My Review of Watchmen by B.C. Holmes, age 42

[bcholmes]

I wrote this to a friend of mine. We were both comics readers in the mid-eighties when Watchmen was coming out, so we were both reading it.

I had mixed feelings about it. On one level, I was engaged throughout the whole film, and really enjoyed seeing some of the scenes from the comic come to life. I also really liked the music (99 Red Balloons) and nifty little 1985 details (3.5" floopies! And the Ridley Scott Apple ad running on Veidt's wall of televisions!). Rorschach was great -- perfectly cast, perfectly executed (the oomph with which he delivers the "do it!" line in Antarctica was pretty amazing).

There were also little moments that made me go, "oh, wow." There's a flashback to Jon's life -- it's just one panel in the comics about how the morality of his actions escapes him. In the movie, we watch him blow people up and then we sit there in the scene for a few extra seconds watching the blood drip off of the ceiling. I loved the little scenes like that.

But, ultimately, I felt like the pacing was all over the place. Jon's monologue on Mars slowed the film down too much for my tastes. And there were all of these moments that felt like they were written to punctuate an ending (because they were written that way), but then the story would just keeping going on. And the final ending was way too rushed.

Ozymandias' back story coming when it did seemed like it advertised Ozymandias' role as the story's villain. (But, on the plus side, they managed to shoot Iaccoca in the head).

Mostly, I think Veidt didn't really gel as a character; I think if we'd had his full story-line, we might have more understanding of the character. And without that understanding, I think that asking to understand his plot feels like whiplash.

Laurie's story really gets short shrift (and I wasn't a big fan of the latex costume), although the Comedians delivery of "his... y'know... his old friend's daughter" was perfect). And because we don't get to know any of the minor characters -- the newspaper agent, the lesbian couple, the psychologist and his wife -- then when New York explodes, only minor, faceless people die. So, in some ways, the film allows us to feel like what Veidt did was kinda okay. Certainly not worth getting too upset about. And that's pretty creepy.

I think there's a lot of stuff in the graphic novel about how, in a really important way, the superhero genre is a really fascist model. And I get the strong feeling from the movie that Zack Snyder is kinda okay with that. That creeps me out a bit.

So, ultimately, I don't think it really worked as a movie. I certainly felt a certain amount of fangirl squee watching key elements of the story enacted. But the only times I felt like I was watching something interestingly cinematic were in the original scenes -- the attack on the Comedian at the beginning, for example. I think it fails to be an interesting movie -- that sometimes the experience of saying "here's a story I love -- and it moves!" seems to compensate for that, but that it doesn't do much other than what I expect.

Comments

[professor-booty.livejournal.com]

I agree about the impact of watching The Comedian's murder. I was thinking: 'wow, this is really brutal'. That visceral quality made it more than just pictures in motion. The downside is that because you don't know who the characters are at that point in the story, it doesn't have any real poignancy.

I did get a kick out of seeing certain 'panels' reproduced literally...especially Rorschach walking through the blood puddle. But I also wondered if a better movie could have been made if the writers hadn't felt it necessary to adhere to the source text quite so closely. What was most interesting about Watchmen wasn't really its plot, but its look at heroism, power, human nature. I hope that the 'making of' documentary on the blu-ray has the nerve to look at versions that were almost made over the past 20 years...I'd bee curious to see what Gilliam and Greengrass had in mind for it.

[rosefox]

Hayter, at least, appears to be totally okay with metaphors other people might find a little sketchy, yes.

[professor-booty.livejournal.com]

Yikes. He views the film as a tool for raping the audience?

[bcholmes.livejournal.com]

Ugh.

[rosefox]

And throwing hot grease in their faces. And then smirking as they come crawling back for more abuse because they really like it.

I am not going to see this movie in the theater.

[cigfran-lwyd.livejournal.com]

1) the criticisms you put forward here - which are very much in line with what other friends of mine have said who did not like the movie a great deal, and all of which are certainly valid - are in no small part criticisms of the book itself. ozymandias always was a bit thin. the end always was rather abrupt and pat, coming as it did after all that character development. the minor characters really were just that - minor sketches - and their deaths had little real emotional force. the book, for its well-deserved fame, had some serious flaws. alan moore is a visionary author, but in many ways quite detached, and the film revealed that.

2) i don't know what zack snyder could have done to make the conflict between vigilante ideals and fascist means any more explicit. he filmed the script, nearly literally. does he linger a bit in places? yes, but to what end? voyeurism? or to really put it out there? and i think that's what hayter is saying, and i see nothing wrong with saying it. watchmen was a hard, triggering experience to read. watching it was exactly what it should have been, in my view.

personally, i think it was damn near perfect, given the constraints.


(deleted and resubmitted for typos)

[suitablyemoname.livejournal.com]

Having read the novel but not seen the film, I'm finding myself inclined to agree with this.

Watchmen has to be a warty film. There's a sense of dreadful futility which permeates it, at least when I read it. While the ending did surprise me (and I'm not at all thrilled to hear they've changed it), the constant anti-climax that comes from this steady sense of pointlessness and lack of clarity really made the book for me.

[bcholmes.livejournal.com]

the minor characters really were just that - minor sketches - and their deaths had little real emotional force.

Hm. My mileage varies on that.

I further think that the problem of pacing is a key one introduced in the film version that doesn't exist in the original text.

[cantkeepsilent.livejournal.com]

I cared about the deaths of the minor characters. Gosh, the only healthy thing that Rorschach ever did in his life was to open Malcolm Long's eyes to the world's pain. Bernard the newsvendor was starting to reach out to folks, which was awkward but real to me. I don't know that Joey and her girlfriend were the most authentic lesbian couple I've ever seen, but I felt for them. And then someone goes and drops a giant psychic space squid on them, in all its tentacle glory (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIhHema5PNg). And "heroes don't save the day" really isn't so well explored ground even now, and especially not so then and doublemuch not when the writers explore the human toll of that failure.

I also think that Adrian got a lot of development in the graphic novel. Large walls of text and two post-chapter interludes. The Doug Roth interview is one of the neatest cutaway scenes in literature, up there with the Doublespeak essay at the end of 1984.

"Given the constraints" means that you have to throw 3/4 of the material away to get the rest to fit, and I think that it's not unreasonable to ask more than that they do the best they can. One is reminded of Samuel Johnson being reminded that a poorly-played musical piece was difficult and responding "I wish it had been impossible!"

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

The ending's theme doesn't really change at all, even if the specifics of Veidt's plan did.

[cigfran-lwyd.livejournal.com]

well, one could always remake it as Berlin Alexanderplatz, i suppose.

[gisho.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's just becuase I was very familiar with the book, but I could see the chapter divides. They kept the film from flowing smoothly. Nothing wrong with using chapters in a movie, but I would rather have seen them explicitly framed as such - which might have been a brilliant oppotunity to toss in some background on the newspaper vendors and the New Frontiersmen staff; seeing them could have acted as a pause and comment on the action, just like the textual clips in the comic did.

But, uh, I Am Not A Professional Film Critic.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

I think a lot of the problems with pacing were a direct result of how closely it stayed true to the original comic book. It moved more like written material than a visual media. Having said that, I didn't find the pacing bothered me at all. Some of the violence did. I had to look away more than once.

The ending bothered me. Not only do we not know anything about the people who died, afterward there are no shots of the aftereffects of the blast. No people crying over losing loved ones, no gory scenes of bodies being pulled from wreckage. In contrast to the violence of some of the fight scenes their deaths aren't even touched upon. Instead we get shots of reconstruction sites with Veldt's name on them and posters of Russian and American hands shaking; everybody all happy now. It really seemed to push the idea that Veldt had done a good thing and that left a bad taste in my mouth.

[cantkeepsilent.livejournal.com]

That was evidently Terry Gilliam's notion.

If it were up to me, I would have aimed for a treatment that was faithful to the characters but far more flexible to developing a storyline that works on the screen. Given an infinite amount of money and studio patience, I would have made a movie trilogy focusing on each of the three generations (1940-49, 1960-77, and 1985). The first two movies would have been largely freshly written, maybe with Moloch and Big Figure as the respective BBEGs, and exploring the dynamics of that age while delivering enough foreshadowing that the "real" story can be told without an hour of flashbacks in the third movie. Many would call that unfaithful to the source, but it seems to me that it's how we treat the Batman or James Bond franchises. I would suggest the Watchmen characters are strong enough to break out of the The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or 300 molds of essentially read a comic book to you.

[laura-seabrook.livejournal.com]

My main criticisms of the film are: The pacing is too packed - there are seldom any lulls with which the audience can catch it's breath; There's not much difference in the level of violence displayed between Nightowl, Silk Spectre, and Rorschach. It was uberviolence from all corners.

The psychologist got it in the blast, but without his background, it was a case "so what?" I have always thought thatWAtchmen would make a better mini series than film. The pacing would be closer to the novel, and the back stories could be explored more.

You'll notice that we never see the old Nightowl getting killed? That was a powerful moment, because later it demonstrated that the difference between the new nightowl and Rorschach was one of degree. With the uberviolence we already know that.

[laura-seabrook.livejournal.com]

I doubt that they could have done better in a film format. And the near perfect casting of Rorschach make up for lot.

[laura-seabrook.livejournal.com]

Certainly after 9/11 we now know that such events have severe emotional repercussions. I did my own comment (http://www.webcomicsnation.com/lauraseabrook/yab9-11s/series.php) on that (incorporating Watchmen) a while ago. I think what would happen is that people would find someone to blame, and start picking fights based on that. The film suggested that Dr Manhattan would suffice for that. In an LJ community someone suggested that because he was a USA operative, that the USA would be picked as a scapegoat.

But in any case, you're right about how anonymous the carnage is. This is the most common criticism I've heard about the ending - that we know absolutely nothing about the victims. The novel of course carefully sets up a scenario so that the psych, comic book reader, newsagent, police and others are all taken out in one blow. Just like "From Hell", we know something about the victims, more than just a number anyway.

I have always wanted a miniseries of Watchmen rather than a film. It would have followed the pattern of the novel better and allowed more back story.

[cigfran-lwyd.livejournal.com]

i have to admit that a trilogy could have had a lot of potential. my main concern in such a case would have been the extra leeway for peter jackson-like re-interpretation of the source.

[gisho.livejournal.com]

... I love this idea. If anything, it would have been a deeper, more interesting deconstruction after we'd seen all the construction in the first two. Damn damn damn. Well, there's always fanfic, I suppose.