The year was 1980-something-or-other. I was a geeked out high school student, complete with seventeen foot long Doctor Who scarf, multiple sets of multi-sided dice, and of course a comic book collection. I took the city bus across town to the Catholic high school, which gave me a little more flexibility in my after school free time. A favorite after-school haunt in those days was Tim's Comic Corner. This tiny shop put me, unknowingly, at the forefront of witnessing the emergence of some serious writers in a format considered inherently unserious by the wider world. Frank Miller had the first breakout hit among these with his semi-deconstruction of the Batman mythos in Dark Knight. But around this same time, burbling beneath the surface, a number of other writers had grown bored with the triteness of comic book superheroes altogether. Some started weaving decidedly different tales within pages that looked to the rest of the world like the same unserious kiddy-fare that people associated with comic books. My personal favorite in those days was the assertively iconoclastic Alan Moore.
I followed Moore's writings through strange titles such as Swamp Thing, and Miracleman. In these he began to take apart the casual assumptions behind the superhero genre itself. His vision was sometimes dark, but not in a gratuitous or sensational manner. His stories were prone to long flights of introspection - silent soliloquys by his protagonists reflecting on the nature of themselves... life... the universe and man's place within it. Heady stuff for a high school kid who had wandered in looking for stories about Spider Man battling the Hobgoblin for the umpteenth time.
It was not long after this time that The Watchmen was released. Despite later characterizations, it was not initially a graphic novel. It was a mini-series. Twelve issues released, one per month, over the course of a year. Slowly, over weeks and months, this strange alternate world was unveiled in which super heroes were real - but, save for one, quite mortal. Where Richard Nixon was still president, and the world was on the brink of nuclear war. Where heroes wrestled, not just with villains, but with the very concepts of heroism and law and morality. Where, quite intentionally, the reader was forced to question their own notions about heroism. Everything about that story was so meticulously laid out... the way the frames were sequenced... the overlay of one subplot providing a fateful metaphor for another... the effortless shift between the written word, the spoken word, thought, and emotion. This was the way I came to know the story of The Watchmen, and it was quite an experience.
Mind you, I had no idea the thing would be bound as a graphic novel and take on a second life as some kind of mainstream hit. There seemed to be an awful lot of other stories more likely to do that floating around in the comic book shops of the day. Sure, The Watchmen was complex, well written, and excitingly plotted. But it also still had
superheroes, running around battling crime in colorful tights. Nothing says "don't take me seriously" quite so convincingly, no matter how you dress it up. Had I not already been a teenaged geek prone to visiting comic book shops I'm not sure I would have given it a chance. But apparently plenty of others did, eventually getting The Watchmen named as one of Time Magazine's "
100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present."
Fast forward a couple of decades. The Watchmen is now a major motion picture. A blockbuster even. Part of me is very pleased. Part of me just has to shake my head and wonder what the heck happened. I could understand the popularity of popcorn-munching fun superhero movies, like Spiderman, Ironman etc. Those are in the same tradition as other Hollywood action movies, and realism has never been in high demand there. But The Watchmen is... well it has action in it. But it is definitely not an "action" kind of story. It's complex. It has multiple subplots going on at multiple levels most of the time. It has a lot of major characters, each one carrying something crucial to the overall story. At it's heart it's also a deconstruction of the superhero genre itself - these are not the kind of superheroes you're meant to root for. Condensing the thing by shortening it or collapsing multiple characters into one, which are the typical Hollywood adaptation gimmicks, would risk making the whole thing incomprehensible. Leaving it all in would require far more run time than any movie would allow. Nevertheless, I was keenly interested to see for myself how such a thing might be adapted to the screen. I was hopeful it would somehow work, even if I couldn't quite imagine how.
And in that light I headed off to the local cinema on Saturday afternoon to see for myself. So how was it in my opinion?
Dark. That's my initial and overarching impression of the film. Far darker than the graphic novel suggests, I would contend. Mind you, the darkness is faithful to one aspect of the story. But in written form it's not so... pervasive. There are plenty of levels where the light is allowed in. In the film the darkness overwhelms other elements that should otherwise be there. For one the sense of normalcy... the idea that life goes on oblivious to grander events which threaten to overwhelm them. It's as if the darkness of the character Rorsach's warped mind has been translated by the director as the actual state of the world. In the original story this is very much subject to opinion and perspective.
That being said, is the pervasive darkness a problem of the film, or merely a choice made by a director with only so much ability to tell so much of a story too big for the screen? Taken for its own sake the darkness does make for an effective story. It also forces the director to quicken the pace, as a movie paced to drag along in this kind of morose world view would grow quickly and overwhelmingly oppresive. And so, despite - or maybe because of - the darkness the movie clips along at a fairly breathless pace most of the time. Will the casual film goer even catch a fraction of the subtle elements the director hides in just about every corner of every frame in this film? Doubtful. And I'm not just referring to the easter-egg type elements to please fans of the written story.
And that leads to the other overarching impression of the film - Dense. And I don't mean that in the "duh" sense. I mean the movie is just packed with visual detail, a surprising amount of which contains significance to the story. This is the kind of movie you can rewatch half a dozen times and still find yourself discovering something new tucked away in the corner of a frame you thought you already knew. Whether or not film-goers appreciate the plot, one will not leave this movie feeling cheated out of their money. The shots are so rich and deep and textured it's a wonder anyone could afford to make it at all. It is at times visually stunning, at others grittily revolting, and others just so plausibly lived-in that you forget the world portrayed doesn't even exist.
Now all of that context aside, I need to head into the area of spoilers to fully complete my thoughts as one of those viewers who can't help comparing it to the original. If you don't want to hear that, do not read further. You've been warned.
SPOILERS AHEAD!!!
So let's talk for a moment about the portrayal of the characters. How do they compare to the book? Some are so dead-on they might have walked off the page - Dan "Nite Owl" Dreiberg, and Rorsach are absolute tops in this regard. It helps that their physical resemblence to characters first drawn twenty years ago is uncanny. But they're equally helped by having the lion's share of their subplots from the original story preserved. We see everything about Rorsach from his childhood flashbacks, to the grisly child-murder case that broke his mind and changed his view of good and evil, to his interaction with the prisoners when he's in jail, to his work as an investigator, to his interactions with all the other key characters. We even get the narration of his journal entries. In Dreiberg's case we see him interact with Hollis, the original Nite Owl. We see his morose and aimless civilian life. We see his embarrassed and restrained desire for Laurie emerge. We see him reclaim his heroic mantle and how he differs from Rorsach, even as they work together.
Less satisfying is the portrayal of Laurie "Silk Spectre" Juspeczyk. In appearence she's a dead-ringer for the charcter she portrays. But in the film she's quite a bit more straightforward than the complex character of the original. She's not torn over her desire for Jon "Dr. Manhattan" Osterman while feeling trapped. She's basically over him the moment they're introduced, needing little more than an excuse to leap into Dreiberg's waiting arms. The awkward flirtation with Dreiberg is over and consumated in what seems like five minutes here, whereas it was intentionally a long and less-than-obvious match in the original story. Importantly, her complex love/hate relationship with her mother - the original Silk Spectre - is included here. This was a welcome surprise and did help add a bit more complexity to who she is and where her hostility comes from. The problem is this hostility is only sparingly allowed into the movie, changing Laurie from a recalcitrant heroine who resents that she ever played such a role, into just another retired hero. The script gives verbiage to the former, but it's simply not present in the performance.
The role of Dr. Manhattan is a bit harder to critique. It's a slightly different portrayal than in the original story. Both more abbreviated and just inherently harder to portray. How do you portray a character who sees every point in time at once, and frequently comments on the future and the past the way anyone else comments on the present? Someone who's frame of conscious skips readily across time in any direction? Apparently you make reference to it and then leave it out. Probably the right choice for the screen. The role tachyons play in allowing Veidt to launch his grand plan without Manhattan knowing is, in my opinion, never adequately explained. It's only from knowing the story that I knew what they were talking about in that regard, and I'm fairly sure most movie-goers will miss it entirely. However overall I think they got the essence of this character correct. He is "drifting" away from connection to humanity. And this is itself a major part of the plot.
Adrian Veidt is the last character I intend to mention. In some parts they got him right, and in others I think they got him very, very wrong. Where did they go wrong? They forgot that in the translation from the two-dimensional print medium that he's still supposed to have three dimensions on the screen. Veidt in this film is a villain, through and through. Missing are the complexities and dimensions of his character that make him more than that in the written story. Missing too is most of his back story. We know from the film only that he's called the smartest man in the world, though we're not sure if that's intended sarcastically. We know he's the richest man in the world. We know very little else other than that he is the one who decides to slaughter millions in order to bring about "world peace." Very little is done to complicate the thought process that lead him to this decision. Very little is done to obscure how he was able to bring this about in such secrecy. His portrayal even lacks the believable sympathy which makes it so difficult for the other heroes to conceive of as a villain in the original story.
Leaving characters aside there are a couple of jarring differences with the written story that deserve mention. Foremost among these is the nature of the attack unleashed by Veidt upon the world. In the book, this is portrayed as something Veidt stages as an alien invasion, complete with giant dead psychic-quid beasts appearing in the attacked cities. The film does away with this, instead having Veidt attack with a simulation of Dr. Manhattan's abilities, in effect framing him as the perpetrator. And you know what? I can leave aside my fanboy affinity for the original well enough to admit they got this one right. It is at once cleaner, more plausible, and motivating to what happens next. After this is makes great sense for Dr. Manhattan to leave Earth for good. It lends an understandable motivation to the superpowers to cooperate, in that they believe it was their near war that lead Manhattan to attack them both in the first place. It is, in short, an improvement to the original. And that's quite an accomplishment.
Another device that differs from the original is equally effective in the film adaptation. In lieu of being able to tell the back story of the "superhero" world in which the film is based in long narrative fashion, the movie opens with a series of sequential flashback images, starting back in the 40's and bringing us up to the present day. This brings a lot of context in areas that otherwise would never have fit into the film at all. It's not an improvement over the original, but it is a skillful adaptation of one medium to the other.
Okay, with all that out of the way I have left the big question unanswered: Did I like the movie? Yes, I did. It's not the kind of movie that had me leaping out of my chair... but then it's not that kind of story either. It's the kind of a movie I walk away from with great admiration for the production itself. I think it did a decent job bringing the story to life, if perhaps more darkly and confusingly than it might have done. I'd be hesitant to send someone who had never read the story to see the film without qualification. That said, this movie was aiming for a particular niche and I think it was largely successful in finding it. It's not for everyone. But I think many will be pleased.
(And as a subscript I would like to note, parents who take their young kids to see this movie and fail to drag them right back out the moment they realize "R" really means "R" in this case are morons. This isn't "Batman and Robin," or "Spiderman," and you realize that five minutes into the film... and it gets darker and more graphic from there. I witnessed a couple such morons in the showing I went to and it was all I could do not to interrupt the showing to ask them what the hell they were thinking.)
