Yeah, yeah, I just got around to seeing Watchmen today. I’m assuming that most of y’all already saw it, so won’t need a spoiler warning, but just in case, here it is: below this line there be spoilers.
So what did I think? It was a good movie. It wasn’t a great movie (The Dark Knight was). It was worth nearly 3 hours of my Sunday night, I’m glad I saw it, and I might even be glad they made it. It was even closer to Watchmen than I thought it would be, keeping some attempts at metatext in the scenes with Dr. Manhattan. But it didn’t have even close to the raw impact of the comic.
My moviegoing companion, not a comic person and never having read the book, called it “disconnected.” On our walk back to the car, I picked at it a little bit and filled her in on some missing pieces, but I shouldn’t have to do that–the film should stand on its own. I’m OK with modifications to works I love to make them compatible with new media (V for Vendetta, for one, was well adapted to the politics of the oughties while keeping the feeling of the original). I’m not beating up on Snyder’s Watchmen for not being exactly like the book. And plenty of people seem to have loved it, so clearly it works as a film.
But it didn’t make me feel anything. Well, for one moment it did. The moment where Billy Crudup as Jon Osterman is locked in and sees his doom coming, eyes locked on his colleague outside the door, his lover having fled, unable to watch him die–that moment hurt on screen as much as it did on paper. Crudup does a masterful job making a walking special effect into a real character without even the benefit of being able to use his eyes–when Veidt, at the end, mentions being able to read Manhattan’s facial expressions, you realize that you too have been able to.
One of my favorite moments from the book was gone and replaced with a bit of a happier ending for Dan and Laurie, and I resent the loss of it. I wrote months ago:
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.
Well, it’s gone. We get a long, lovingly shot love scene between them earlier in the film, but at the end that moment is hidden. Dan’s pain at that moment is spent smashing Veidt, who takes it, against a wall, crying for his friend, and then we see Laurie and Dan kissing happily, planning to go out in Archie. But without that moment where they bury their pain in each other, the end seems overly optimistic.
The ending? I’m still pulling it apart in my head. I can’t decide if the choice to make Manhattan appear to be the cause of the attack on humanity undermines Moore’s point or accentuates it. It’ll probably take me days to decide, maybe even a reread of the comic. We’ll see.
The action sequences were mostly too much. Adding a drawn-out fight scene at the beginning I suppose was necessary, because it would’ve been impossible to chop the film the way the comic lays it out–panel of investigation, panel of flashback–but like nearly every fight scene, it was so slow and stylized that it lost most of its punch. Much of the film felt this way–long, slow camera movements that make the film drag rather than build tension. David Edelstein noted that Snyder’s idea of staying true to the comic was to move the camera as little as possible, and it shows.
Still, Jeffrey Dean Morgan as The Comedian stole the film, with Jackie Earle Haley a close second. The Comedian is vile and hateful and real–you can understand why Sally Jupiter felt for him even after what he did to her (again, a trope I despise but one well done here–the film neither shies away from the violence nor pretends that Sally didn’t love him).
Rorshach suffers the most from cuts from the comic, I think. As Attackerman noted, his politics are gone, erased. His asides about “liberal values” make as little sense as Dan’s comment toward the end that Veidt is a vegetarian–they seem bits of color spotted in rather than real important character traits.
The theme of time is mostly gone from the film. We lose the importance of watchmaking to Manhattan–the broken watch that leads Osterman to run back in and end up becoming Manhattan, the moment when his father throws out his watchmaking supplies in the face of Einstein’s theories. The name Watchmen is used in place of “Crimebusters” and by gaining a concrete meaning, loses all of its double meanings.
Still, the miscastings that I worried about seemed less off, though Laurie was still too young–again, Attackerman’s points on Laurie are excellent observations. This Laurie isn’t damaged. She leaves Jon because he doesn’t pay attention to her, not because of aging.
Dr. Manhattan’s scenes on Mars play like a flashback–again, necessarily so. You can only go forward in time with a movie. Again, panel by panel works differently, so you lose the understanding that Manhattan sees all time in the same moment–something I found myself attempting to explain to my friend on our walk home.
The few attempts at upgrading political commentary were tone-deaf. The problem is that Watchmen’s entire premise–a world on the brink of nuclear war–seems outdated now. Yet to try to tweak it a bit to update it is impossible. But the paranoia, the fear of annihilation is simply not here, and maybe there’s no way to evoke it in a world that fears insidious, isolated terror attacks and especially now, economic meltdown more than nuclear war.
Watchmen the comic leaves you looking desperately for a good guy, only to realize that there aren’t really any. The film does the same thing, and so maintains faith with the original. What it didn’t do was evoke the same feelings the book did. Still, it’s a good movie, and I enjoyed it. And what it did do was make me want to re-read the comic yet again.
March 8th, 2009 at 11:11 pm
Wow. You’re obsessed with “aging,” aren’t you?
I disagree strongly. At the book’s end, Laurie and Dan are reinvigorated as their passion is what died and was reborn – not their “beauty.” That carried across in the film, although a shot of them in their new adventuring identities would have been nice.
Age had nothing to do with it. Their souls had atrophied.
March 8th, 2009 at 11:40 pm
good review Sarah. What did you think of the opening credits?
March 9th, 2009 at 7:11 am
No one else complained about the real ending like you did! All I hear is the squid/DrM debate. It’s a different monster serving the same damn plot point, in fact DrM works better. Look at the denouement! He ruined it.
I was ok with the movie. It was the sex and violence cliff notes of the comic. Movies are a crappy medium, their time constraints dictate nearly every choice in an adaptation and that is seriously starting to annoy me. We need a revival on the Mini-Series.
March 9th, 2009 at 9:40 am
I’ll preface this by saying I’m 37. When I was young, I had a dread fear of nuclear war. This movie brought that back immediately. It evoked the memories I had of reading about the Cuban Missile Crisis. It made me remember Reagan’s strong anti-Soviet rhetoric.
I felt for Dan. The, “whoa, where did my youth go?” feeling. Not feeling old, just not feeling young. I felt the movie evoked that well, too.
The movie also made me feel profoundly powerless. Sure, you can do something positive about the small things around you but the big things? Nope, even if you have band of friends that includes someone with actual superpowers, you aren’t going to be able to change things.
I didn’t get any of this from reading the book either time. I might’ve been too focused on the mystery, which certainly isn’t the point.
March 9th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
Dr. Manhattan was a poor substitute for the squid. Something is lost when you have the patsy agreeing to be the patsy after the fact. Also, an ostensibly American super weapon going rogue isn’t quite as believable as a world uniting threat as something truly out of this world (Manhattan’s trips to Mars aside).
I can’t offer a better solution, though. I can see why they’d want to change it, but they make it an ending that betrays the source material after all the time spent on staying true to lesser elements.
March 9th, 2009 at 8:48 pm
I haven’t read the graphic novel so I can’t speak to a lot of this, but my thoughts for what they’re worth.
I thought the politics *were* mostly relevant actually. For one, the theme of obsolescence, what happened to the American Dream etc. I mean, seriously,as a non-native when I’m in the US it’s hard not to shake the feeling of America as crumbling, once-great nation. So I think that works.
The Cold War paranoia probably would have worked a few years ago, true. But I thought it was interesting and thought it suggested that 50s McCarthyist style fascism always lurks somewhere in the American political unconscious–the suspension of democracy that left Nixon in charge for 5 times. Given the dodgyness of previous elections, the flagrant disregard for human rights etc, the specter of fascism necessary to fight great evil, Islam instead of teh Commies that seems relevant too. So I don’t see those concerns as quite outdated yet, even though the actual tropes are.
Similarly, the threat of nuclear apocalypse. Apocalypse is always with us, from 9/11 to ticking bomb scenarios of the 24 sort (not to mention the financial crisis), so it should’t be *too* hard to make it work. I don’t think it actually has any real resonance with any of those for some reason (perhaps because it’s the Commies, tied to Cold War kitsch like the nuclear clock), but it works ok I spose. Bit flat but oh well.
That’s my surprisingly positive take on it
I went in with low expectations, but liked it a surprising amount.