Watchmen

Watchmen was the most anticipated comic book adaptation ever. Never mind your Dark Knight's...Watchmen was the movie that fans have been hanging out for; that everyone has been hanging out for. Well, I say everyone, but I obviously don't include Alan Moore. Given the choice between Watchmen and Howard the Duck, I suspect Moore would settle on George Lucas' comic book epic over his own.

But Watchmen is first and foremost, in this media, a movie, so before we start looking at comparisons, let's give it the fairness it deserves and look at the actual movie.

It's 1985 and America, with Richard Nixon as third-term president, is on the verge of nuclear war with Russia. The only thing holding them back is the presence of the powerful superhuman Dr Manhatten, the last superhero left after "The Watchmen" were outlawed some years earlier. When one of the former Watchmen, the Comedian is murdered, the other Watchmen find their lives starting to come together to learn the reason behind the murder...and nuclear war grows ever closer.

Visually the movie is spectacular, looking brilliant in almost everyway, from some brilliant character design (most particularly Dr Manhattan, although looking at his nob gets a little boring after a while) to amazing special effects and a, quite frankly, breath taking structure on Mars, the budget is clearly seen on screen. The whole thing is expansive and epic, which is possibly to remind the audience that that is what director Zack Snyder thinks the movie is as well.
But some bizarre aesthetic choices and a script that doesn't entirely convince causes Snyder's vision to fall short. There is something just a little absurd about a giant blue man killing the Viet Cong to the strains of Wagner's Flight Of The Valkyries. I've always maintained that comic book movies need to exist in a heightened reality, but if that reality is pushed too far - such as Batman & Robin - you can't really take the movie seriously. Snyder comes close to pushing the reality in scenes such as the one I mentioned just beyond breaking point.

Equally the motivations of some of the characters seems very odd. The villain's plan (and it's not particularly difficult to guess who the villain is given the actor's and director's choices) seems reliant on the entire population suddenly deciding that they don't particularly want Dr Manhattan to hang around. When it is revealed that Dr Manhattan appears to have given three people cancer, there is no particular indication that the world believes this, and given that, later, the President is still waiting for Dr Manhattan to return and save them, one would assume that he is still in the people's graces, and they are hardly likely to suddenly turn on him.

The true problem with Watchmen, regardless of what anyone tells you, is that it is criminally boring. With so many interesting characters and a quite in depth story to tell, the movie just seems to drag on without actually engaging the interest of the viewer. The cheif reason for this is that, at the end of the day, not a single one of the superheroes is vaguely heroic.

The Comedian, Rorschach and Dr Manhattan are all supposed to be heroes that live, very much, in the world of gray, but one gets the feeling that Nite Owl and Silk Spectre (the second incarnations of both) are supposed to be more representative of what our ideal hero is - and yet both stand by and do nothing as Rorschach murders a criminal in revenge, and then look and each other and shrug as though waiting for a "da-na-na-nuh-na-nuh. NAH!" sound effect. When faced with a group of characters that you can't really sympathise with, let alone like, your movie suddenly runs into some difficulty.

The sad thing is that the acting is actually of a particularly high quality. Malin Akerman is very likeable as Silk Spectre (until her character does something bizarre), while Billy Crudup and Jackie Earle Haley are very convincing as Dr Manhattan and Rorschach. However it is Jeffrey Dean Morgan who steals the show, cast absolutely perfectly as the Comedian, giving us the sick, twisted individual that he is, complete with all the character flaws he possesses. That said there are two performances that are quite unbearable - Carla Gugino as the original Silk Spectre and Robert Wisden as Richard Nixon, both of whom are not even remotely convincing as their characters, and one wonders if it has something to do with the fact both are under prosthetics throughout the movie. The prosthetics are particularly unconvincing.

Unfortunately, actors can only deliver a script to the best of their ability under direction, and when the latter two elements are letting them down, there is not an awful lot the actors can do about it.

But what about the movie as a comic adaptation?

Zack Snyder said: "Worst case scenario - Alan puts the movie on his DVD player on a cold Sunday in London and watches and says, 'Yeah, that doesn't suck too bad."

Alan Moore's response to this was: "That's the worst case scenario? I think he's underestimated what the worst case scenario would be... that's never going to happen in my DVD player in 'London'. I'm never going to watch this fucking thing." It's perhaps worth noting that Moore lives in Northhampton...

And that kinda sums up Snyder's approach to Moore's work - focussing on getting the little details perfect (but not quite making it) while at the same time missing the overall point. It's a little like building a copy of the White House and thinking "I need to get the exact right shade of white" while missing the columns on the front, and not realising that it is where the American President lives.

Moore hates all his movie adaptations, including V For Vendetta, but that movie is actually a movie that is a very good adaption of his work. Despite the change of setting (and indeed because of it), the movie is very faithful to the work, realising what the story is actually about and trying to make that work in today's world - which includes making it relevent. The problem with Watchmen is that what was relevent twenty years ago is not so much now, and it's difficult to get an audience to connect to that. Watchmen is a reflection and a response to the time it was written in. Snyder sees it as a superhero story in the vein of X-Men - real people with real problems, despite having amazing abilities.
The movie isn't about superheroes coming out of retirement, it's about nuclear war and the sacrifices that must be made to stop the end of the world. Gay characters abound in the comic, at a time when homosexuals were hiding in parks thanks to Thatcherism. Funnily enough they've all disappeared in Snyder's movie.

The movie attempts to be faithful to the comic by replicating designs and staging, and some of the more cringe-worthy dialogue (keeping in Rorschach's journals are a painful reminder of how some things work in comics that don't work on screen), but strangely enough chooses to change the ending to one that doesn't work quite as well as the original. It feels as though Snyder has read the comic book and said "those scenes look great, let's recreate them - do what needs to be done to the script to link them all together".

It's hard not to sympathise with Moore about the disappointment he feels over his movies, and never more so in this case. Perhaps, at the end of the day, Watchmen should never have been made into a movie. It just doesn't work that way.