
No Country For Old Men, which is in my view the best adaptation of a novel ever made, abandoned Cormac McCarthy’s entire moral framework. It had to! Because a movie reflects the director’s point of view, not that of the author of the source material.
That’s one reason that source material that includes a lot of expositive narration, like Watchmen has from Rorschach, is very, very difficult to adapt. I thought they did a great job. The graphic novel, while groundbreaking, just had some basic flaws that were expanded to cartoonish proportions on the big screen.
March 8th, 2009 at 11:09 am
I wasn’t thrilled by the decision to use so many famous and iconic songs in the soundtrack. I don’t see any real basis for that in the original material
Did you not notice that every issue/chapter of the comic takes its title from a specific song, which is then quoted again in its context at the end of that chapter? The only one that survives into the movie, I think, is All Along the Watchtower (Chapter 10, “Two Riders Were Approaching).
There was another one. The first chapter of the graphic novel is titled, “At Midnight, All the Agents…”, which is taken from Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row”. A cover version (by My Chemical Romance) of that song is used over the closing credits. I loved part of the soundtrack and wished they had used it earlier (maybe they did and I missed it).
I initially found the use of pop songs to be out of place, but that was before I realized a number of them were referred to directly in the comic, mostly by chapter titles.
However, even allowing for that, I would not have used 99 Luftballons (which I just don’t like) nor would I have used Cohen’s “Hallelujah”, which has been in too many movies already.
I wish I had heard more Phillip Glass (Koyaanisquats), like they used in one of the trailers.
March 8th, 2009 at 11:10 am
Thank God Matt is not a movie critic. Not a single word in this post about whether the movie is good or not. Instead, it is all about whether the movie is a faithful adaptation of the comic book or not.
Well, fanboys be damned. I didn’t read the comics, but greatly enjoyed the movie.
March 8th, 2009 at 11:22 am
With Watchmen you had an overdense novel made into an overdense film.
Steve Sailer once said that one of the problems is the decline of the short story and the novella as literary forms.
With such shorter forms you can actually make the movies more complex than the book. With novels, you always have to leave something out.
March 8th, 2009 at 11:23 am
This, I think, is the real problem with the movie, and why, for about the past 20 years I’ve said it couldn’t work. We don’t really fear the end of the world, anymore. Sure, it’s still a possibility, but the real gut-wrenching “the commies could nuke us any second now” fear that so many of us grew up with, simply doesn’t exist today.
In the book, we wanted Adrian to succeed because we, the readers wanted our real life fear to go away. It was a dark fantasy about one man going to extraordinary measures because it was the only way to save us.
But 20 some odd years later we now know that there was another way: just wait until the Soviet Union collapses under its own weight. Now that terror is gone from the collective psyche, Watchmen simply loses most its power.
March 8th, 2009 at 11:27 am
This, I think, is the real problem with the movie, and why, for about the past 20 years I’ve said it couldn’t work. We don’t really fear the end of the world, anymore. Sure, it’s still a possibility, but the real gut-wrenching “the commies could nuke us any second now” fear that so many of us grew up with, simply doesn’t exist today.
Well, I live one block from Times Square, and what happens in the movie is the stuff of my nightmares. So there you go.
March 8th, 2009 at 11:36 am
I miss the old days, when fascination with superheroes meant you were either thirteen years old or a dope.
March 8th, 2009 at 11:40 am
With such shorter forms you can actually make the movies more complex than the book.
See ‘Benajmin Button’. Or perhaps not.
March 8th, 2009 at 11:45 am
Matt’s right. The true worth of Watchmen isn’t in the theatrical release, it’s in how the longer director’s cut ends up. Likewise, the real worth of the LotR movies is the extended editions. IMO.
March 8th, 2009 at 11:46 am
I’ve noticed an odd thing: A lot of Watchmen comic fans are complaining that the movie hews too closely to the comic and therefore people who weren’t fans of the comic won’t like the movie, and everyone I talk to who saw the movie but never read the comic thought the movie was great.
March 8th, 2009 at 11:54 am
Snyder turns a psychopath (Rorschach) … into generic action movie badasses.
What really brought this home for me was Rorschach’s scene in the prison cell: in the comic, he’s weak and somewhat pathetic, cowering in the corner, even though his ingenuity saves him. In the movie he’s a scary badass. The fact that one of his attackers just happens to die the same way as he did in the comic once he’s already been beaten down seemed to be just a shout-out to fanboys.
Still, I liked it.
You must have read a different comic than I did. Rorschach does not cower in the corner in that scene. There is not a single drawing in which he looks scared or pathetic. And the dialog is almost identical in the movie and in the comic. I thought that scene was a very good translation.
The main thing different about Rorschach in the movie is that he’s sounds angry all the time, while in the comic his facial expressions are often very flat. Like a true psychopath, he doesn’t feel very much.
I agree that none of these heroes are supposed to be Heroic in the classic superhero sense. However, part of the point of the comic was also to make the reader think about why we yearn for heroes, and how complicit we are in the mythos. Part of the point was to show different “superhero” moralities and exaggerate them in order to deconstruct them.
People love Rorschach despite him being a psychopath. That was true in the comic; Rorschach has always been the character fans like the most, and I think the movie preserves that. In the comic version of the famous “grease scene”, I cheered for Rorschach, and felt the same way in the film, all the while thinking to myself, “I really shouldn’t be feeling this way”. That’s art.
March 8th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
“I think the weird pacing and feel of the film is a manifestation of problems with the source material.”
It’s not a problem with the source material. The movie, for very good reasons, makes the plot of the story much more dominant and strips out much of the narrative complexity of Moore’s work. But plotwise, WATCHMEN was designed to be appreciated in distinct segments as either monthly issues of chapters in the trade. It’s built to give us just a little bit of plot along with everything else. Take out the everything else and you’re left with a plot that isn’t intended to flow smoothly or work as a propulsive engine, powering you through the story.
Zach Snyder deserves credit for getting as much of the basic story and themes on screen as he does, but he’s a blunt instrument as a director and either misses out or can’t handle a lot of Moore and Gibbons more subtle points.
I mean, if Dan Dreiberg isn’t fat…he’s not really Dan Dreiberg.
Mike
March 8th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
People should not make movies from novels.
That’s arguably the dumbest statement I’ve ever read. There are plenty of films based on novels that are better than the source material. See, e.g., Fight Club, Gone With The Wind, LotR: The Fellowship of the Ring, and The Godfather to name four very different examples.
March 8th, 2009 at 12:47 pm
Having read the comic I found the movie to be very boring. My GF kept giving me looks because I was saying lines before the characters did. She also knew Rorschach was the sign board guy way too early.
The news vendor hugging the black kid at the end made no sense in the movie. It was a needless shout out to fanboys.
My GF loved the blue penis though. All 1000 times they showed it.
March 8th, 2009 at 1:10 pm
The movie ending was better than the book ending–but, they never explained the freaky cat to people who might not have read the book.
March 8th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
I agree with El Cid. This film is epic. I did not read Watchmen, and walked out of my neighborhood theater in a daze. Kept having flashbacks of scenes from the movie until I went to sleep and again when I woke up. Had discussions about it at the bar last night. Am going to see it again at IMAX today for the experience, and may end up seeing it again later this week with someone else. All of you should un-read Watchmen, than go see the movie again.
March 8th, 2009 at 1:38 pm
Just Dropping By -
If you’re still around: I kept my comment pithy and short because I didn’t want to veer into a lengthily off-topic explanation of my personal opinions nobody cares about. I haven’t read Gone With the Wind or The Godfather, so I can’t speak to the quality of those books vs. the movie (though I have some issues with the first Godfather that I wonder if they might be due to the adaptation).
I agree with you on Fight Club, which is one of my favorite movies, and also in my opinion a pretty underwhelming book. In my experience, if I liked a movie better than the book, it’s because I thought the book was kind of shitty.
I disagree that the LOTR films were superior to the books. I think they succeeded as adaptations by being really quite different than the books; I prefer the reading experience, but I think the movies are quite good. Still, a lot had to be altered to make the adaptation workable, which is kind of my point. One of my favorite adaptations of a novel I loved is Wonder Boys, which nonetheless cut out my favorite part of the book because there just isn’t time for that kind of stuff in a movie.
There are lots of films I liked which were based on books. The only ones I thought were better than the books were the ones where I thought the book was bad. (Or weirdly suited to adaptation; Tom Clancy works well, because so much of his prose is taken up with stuff nobody wants to hear spoken by an actor.) This isn’t so unreasonable, is it? An artwork is conceived as an organic entity, with a certain breadth and depth and character. Then it’s transferred into another medium where the prevailing standards for tolerable length, basically, dictate great changes to the breadth and depth of the artwork. The same underlying material which was intended for a certain format is now divorced from the original context, and 97% of the time the original context will seem superior for its greater richness and unity. I mean, look, I also take it as axiomatic that novelizations of popular movies are likely to be pretty shitty as well, for much the same reasons – Star Wars wasn’t conceived with Luke’s internal dialog in mind. I’m not in general a fan of adapting art from one medium to another – genius exceptions acknowledged, of course – but I think the novel –> film transition is just especially uncongenial. And Watchmen strikes me much the same way.
March 8th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
The movie was great. The ending better than the comic. You did see the how morally depraved the heroes were. Yes, the sex scene was needed to show all the motivations of the characters for being costumed avengers. I am glad the comic within a comic wasn’t put in because that was the worst part of the comic. Everyone back in the day wasn’t scared of nuclear holocaust. Anymore than everyone nowadays is scared crapless because of terrorism. The book and the movie are different art. More people will see the movie than ever read the comic book. It is a good movie.
March 8th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
Jackson’s LOTR movies : Tolkien’s LOTR :: Jackson’s King Kong : Original King Kong
March 8th, 2009 at 3:36 pm
Why did we decide making a movie of this book was necessary again? Were comics too hard to read?
March 8th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
This, I think, is the real problem with the movie, and why, for about the past 20 years I’ve said it couldn’t work. We don’t really fear the end of the world, anymore. Sure, it’s still a possibility, but the real gut-wrenching “the commies could nuke us any second now” fear that so many of us grew up with, simply doesn’t exist today.
In the book, we wanted Adrian to succeed because we, the readers wanted our real life fear to go away. It was a dark fantasy about one man going to extraordinary measures because it was the only way to save us.
A story can realistically convey the fear of something without it being something you’re actually afraid of in your day-to-day life. I’m not afraid birds will turn against humanity but The Birds is still an effective movie. For that matter, I first read Watchmen in the mid 90s when I had no particular fear of nuclear holocaust (and to be honest I never really had such a fear earlier in life, since I was born in 1977 and didn’t really reach the age of political awareness until perestroika and glastnost were in full force in the USSR), but it still worked for me. And a few years ago I watched the nuclear holocaust TV movies The Day After and Threads on DVD, both of which I thought did a good job of making the approach to nuclear war seem fairly realistic and tension-filled.
March 8th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
Now if we can only make the Americans buy it which they haven’t done yet, just like the didn’t buy the comic a generation ago. It may make Time-Warners favorite Amazon order list, but obviously not the list of real comic readers. There’s no wonder why it took so long to get made. Of course, all that Frank Miller, Jack Kirby, Will Eisner, Herb Trimpe and Jim Steranko stuff got the real hearsay largely because it was just plain better written and drawn from within the culture, without the internet marketing drivel to try to mythologize it. And the readers buy them, too. Maybe the movie will help it sell a few hardcovers?
March 8th, 2009 at 5:04 pm
I miss the old days, when fascination with superheroes meant you were either thirteen years old or a dope.
Remember when homosexuality meant you were a pervert?
That was awesome.
March 8th, 2009 at 6:24 pm
I remember when trolls called themselves Kaiser and Rat. The Americans wouldn’t understand what those names meant, until after the war, of course, but we sure did. The Americans couldn’t give a shit, really. They’d just call them all boats.
That hasn’t changed.
Now, that was truly awesome.
March 8th, 2009 at 6:40 pm
It may make Time-Warners favorite Amazon order list, but obviously not the list of real comic readers.
Watchmen has been a perennial bestseller among graphic novels since long before the movie was announced, who do you think was buying all those copies throughout the 90s and 00s if not “real comic readers”?
March 8th, 2009 at 6:58 pm
It certainly was an improvement on the god-awful art in the book. That’s always been the weakness of the work – Alan Moore’s compelling story drawn like something from the sunday funnies.
March 8th, 2009 at 7:11 pm
Or what? I can understand the position that Watchmen wasn’t made into a good movie – although I thought it was great, enjoyed it immensely, and will probably go back and see it again – but I can’t understand the position that it shouldn’t have been made at all. Seriously, what does it cost you that a movie you don’t like was made? It’s not like Zach Snyder used up some kind of nonrenewable movie resource that could have been spent on some better movie. If there was a better movie to watch this weekend, you could have gone to see it instead, but I guess you didn’t.
How that becomes Snyder’s fault is beyond me. I saw it, had a great time. But even if I hadn’t, how could that possibly mean that the movie should never have existed? Is Watchmen the comic diminished if the movie wasn’t good?
What a compelling graphic novel indeed if it can render its readers clinically insane.
March 8th, 2009 at 7:27 pm
“What really brought this home for me was Rorschach’s scene in the prison cell: in the comic, he’s weak and somewhat pathetic, cowering in the corner”
Wrong.
Rorschach is smart. He’s not going to go over to the bars and get grabbed.
You need to have been in a prison riot – or a prison cell – to get that scene.
There was nothing weak about him at all.
March 8th, 2009 at 8:04 pm
It certainly was an improvement on the god-awful art in the book.
“God-awful”? Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen art is amazing, and brilliantly subversive – he takes a style that was retro even for the time (1986) to better evoke the era of classic superheroes, but he coats that Silver and Bronze Age imagery in a layer of grime. It’s the perfect visual counterpart to Moore’s script, and the movie is naturally completely oblivious to this – with most of its imagery created by computer, it never feels real, let alone tactile. Zack Snyder’s New York seems bizarrely over-clean, while Gibbon’s drawings of New York manage to feel at least as skuzzy as the real thing.
I’ve always thought that Gibbons has been wildly underappreciated for his contributions to the book – I mean, Christ, he drew the damn thing, and it is a goddamn comic book, after all. But the peculiarities of American corporate comic book culture have created a cult of the writer within the framework of a visual medium, while comics in nearly any other context – Europe, Japan, American art comics, etc. – are recognized as primarily being driven by art.
March 8th, 2009 at 8:38 pm
Chet -
Or nothing; it’s an opinion, not a warning.
(1) I haven’t seen the Watchmen movie. I’ll probably see it when the special edition whatevermajiggy comes out on DVD. I have no opinion on the quality of this particular movie, though I’m not optimistic for some of the alterations I’ve heard about.
(2) I didn’t actually say people shouldn’t make movies from graphic novels, I said they shouldn’t make them from novels. I’m sure there are graphic novels which I would consider good film material – Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, e.g., could make a compelling film, but probably not one anybody’s interested in making properly. I think it’s funny that two people have responded quite strongly to my statement that people shouldn’t make movies from novels, but haven’t taken issue with my immediately subsequent claim that biopics are kind of a stupid idea, especially since my reasoning for the two statements is largely the same. That doesn’t mean there aren’t good (or great) biopics in the world; incidentally, my favorite drama from the past few years was adapted from a novel (which I haven’t read).
(3) It doesn’t cost me anything that Watchmen was made, and the goodness or badness of the film neither elevates nor denigrates the source material. To the extent that there’s some sort of nonrenewable film resource that got used up here (which, yeah, I know there isn’t) I’d posit that I’m probably more interested in what would’ve happened if Snyder had written (or commissioned) an original screenplay that traded in whatever it was he found stimulating about the comic, the same way I’d be more interested in watching an original film about the relationship between politicians and the press than I am in watching a truncated remake of State of Play, which I referenced in my original comment.
I mostly just don’t see the point, or understand the appeal, of 90% of adaptations, and would rather see what a creative artist could do with an original story that was designed around the strengths of the cinematic medium.
March 8th, 2009 at 8:40 pm
No one, not real American comics readers, were buying Watchmen. And American comic culture, they don’t call it “book”, is not corporate, but actually cultural, actually situated within American society, which it isn’t in britain, japan or anywhere else. Everything is “art” driven. Everything is the language of graphics, as the Americans are and the originators and creators of. The Dave Gibbons art might actually be the strong point of the entire comic.
March 8th, 2009 at 9:03 pm
There’s absolutely nothing “subversive” about it except that he occasionally tucks a diner named “Gunga Diner” (yuk, yuk!) into various panels.
The art is trash. Straight camera angles, square blocking – it’s amateur hour. Nothing dynamic or visually interesting at all, and as a result the entire story is nearly devoid of any emotional impact. The scene where Manhattan and Spectre arrive in the carnage of downtown New York? As drawn they might just as well have arrived in the middle of a Barnes and Noble for all the visual impact of the scene.
March 8th, 2009 at 9:11 pm
The point is to recoup expenditures by means of ticket sales. That’s it. When people say “why was it necessary to make a Watchmen movie”, I don’t know what the hell they’re talking about, nobody makes movies out of necessity – but you want a reason to have made the movie? I’ll give you 55 million of them this opening weekend.
Here’s what would have happened – anybody with any brains at all would have told him “why don’t you just make a Watchmen movie, instead?”
March 8th, 2009 at 9:23 pm
I’ve always assumed that most very successful films that were based on a prior work – and really, a lot of films are based on books – didn’t actually depend on fans of the prior work for that success. The scales of “successfully large audience” just don’t compare between the readership of even a successful book – or comic book – and a successful movie.
Also, between me and strasmangelo jones (who’s right about the art, but whatever), you seem kind of worked up about all this. It’s OK, Chet, no one has a problem with you liking the movie.
March 8th, 2009 at 10:01 pm
I’m puzzled more than anything else, but I won’t deny that, when faced with people advocating censorship, I get a little torqued. “This movie is bad.” That’s a statement I can respect even when I disagree with it. “This movie should not have been made, regardless of how good it is.” That’s a statement I cannot have any respect for, or for the person uttering it.
Maybe you’ll see Watchmen and think it sucks. I thought it re-invigorated the story I had read, mostly because I was seeing it clearly for the first time, instead of through the haze of Gibbons’ amateurish art. (I think a good example of how bad it is is up there at the top of the post. A shot of Rorschach with all the drama and dynamism of a medical illustration.) Maybe you believe, as Moore does, that Watchmen can’t be made into a movie. But to say that it shouldn’t? It’s absurd to think that any work could be so good, it could justify censorship.
March 8th, 2009 at 10:06 pm
The really interesting thing is that the film in some ways demonstrates how influential the book was. John Doe in Se7en is obviously a descendant of Rorschach, for example.
March 8th, 2009 at 10:23 pm
(1) I think you’re way overreading the use of the word “should” here, at least in my posts (guess I can’t vouch for anyone else’s). I’m saying “should” as in “I think people should talk more during sex” – a recommendation – not as in “I think people should not cheat on their spouses” – a moral (or quasi-legal) judgment.
(2) The sentence “This movie should not have been made, regardless of how good it is” is not a statement that appears anywhere in this thread before you typed it (I just checked; maybe Google Chrome’s “find” function doesn’t work yet). I’m not going to reread the whole thing for sentiment, but I guarantee you that it’s not what I’m saying. I’d analogize my attitude thusly: Fight Club is one of my favorite movies. If you’d asked me ahead of time whether “they” should make a movie out of the book Fight Club I would’ve said probably not. I’m glad the movie was made anyway. That’s not an analogy yet, really, so the analogy is: when Paul Pierce takes a double-pump fade-away eighteen footer with two defenders on him, I think “he shouldn’t take that shot.” But when it goes in, I’m glad he took it. In my opinion the average film made from pre-existing source material as lengthy and detailed as Watchmen is likely to skim over a lot of what made me enjoy it so much in the first place. Since I think people should make better movies than worse ones, I think they shouldn’t (there I go again!) set out to make films that I think are likely to be inhibited in maximal goodness* from the very start; to make it about biopics again, an attempt to tell a rich and interesting story about the decades-long life and career of Ray Charles within the confines of a feature film is probably going to feel kind of shallow, because 30+ years of a man’s life don’t gracefully compress into 120 minutes. Sometimes I’ll be wrong.
* And this is what I don’t get, on a visceral level, whenever I read an article or see a DVD extra that rhapsodizes about how the screenwriter or director or whomever read a 450 page long book and loved it so much they just had to bring it to film and throw away 65% of it.
March 8th, 2009 at 10:29 pm
Daxon wrote:
No one, not real American comics readers, were buying Watchmen.
Either your memory is off or you’re just trolling; the publication and reception section of the wikipedia article says “Watchmen was published in single-issue form over the course of 1986 and 1987. The miniseries was a commercial success, and its sales helped DC Comics briefly overtake its competitor Marvel Comics in the comic book direct market.” And as I said, the collected edition of the comic series sold very well throughout the 90s and 00s.
March 8th, 2009 at 10:40 pm
I miss the old days, when fascination with superheroes meant you were either thirteen years old or a dope.
Remember when homosexuality meant you were a pervert?
That was awesome.
Hmm. I don’t quite get the analogy.
March 8th, 2009 at 10:53 pm
No, I get it. You think certain kinds of movies shouldn’t be made – either their creators should be prevented (censorship) by others or they should simply choose not to create them (self-censorship, often more pernicious.)
When I asked you “or what”, that’s what I meant – you’ve just said that you think filmmakers should censor themselves. Why should they do that? What argument do you have to convince them when it’s obvious you admit that some good movies wouldn’t be made as a result? And even if that wasn’t true, why shouldn’t bad movies be made if people want to make them?
No, look, I got what you meant. You made an assertion that some kinds of stories – those in novels – shouldn’t be told in the medium of film. At no point did you make an argument that they would always be bad movies, so pretty clearly you were expressing a prohibition that, in your mind, has nothing to do with the ultimate quality of the film. Here, look, you’re agreeing with me:
Naturally, because it’s a great movie. Which, you admit, has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not you would have thought it should have been made into a movie before you saw it.
Which is exactly the position of a surprising number of Watchmen fanboys – not, “Snyder’s adaptation will suck”, but “Snyder should not be allowed to adapt it. A film adaptation should not exist.” Incomprehensible.
So why guarantee it? Why not just say “movies made from novels often are worse than the novel”, make note of the exceptions and enjoy them, and most importantly – not begrudge people making movies you don’t like so much that you would ask them to be restrained from doing so?
That way you don’t come off like, oh I don’t know, a censorious ass?
March 8th, 2009 at 11:49 pm
Look, Chet, you seem determined to fit my opinions into some predeterminedly “pernicious” narrative. Either I’m not expressing myself clearly enough for you, or you’re arguing with somebody who’s not actually me, the person typing these words. I’m not trying to censor anybody, I’m expressing my aesthetic opinions about the limitations of film as a medium. And I am an ass sometimes, but not because I want to stop Zack Snyder from making the movies he wants to make (because I don’t want to stop him). Have a good night.
March 9th, 2009 at 12:45 am
Whereas Chet comes off as an ass, plain and simple.
March 9th, 2009 at 8:55 am
(1) abandoned Cormac McCarthy’s entire moral framework
You mean, *added* a moral framework?
(2) Anyone who thinks the LOTR movies were *better* than Tolkien is an aesthetic imbecile.
March 9th, 2009 at 9:19 am
I assure you you’ve been more than clear throughout. I understand exactly what you mean. What I can’t comprehend is how you can use the language you do and not see it as a call for self-censorship: some movies should not be made.
The only one who doesn’t seem to understand what words mean, here, is you.
There’s nothing aesthetic about saying it should not be made. Say “it’s bad” if you want to express an opinion about aesthetics. Say “it’s gonna suck” if you believe that making a movie out of a novel is likely to be an exercise in failure. The language you used instead is the language of censorship. How does that become my problem, exactly?
You want him to stop himself. I get it. It’s just as bad, though. Self-censorship is still censorship. In fact it’s worse.
No, come on, that’s just stupid. Tolkien may have invented high fantasy literature but it’s not like he perfected it out of the gate. There have been developments in the genre since he wrote his books – for instance, don’t tuck the reluctant king’s dramatic embrace of his nobility into the first act of the story, since it rather undercuts his “reluctance” if it’s the first thing you see him do – which make their way into the movies.
They’re an improvement. A dramatic improvement, especially in the pacing, since breaking the movies exactly like the novels would result in the third movie only being 45 minutes long. The lack of the interminable Tom Bombadil nonsense is only the first of the movies many improvements over their sources.
March 9th, 2009 at 11:48 am
“I’m expressing my aesthetic opinions about the limitations of film as a medium.”
As a medium for what? Entertainment? Eternal truths?
I never read the graphic novel, but liked the film, especially that scrappy crank Rorschach.
“…He tried pulling that on Rorschach and Rorschach threw him down an elevator shaft.” Classic.
Also, when he’s in prison “You don’t understand, I’m not in here with you, you’re in here with me!”
The movie had a weird combo of a liberal sensibility about the insanity of nuclear war and the moral equivalency of both sides in the Cold War and then the conservative/vigilante views of the Comedien and Rorschach (think of Jack Nicholson in a Few Good Men or Vic Mackey in the Shield).
March 9th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
I’m late to the party, but saw The Watchmen over the weekend, and liked it. Sure, I’m aware of the reviews that bash the adolescent politics it contains, complaints about the awful sex, and time spent in flashbacks. However, as someone who hadn’t even heard of the comic series until a couple of months ago, I thought it worked as a movie.
Unlike the DeLaurentis version of Dune.
On a tangent, I’m always amused that the superhero mythology never acknowledges the vast swath of suburbia surrounding their urban milieu.
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