Everyone else is posting what they thought about Watchmen: The Movie, sooo...

[thatcrazycajun]

Tonight I finally went and saw the long-awaited film adaptation of Watchmen, the acclaimed comic-book limited series (later repackaged as a graphic novel; a lot of people seem to forget it was originally 12 separate issues). It took two decades of development hell and over $100 million to finally get there, but as the saying goes, all the money is up there on the screen. Here are some of my initial thoughts, as someone who read the original 12 issues when they were first released (and has gone back and re-read the story in its reissued form, re-reissued by DC a couple months back to make sure people know where the hell this came from).

• The look was great, the music worked fine for me and I thought most of the actors turned in at least serviceable performances. The film may well have been better served by not trying to shove a bunch of more well-known, "bankable" names into these roles. But who the frak thought they could get away with casting a skinny, chinless wimp like Matthew Goode as Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias? The guy's supposed to be a perfect physical specimen, for the love of Kirby! And this kid looks far too young for the character's history, besides.
• I kinda missed all the subplots Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons wove into the original (the newsstand vendor and his diesel-dyke customer, the shrink and his wife, the boy with the pirate comic etc.), but I realize there's only so much you can cram into even this long a film. And despite its pushing three hours, I never felt any sense that it was too long or slow in spots.
• It was also sort of weird seeing something based on a comic I know so well unfold, knowing mostly how everything would go and yet enjoying watching how the filmmakers and actors handled the set pieces, and the deviations from source were creative and pretty much worked. (Am I the only one who thought Nixon and his generals were on a set that looked exactly like the War Room from Dr. Strangelove? This may not have been an accident on the set designers' part.)
• Apparently Moore did not want his name on the film (a reviewer quotes him as saying "I'm never going to watch this f---ing thing," and given what Hollywood has done to some of his other work, who can blame him?), so at first I was shocked to see only Gibbons credited in that amazingly well-done opening-credits montage. (And how nice to see a big-budget genre film that actually gives us opening credits for a change! Too many people making them these days seem to prefer just flashing the title and then dropping you straight into the action. Me, I like to have the mood set and to know who the main players are up front.) The irony is, this film is a helluva lot more faithful to Moore's text than any of those other adaptations were.
• Being a longtime fan of The McLaughlin Group, I was ever so slightly jarred out of verisimilitude to find the actors playing John McLaughlin, Pat Buchanan and Eleanor Clift neither looking nor sounding nearly enough like the genuine articles in the opening scene. And where were Mort Kondracke and Freddie "The Beatle" Barnes? Half the seats on the set were empty; Father John never has fewer than four panelists besides himself.
• The film's ultra-gory violence didn't shock me, inasmuch as the source material was pretty bloody...but it was still a tad disconcerting to see how much more visceral it was in live action and moving, versus drawn on paper. And oddly enough, the only such scene I found I could not watch was Walter/Rorschach as a kid going all Mike Tyson on a tormentor's ear. I do not think I shall be taking the Songbird to see this unless she requests it, nor would I recommend children be allowed to see it unsupervised.
• Which brings me to the final thing that disturbs me about both the comic and the film: This is the story that began the radical deconstruction of superheroes that led to succeeding works such as The Dark Knight Returns, Kingdom Come and the last three Crisis miniseries (Identity Crisis, Infinite Crisis and Final Crisis), not to mention Marvel's Civil War. (Some would argue that deconstruction actually started earlier with Stan Lee and Co. giving their heroes real human flaws, but that's another discussion.) Maybe it's a good thing to ask whether human beings with superhuman powers can be responsible all the time, and who should hold them accountable when they're not...and maybe it's a good thing to demand more intelligent storytelling from our comics creators than we got back in the day, when superheroes were uniformly paragons of virtue. But I don't know that I agree graphic gore and moral line-crossing always need to be there to sell books or tickets...and as I watch the Watchmen anew, I find it unsurprising that people could grow so fearful of these "heroes" that they ended up outlawed by act of Congress.

Have you seen it? Feel free to add your own thoughts.

Comments

[faxpaladin.livejournal.com]

I don't think the War Room look ("Gentlemen! You can't fight in here!") was the slightest bit accidental.

ETA: Minor nitpick — The Dark Knight Returns was contemporary with Watchmen.