I saw Watchmen this weekend, and I've got to be honest: I kinda wish I hadn't.
Now don't misunderstand this as some sort of misplaced nerd rage at the thought of someone making alterations to my beloved Watchmen. It's not particularly my beloved Watchmen to begin with. The comic book cognoscenti (if such things can be said to exist) have long since anointed the original The Official Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread, and I've never much agreed with that point in the first place (also I don't see what's so great about sliced bread). While I can certainly see and admire the skill with which it was crafted I can easily think of about two dozen comics I would rather read than Watchmen.
If you aren't of a particularly comic-booky stripe, look at it this way: anyone who talks about how much they love Watchmen, like really LOVE it, should be greeted with the same wary circumspection as someone who talks about how much they love, like really LOVE, the collected works of William Faulkner or Stanley Kubrick; i.e. as a preening, self-important intellectual jerkoff. The former because Alan Moore makes William Faulkner's lifelong attempt to create dense and impenetrable literature look like a Mister Rogers lesson about the joys of sharing, and the latter because Watchmen in particular is a quintessentially Kubrickian work, a piece of literature that is so far detached from human emotion you wonder if its creator actually possesses any. Watchmen is a comic book about comic books, as skillful a bit of deconstruction as you will find outside of Derrida himself, and anyone who professes to "LOVE" something like that is not to be trusted, for they have clockwork where their heart should be and a soul emptier than the vast reaches of outer space.
But we're not talking about my problems with the original or how much I hate a certain woman I briefly had a thing with years ago.
Actually, in terms of the film's direct relationship to the book –i.e. the script – I was very pleasantly surprised. I thought the cut was excellent; I never sat there wondering why a certain scene was missing or why certain other scenes were shuffled about in the way they were. Alex Tse and Solid Snake did, frankly, an excellent job taking an extraordinarily long and complex book and translating it into a coherent story of movie length, even if it was a little overlong. That's okay, we endorse long movies (c.f. places in the All-Time Top Five for Gladiator, The English Patient, and Lord of the Rings). No, there is no quibble to be had as regards the script.
In fact, and I said this coming out of the theatre, the things the movie gets right it gets exceptionally right. The Comedian, Rorshach, Nite Owl, Dr. Manhattan: all dead solid perfect, both in casting and performance. They are great. They are super-great. (Well, they only got Dr. Manhattan half perfect, a little bit on that later.) The "look" of the film is also exactly right; though the movie's apparent need to exactly replicate certain panels from the book becomes increasingly annoying (especially after, like, the HUNDREDTH TIME) it does an excellent job rendering the world Dave Gibbons painstakingly created. And the change made to the ending, which out of a spoiler sense I will not reveal, is fantastic. Really, it's the best thing in the movie. The original ending to the book is INCREDIBLY FUCKING STUPID and the way the movie changes it is better (and improves the overall story) in about ten thousand different ways.
However, while the movie gets the right stuff very right, unfortunately, the things it gets wrong it gets REALLY fucking wrong, and those things vastly outnumber the things it gets right.
The wrong things in the movie are, to an extent, a death by a thousand cuts, but there are three that pretty much define it:
First: Dr. Manhattan looks stupid. I mean the EFFECT looks stupid, which is frankly amazing. Spend the fucking money, for god's sake. The most important character in your movie looks like he stepped out of a Playstation 2 game. In a world where we had Gollum seven years ago there is absolutely no excuse for this.
Second: bad casting will quickly ruin your day. I can almost forgive casting Malin Akerman (ALMOST). Laurie doesn't do a whole lot other than bitch about Dr. Manhattan and get her kit off anyway, and if that's your game, well, Malin Akerman is a good choice (for the getting her kit off part, at least). You can learn to grit your teeth and get through the parts when she talks. However, when your main villain, your antagonist, your Blofeld, your Colonel Kurtz, your Hannibal Lecter, is not only terribly portrayed (complete with wandering accent!) but is actually wimpy and slight and effeminate, your movie is undermined beyond a recoverable point. Imagine if you were watching Star Wars and Darth Vader suddenly turned into a prissy, whiny little bitch. All right, fine, imagine Lucas didn't already fucking DO that, and now imagine he was like that from the start. Would you think Star Wars was that great anymore? Of course you wouldn't. The lessons are, respectively: actresses famous for getting naked aren't usually that good (bar Kate Winslet, of course), and just hire Jude Law already.
Third: Zack Snyder is an idiot man-child. I have gone on at length about the complexity of the source material, and suffice it to say that Snyder may not be the best person to shepherd difficult material through the filmmaking process as he seems to believe that film is not so much an entertainment medium as it is a way to physically assault the audience. Snyder's sensibilities (such as they are) are actually very well suited to something like 300, where both book and movie basically boil down to "KILL THAT FUCKING GUY RIGHT NOW! Okay, you're done? Good. Now KILL THAT OTHER FUCKING GUY RIGHT NOW!" If you're Zack Snyder that kind of material is right up your loud, obvious, subtlety of a 20-pound-sledgehammer, did I mention loud and obvious alley.
If that's what's up your alley, however, an intricate examination of Cold War socio-political theory, the essential nature of morality, and the insidious ways in which power corrupts may not be the movie you should be making. So instead of a complex and thoughtful adaptation of a complex and thoughtful book we get a movie whose narrative plunges forward so fast it blows past itself then comes to a dead screeching halt, all the while covering up the action with songs that are either wildly inappropriate or painfully clichéd, and are all excessively loud, and goes on to repeat that cycle for THREE GODDAMN HOURS.
(Here's a hint, Zack: when your movie is already pushing the 150-minute mark, slow motion is NOT YOUR FRIEND. Seriously, fucking stop with the slow motion. Christ.)
After the movie I was trying to think of another example of such a legitimately great book that got turned into such a terrible movie, and at the time I couldn't come up with anything. The next day my father suggested Starship Troopers and Dune, and they're good examples of that specifically. (I am open to more suggestions, by the way.) Thing is, though, they aren't as disappointing as Watchmen because, unlike Watchmen, they have zero redeeming value. Every single aspect of them is completely and utterly terrible.
At the end of the day the real shame of Watchmen is not that it's dreadful – because, oh sweet zombie Jesus it is buckets of dreadful – but that with literally three personnel changes the movie could have been fantastic. Get yourself Jude Law, get a director who can do big stupid action stuff AND at least look up the word "nuance" in the dictionary, someone like Chris Nolan or Gore Verbinksi or Paul Greengrass or SOMEONE, and hire an actress who can both act AND look good naked, throw them in with everyone and everything else you've already got and BANG! You have your next Dark Knight. You have a legitimately outstanding movie.
The shame of it is that this thing, this wretched, misbegotten, twelve-fingered bastard of a movie is now and forever THE cinematic version of Watchmen, and it could have been so much better.
JLK
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