The

Best comic book adaptation of all time. And the WORST comic book movie ever. Who Watches The Watchmen, indeed….

Watchmen is, undoubtably, the most anticipated comic book movie ever, at least since it was first published back in 1985. It only took 24 years to bring it to life on the cinema screens, and the weight of anticipation is immense. So, is it any good? Well, Yes. And No. A Very big No…. But of course, if you’ve never read the comic book / graphic novel / masterpiece, you won’t come loaded down with expectations.

Lets get it out of the way ; Watchmen is the finest graphic novel of all time. Period. Full stop. Alan Moore knows the score. Watchmen is a  Multilayered deconstruction of the Super Hero mythos from the ground up, loaded with subtext and background detail. It challenges our invincible, superhuman vigilante self-appointed costumed protectors and peels back the layers of public image, to see them as fragile human egos, insecure, driven by petty vengeance and fractured, dysfunctional personalities. It challenges their role and asks questions that you never normally get in titles such as “Superman Vs. the Flying Saucers” ; Questions such as what is the role and responsibility of a superhero?  Is it to misuse their power? To deal out their own personal justice from behind a costume? Or is it to save the world, no matter the cost?

From the start, its premise is a difficult one to grasp, and nigh on impossible if you’ve not read the book. Its 1985. President Nixon is in the White House for a record breaking third term. The World is on the brink of nuclear annihilation, Soviet troops in Afghanistan and Soviet missiles ready to strike Armageddon into the Heart of the free World. Only one superhero – Dr. Manhattan, once a man but now a metaphysical being with limitless, godlike powers can save the world. All other superheros have been outlawed a decade earlier. And now they are being brutally killed off one by one. Is it a plot to kill them all? Or is their something much, much greater at play here?

Everyone and their cat whose ever read a comic book will have an opinion on this one. To some, every little road sign will be an easter egg of reverence and a nugget of finely tuned details. The use of “Ride of the Valkyries” in the war sequences seeing America use its superheroes to vanquish the Vietcong now is a hollow pastiche from “Apocalypse Now” to some, for fans of the book, a reference to its appearance in the “Under the Hood” subplot where it soundtracks a betrayal of good intentions by evil men.  Ah, multilayered. But for every fan who notices that, they’ll be many others, to whom it’ll be just another comic book movie about Superheroes, judged by the same standards as any other movie. Fanboys will love this ; and normal movie goers will come out of it with a tremendous sense of disappointment.

Don’t get me wrong: I loved the graphic novel. Its a work of genius. But this empty, hollow adaptation ticks all the fanboy buttons, gets lost in its own minutae, gets choked by its own reverence for the original book. With no perspective but, its just a slavish re-creation of the book panel for panel. That makes a great comic book. But a dreadful film.

Dreadful. Watchmen is a terrible , terrible movie. Loaded down with pretension, it’s a lumpen, leaden, slowcoach film. It a film whose originality has been diluted with 20 years of inspiration the book has given film makers. Its two main plot arc’s – Superheroes outlawed and the ending - have been used in The Incredibles, which is a adaptation of Watchmen in all but name. Its dark gritty film noir transplanted to Sin City. An unbalanced broken man metering his own vigilante justice hunted by the police, forcing a victim to saw his own leg off or face certain death? Well, that’s Saw. And so on. And the near armageddon doomsday clock and bizarre goings on echoes Southland tales. And so forth. So what appears rehashed here has been stolen from the original for other films. And that certainly damages the film immensely.

But there’s much good, much brilliance here. Technically its fantastic. A labour of love. The casting is impeccable – adhering to the comic book character, rather than box office clout. Jefferey Dean Morgan as the Comedian is sinister yet charming; Healey as the enigmatic vigilante Rorschach is a revelation. Its clear that a deep, slaicish reverence to the graphic novel informs every frame. But the flaws of the film are inherent in its medium and the execution into a different format rather than in the original source material. Let me try an example here:

There’s an old example, often quoted, of how James Bond films changed films. In Dr. No, for example, Bond walks into a room, introduces himself, and then exits through the door on the other side. It lasts exactly the length of the disalogue. No longer. It cuts from his entrance to him opening the door as he leaves. It cuts the act of him walkign across the room. What he has done, his walk across the room, does not need to be shown – it is already understood. Exactly the same thins occurs in the graphic novel of Watchmen: Rorschach enters a room, two words of internal monologue and he’s over the other side. Even though it would take so much longer to demonstrate him walking, you read the dialogue and move on.Its an act of maybe 20 seconds in real life, condensed in comic panel form to simply twolightning fast words of dialogue. But in the film of Watchmen, its paced exactly to that period of time – leaden, cumbersome, reverent.

Seriously – Watchmen is a brilliant comic book adapatation. But it’s the comic book on film, frame for frame, panel for panel. Reverent. They made the best film translation of the comic book they could. They just made something which works as a comic book, but as a film? It doesn’t work. At all. Its like making a fish dish out of cow; both serving the same function [ie to provide nutrition] from the same basis [meat] but fundamentally and intrinsically by their very nature, completely different and never ever going to be the same.

Anyway, enough of my bitching; its 85% genius, 15% clod. The 85% is all in the original material, much raided and diluted since, so the shocking final plot twist is now robbed of much of power having since been used elsewhere. The 15% is the insertion of gratuitious and needless graphic detail, adolescent in its gawpery. There’s a difference between making a film for adults, and an adult film ; much as there is a difference between pornography and erotica. So into the film comes unneccessary and justifiable gore – a man having his arms removed with a powersaw, a meatcleaver  bloodily thrown into a mans skull – and adolescent pipedreams tits n ass. The consumation of a budding relationship doesn’t require three minutes of thrusting naked buttocks to be understood, that serves only to titillate and satisfy an adolescent urge for flesh. For a film of subtext and background detail, this lack of subtlety is glaring and haphazard. It  devalues the film, cheapens it and debases it. That 15% clod – the excessive slowmo/fast mo editing with varispeed frames are empty and vacous. And also, tellingly, they are all stylish flourishes interjected by director Zack “300” Snyder.  All show – and no tell.

For a film of such length, the plot is surprisingly slow, slim  and ill explained. Most of the plot comes out after about two hours of character building, when our superheroes walk into a bar, punch a guy, and get 30 seconds of exposition. Then ZOOM!  Everything is explained, after tedious boredom.  Muddled, and unclear, this film ios far too much in love with its characters to get on with the crux of the story – the plot.

Everyone who sees this will have an opinion on it. Not everyone will grasp the subtext – especially as the drastically changed ending now throws everything on it heads and radically removes the subtext. Not that everyone will understand it either, in its muddled and fuddled execution.

Watchmen… a technical masterpiece, easy to admire,  hard to love. Not a failed adaptation – far from it - but certainly a failure in its own terms as a film. What was daring is now dated – what was subtle and subtext is now overlooked.

It’s a must see for fans, a meh for the curious, and an opportunity squashed by its own reverence.Now that you’ve seen the film, read the comic book to see how good it could be. But its unlikely to win many converts in its own right – it’s a boring, clinical adapatation that fans have waited many years for. Now I have to go back to the original to wipe my brain clean of this….

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