film, eyeballs, brain

I don’t think I can actually write a proper review-review, so let me indulge in some comparisons instead. (I won’t be spoiling anything for people who haven’t read the comic.) Zack Snyder’s film will inevitably be a disappointment to fans of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ graphic novel. I’m not spoiling anything here, I think. Watchmen was acclaimed not only for its unconventional take on the superhero genre, but also for its dense philosophical inquiry into free will and power, and the notion of freedom versus security. It was also a whopping good read.

Watchmen takes place in 1985, in an alternate America where Nena’s “99 Luftballons” still plays on the radio but where Richard Nixon has been elected to his third term. (I think this probably explains why Ozymandias, the most successful of the superheroes in terms of branding strategy, looks like Gary Numan.) The Watchmen are weapons in the war on crime, and even more; in this iteration of American history, the Vietnam War is won by the United States. No doubt the Vietnamese were terrified, as anyone would, by the sight of a towering Doctor Manhattan and his swinging blue dick.

They’re an odd motley collection of costumed vigilantes, either way – the vaguely perverse inverse of the Justice League of America. A very good Jackie Earle Haley plays Rorschach, the psychopath in a shape-shifting mask and trenchcoat. The cigar-chomping Jeffrey Dean Morgan is the Comedian, a sadistic brute whose nihilism is meant to represent humankind’s destructive tendencies. Silk Spectre – and yes, the name is supposed to sound somewhat corny in a marketing way – is played by Malin Akerman, who is just about the worst actor in the ensemble, but that, alas, is not saying much. (I did briefly consider whether everyone’s leaden delivery was supposed to be a reference to Star Wars or Star Trek, but that would have been too generous.)

And then there’s Doctor Manhattan, played by Billy Crudup, who is by far the most interesting character – and indeed, the only one with actual “superhero” powers. (This is significant, because everyone else on the team is basically just like “us”, except with tight-fitting costumes and better fighting skills.) A physicist who is the victim of a classic laboratory accident, Doctor Manhattan is omnipotent and omniscient, both the ultimate weapon and deterrent of nuclear war. As the character Milton Glass says:

…I never said ‘The superman exists and he’s American’. What I said was ‘God exists and he’s American’. If that statement starts to chill you after a couple of moments’ consideration, then don’t be alarmed. A feeling of intense and crushing religious terror at the concept indicates only that you are still sane.

If it all sounds rather ponderous, you’re probably partly right, but it’s the juxtaposition of philosophical concerns and the superhero genre that made Watchmen the book – but not necessarily Watchmen the movie – quite compelling. The murder of the Comedian – thrown to his death from his penthouse apartment – is what sets the story in motion. Someone seems to be systematically killing or else neutralizing the surviving Watchmen, forcing the rest to don their masks and grudgingly come out of retirement. Oh, and something else – the United States is also inching closer to nuclear war with the Soviet Union.

Watchmen was also justly celebrated for its specific use of the grammar, as it were, of the printed comic book page, and it’s one reason why it seemed particularly unfilmable. Watchmen didn’t have just pictures; it also included, as addenda to each issue, excerpts from memoirs, news clippings, psychiatric reports, business letters, editorials – not part of the action per se, but still essential to understanding the comic.

One issue in particular, entitled “Watchmaker”, relied on the repetition of panels and captions – and voiceovers don’t produce the same effect – to weave back and forth in time, with at least four different temporal layers, sometimes on the same page. There’s also a comic within the comic entitled Tales of the Black Freighter (available as a separate DVD release, and will apparently be tacked on to the inevitable extended version on DVD), a pirate-horror comic whose narrative intersects with that of Watchmen – not just in terms of the storyline and its themes, but panel by panel. It’s a beautifully controlled piece of comic-book writing, and surely impossible to render clearly and effectively in a mainstream narrative film – and so it’s unfortunately left out of Snyder’s movie.

It’s important to note, I think, that Moore wasn’t just trying to re-imagine the superhero genre in Watchmen, but also gently parodying it at the same time: the unwieldy costumes, the marketing, the deliberately purple hard-boiled narration. (Moore explores all this further, in a more genial manner, in the unfinished 1963 and Tom Strong, among others.) By 1985 when we meet the retired Watchmen, many of them seem fairly washed up, condemned to late-night drinking sessions reminiscing about the old days.

Snyder at least gets this sense of parody right with an over-the-top coupling scene, complete with lots of bucking and heaving and fire-breathing. In the book it’s similarly funny and important, because it precisely addresses the erotic charge of power and concealment behind their costumes. (One other scene towards the end of the book is also wisely retained in the movie, namely, the stereotypical Marvel fight scene when the supervillain explains his nefarious plan to take over the world in between punches. In the book the fights are punctuated by several panels of heavy expository dialogue, and we get the same in the film.)

Watchmen has arrived on screen largely intact, though “intact” is fairly relative. A substantial number of scenes and dialogue, except for a gratuitous profanity or three, are lifted straight from the book. (Speaking of gratuitous, the gore has been upped several notches for no real reason except the joy of 300-style violence.) It’s the visual style where Snyder excels, really; for fans of the comic, being able to visualize Doctor Manhattan’s glass clockwork castle on Mars, or the famous opening sequence with the bloody smiley button, is reason enough to see it in all its IMAX glory.

But some absences are felt more keenly. (There is, for instance, the matter of a certain island and something that happens to half of New York; that whole subplot is jettisoned here in favor of a different but only somewhat satisfying ending. Not that the island was ever explained satisfactorily in the book anyhow.)

Part of what made Watchmen the brilliant work that it is included an entire subplot between two competing tabloids and their ideological debates about the role of the Watchmen in society. When Barb and Oscar and I saw the movie last night at midnight – I’ve literally had only 4 hours of sleep as I write this, which is why it’s not very organized – Oscar said that the newspapers were crucial, and he’s right. It’s those contrasting voices that are missing from the film, a swelling, cacophonous Greek chorus that only intensifies the anxiety as the hands of the doomsday clock – meant to signify how close the world is to nuclear annihilation – move closer to midnight.

This anxiety is absolutely crucial in the book, with a lot of the chatter generated by a newsstand dealer’s soliloquies. (He’s actually talking to someone – a comic book reader sitting on the pavement – but he is barely answered.) But because the guy at the newsstand has only a few seconds of screen time, this fear is only kept to a simmer in the film, and seems to blunt the impact of the plan to save the world at the movie’s conclusion.

The problem with the movie – and as should be clear, I’m writing from a pretty biased perspective – is Snyder’s seeming insistence on an action film, with the book’s deeper moral and intellectual implications left somewhere on Mars. Oh, Watchmen is a fun sci-fi romp, for sure, and a visually thrilling murder mystery to boot, but you can see in the loving attention to each crunch and spurt where Snyder’s allegiances really lie. No wonder Moore took his name off the film.

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