Archive for March, 2009

Looks like Jon emerged from under his collection of vile pornography and empty pizza boxes to finally deliver on the Watchmen review.

And that is a good thing. Because he is the talented one. So here goes:

Big apologies to Chris for it being so late – a recent bout of flu, laziness and an addiction to MMORGs seems to have mysteriously swallowed up all my time. But anyway – here’s my belated review for Watchmen (hopefully before it disappears completely from the top 10 – or before the next big event movie turns up).

If comic books are something you’re only dimly aware of and sneer at as
juvenile rubbish – the reading material of spotty geeks and social failures,
something with the literary complexity of Watchmen might come as something of a surprise. The book’s author, Alan Moore is something of a legendary figure in comics, one of the rare breed of writers who took a medium and turned it on its head and produced works of a rare standard that defy conventional genre categorisation.

Like V For Vendetta (the last of Moore’s books to be given the movie
treatment) Watchmen deals less in conventional drama than with viscerality and a heavy political subtext. Taking place in an alternate 1980’s where Richard Nixon is enjoying his fifth Presidential term and the United States is cowering under the very real shadow of nuclear annihilation from the Soviet Union, the world the story takes place in is a noir nightmare of whores, drug dealers and morally ambivalent antiheroes.

Against this grimy backdrop of violent demonstrations, child abuse, rape and murder – a group of unlikely superheroes (the titular Watchmen) prowl the streets of New York City, fighting a nightly battle against the thugs who inhabit it. What sets these characters immediately apart from the norm is that none of them (save one – more on that later) has any superhuman powers. This has the effect of removing the fantasy elements from the story and putting the emphasis very much on the psychology of the characters.

This isn’t your usual Peter Parker teen-angst stuff. The “heroes” of
Watchmen are at odds with everything that we’ve come to expect from the concept – ranging from the masked Rorschach – a monosyllabic psychopath who tortures and kills anything in his way; to Silk Specter – a insecure female crime fighter trying to adjust to fill her mother’s shoe; to the narcissistic Ozymandius – a former superhero turned billionaire
industrialist; and the Comedian – a sadistic rapist who, as one of the other
character remarks “is practically a nazi”. The Godlike Dr. Manhattan (the
victim of a freak accident involving a particle accelerator and a can of
blue paint) is the only one of the characters with supernatural abilities
and it soon becomes clear that these powers came at the expense of his
humanity.

If all that sounds like pretentious academic nonsense, well… it is. What I’m
saying in a nutshell is that Alan Moore is not your typical comic book
writer, and Watchmen is anything but the typical superhero comic book. The upshot of that however is that anyone expecting a conventional action superhero film like Spiderman or Iron Man is going to be disappointed (very very disappointed in fact) by this film.

And that’s really the problem with making a movie based on a work with such a narrow cult appeal as Watchmen. When you think about it its really amazing that the movie got made at all – as it must have occurred to studio execs that this wasn’t exactly something that lent itself well to mass appeal, or indeed to the inevitable round of merchandising that has become obligatory to major film releases.

So Watchmen: The Movie. Is it any good? If you’re a fan of the comic then
this is as faithful an adaptation as you’re likely to see. While there are
changes to the story which will likely generate hisses of outrage to rival
that of the Tolkien purists over the LOTR movies – its surprisingly faithful
to the source material down to the composition of some of the shots and the dialog. That’s certainly a good thing for the fans, less so to the
mainstream audience who will likely be scratching their heads as to what is
going on, or why they should care about any of it.

Having read the comic book myself relatively recently I felt the adaptation
was rather slavish, perhaps because I knew what was going to happen and
started to mentally check off the plot points in my mind. I didn’t dislike
it – but I didn’t really come away from the movie with much of a feeling
about it at all. Its certainly well directed, with the usual kind of
stylized violence that punctuated ‘300’ – director Zach Snyder’s last
comic-book adaptation (though thankfully with less of the painfully OTT slow motion).

Certainly I can see how people who hadn’t read the book could be easily
confused – why does Rorschach’s mask ripple like that, WTF is that purple
tiger thing following Ozymandius around? Ultimately these things are trivial
– and the true test of the movie’s success is whether or not it conforms to
the themes in Alan Moore’s novel. Thankfully it does, though there are cuts
(as I said) they are fairly economical and the 2 ¾ run time provides enough
detail to encapsulate the story.

Of course there are some big cuts, and this is what makes the movie rather
controversial in my book. Part of the reason people had been saying for
years that Watchmen could not be adapted into a movie was because the story itself was designed to take advantage of the format of the graphic novel.

The narrative is fairly dense – with stories within stories, excerpts from
books written by the characters – all of these are part of an overall
experience that is a celebration of the comic-book form.

To turn this into a live-action movie is not unlike trying to adapt a
Hitchcock film for the stage – you *could* do it, but why would you want to?

On the plus side – this is a very well directed, well-made movie with
pitch-perfect casting – but ultimately I found it a strangely hollow
experience.