I think Watchmen is probably unfilmable.
That said, I’m stoked for the movie. And I am one of those “actual females” that wit at Rolling Stone saw reading the comic recently, most likely. Though I’ve been a comics junkie since high school (about 14 years), I just got around to Watchmen this summer, after I got well and truly sick of explaining that I hadn’t read it.
And yes, it is brilliant. Probably the best comic ever. Because Watchmen is a comic about comics–metafiction, as a few friends noted on my personal blog. Watchmen has a comic-within-a-comic, is a meditation on the nature of superheroes, and messes with the spatial nature of the form as much as is possible.
(possible spoilers here, but really, I was probably the last Newsarama person to have read Watchmen, right? none of you are still waiting, are you?)
In movies and television (and even radio), action and plot are arranged in time. Even if you have a movie like Memento, that messes with the procession of time, events still happen one after another and unless you’re at home with the DVD, you can’t go back and rewatch them.
In comics and prose fiction, events are arranged in space, on a page. Even more so in comics, because images are arranged flat on the page. Techniques in the writing and art are used to speed up or slow down the time you spend on a page or panel, so each page demands a different commitment of time.
The title “Watchmen” has multiple meanings–”Who Watches the Watchmen” being the obvious one, but there’s an entire subplot that revolves around the breaking and repairing of watches, put in to stress the importance of time to the story. (I wrote about Watchmen and time more here.)
Dr. Manhattan experiences all time at the same time–when he flees to Mars to escape his breakup with Laurie, he sees his past and future meshing at once. This chapter jumps forward and back in time not just page by page, but panel by panel, moment by moment. Flashbacks in a movie are fine, but I’m just not sure that there’s a way to create the feeling that the comic does, that all time is the same thing to Manhattan.
The comic-within-a-comic bit has been discussed more as an unfilmable point, and I’ve heard suggestions from an actual comic to a voiceover to a separate short film screened before the feature. Even a split screen. Yet none of them will have the same effect.
Sure, you can tell the essential story of Watchmen without the metafiction elements, and it could still be a great movie. (Witness The Dark Knight.) Alan Moore is an exceptional storyteller even when he’s just using a linear plot, and Watchmen has all the elements of compelling fiction–a cast of living, breathing, hurting characters, a complex, fast-moving plot, danger, action, sex, war, love, and a world on the edge of collapse. Right now, as we teeter on the brink of financial meltdown, Watchmen’s brooding world on the brink seems prescient not because of its visions of war, but because of its sense of mere mortals fighting against the gloom.
If the film can capture the feeling in the last scene between Laurie and Dan, where they’ve lost, their beauty has faded, they’re aging and facing a world they don’t know how to deal with, but they’re still able to love, then it’ll be better than almost everything I’ve seen this year. Hell, even if it’s just a good superhero action movie, my money won’t be wasted.
But it won’t be Watchmen.
Tawk amongst yahselves.
December 3rd, 2008 at 10:47 am
I agree, the movie is not going to be Watchmen as we know it, but then anything that’s not on paper (or a representation of the paper, as in the motion comic I haven’t read)wouldn’t be. I think what we’re likely to get is a pretty faithful adaptation of (The Architects of Fear)+ Superheroes + (Alternate 1985)… Which is not that far off from the STORY of Watchmen. Basically, I think it’s got a shot of being as faithful as the most faithful of novel to movie adaptations - the nuance and depth gets left in the book, but the skeleton and essential look is retained. So, I guess what it comes down to is I think you’re right that it won’t be exactly Watchmen, but it could be Watchmen.
December 3rd, 2008 at 7:16 pm
I used to believe that “Watchmen” was filmable, but only if they did it as a series of episodes, ala “Roots” or (more recently) “Band of Brothers”. That format, where there’d be 12 episodes and each issue would get the full hour (or two) that it deserved, would’ve allowed a screen writer and director to really figure out how to translate what made the 32 pages in each issue work from page to screen. And I would’ve loved to have seen that happen.
Instead, as much as I admire Zack Snyder’s intention of staying true to the original source, I think we’re going to get a mess that inspires laughs at all the wrong moments. I hope I’m wrong. But the trailers to date have filled me with trepidation and a sort of “Oh, God, does Snyder not realize how stupid that looks?” reaction.
December 3rd, 2008 at 8:38 pm
I’ll make 2 short and simple points:
1) If it won’t be Watchmen, then it is a marketing ploy. A title to draw people in, take their money and give them not what they expect. A lie, a scam, a fraud, a crime.
2) You cannot tell that story in two hours. Nor in 3 hours. The traditional movie format cannot possibly ever be enough to tell the tale properly. Movies as a medium of telling a story are over rated and so constrained by time that I’m surprised it’s still a viable money making venture. Nothing longer than a short story should ever be made into a movie, unless it is a children’s book or pulp.
I could go on and on, but really I want to stand in front of the theater at midnight opening night, dressed as Kovacs holding a sign that reads “It’s going to suck. Go home and save $20.”