I was right to worry. Zack Snyder’s Watch­men movie is indeed a sexed-up and dumbed-down shadow of the richly multi-layered graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.

I’ve already unleashed my pent-up anx­i­eties about the then-forthcoming movie in The Dork Report’s 10 Rea­sons the Watch­men Movie Will Suck). Now that the notably long-gestating and trou­bled pro­duc­tion is finally out in the wild, I’m puz­zled why so many comics fans utterly adore it (q.v. Wil Weaton and Ain­tIt­Cool­News), while main­stream film crit­ics com­pete to deliver the most vicious bitch­slap (q.v. The New Yorker and The Hol­ly­wood Reporter). The excep­tion to the rule is the always-unpredictable (bless him) Roger Ebert, who gave the “pow­er­ful expe­ri­ence” four out of four stars. As a life­long comics fan, I ought to nat­u­rally fall into the first camp, but I can­not relate to geeks like Kevin Smith, for whom, after spend­ing decades anx­iously pin­ing to see Watch­men play­acted on the big screen, found the result “fuck­ing astound­ing” and “joy­gas­mic.” End­lessly fas­ci­nated by the orig­i­nal, I per­son­ally never even wanted a Watch­men movie in the first place. But as a lover of both comics and movies, I felt oblig­ated to suf­fer through it.

If Watch­men were a Sat­ur­day Morn­ing Car­toon (via Dar­ing Fire­ball):

My afore­men­tioned rant also repeated the old saw that Watch­men is the Cit­i­zen Kane of comics, and attempt­ing to adapt it into another medium is folly. What is impor­tant about the exam­ple of Cit­i­zen Kane in par­tic­u­lar isn’t so much its char­ac­ters or inci­dent, but rather how the story is told. As Welles did to movies in 1941, Moore rev­o­lu­tion­ized how comics could be told, stretch­ing and bend­ing every rule. Like Welles, Moore didn’t invent the many sto­ry­telling devices he used: includ­ing scram­bled chronol­ogy (flash­backs nes­tled within flash­backs — not just as a sto­ry­telling device but a key insight into how one char­ac­ter expe­ri­ences life), mix­ing of media (prose pieces expand the story), and stories-within-stories (the embed­ded Tales of the Black Freighter comic book that fore­shad­ows a cat­a­clysmic end­ing). Watch­men is in essence a book, not a movie.

Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller’s Sin City inau­gu­rated the recent trend of treat­ing comic books not just as raw story mate­r­ial but as actual sto­ry­boards. But whereas Sny­der had room to expand the story of Frank Miller’s rel­a­tively short graphic novel 300 into his pre­vi­ous film, Watch­men is a mas­sive beast of a book that only real­is­ti­cally had to be bru­tally cut and/or sig­nif­i­cantly altered to squeeze into a roughly two-hour motion pic­ture nar­ra­tive. Maybe, just maybe, that’s exactly what Sny­der should have done: rad­i­cally rein­vent the story to fit another medium. Instead, he cre­ated a slav­ishly accu­rate trans­la­tion that comics fan­boys like Wheaton, Smith, and Ain­tit­cool­news appar­ently thought they some­how deserved.

In the end, Sny­der and screen­writ­ers David Hayter and Alex Tse did make numer­ous cuts, many out of sim­ple neces­sity. Some of them hurt (espe­cially the mur­der of Hol­lis Mason, a scene which I con­sider essen­tial to the story). Whereas I sug­gest above that the movie fails to rein­vent the book as a film, Snyder’s mostly faith­ful adap­ta­tion does in fact make many sig­nif­i­cant alter­ations, but they are arguably the wrong ones. My three pri­mary objec­tions are the out-of-character vio­lence, the flawed char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of key char­ac­ter Adrian Veidt, and the altered ending.

Nite Owl might have some trou­ble doing up the snaps on his super suit

I. HERE’S WHAT’S WRONG WITH: The Violence

First let me pre-empt the imme­di­ate objec­tions: I am not a prude that decries any por­trayal of vio­lence in fic­tion (be it movies, video games, what­ever). I have never sub­scribed to the reduc­tive the­ory that cen­sor­ing movies is the way to reduce real-world ills; if an indi­vid­ual is so dam­aged as to be inspired to vio­lence by a movie (or even to take up smok­ing), there’s some­thing more wrong with that indi­vid­ual than can be repaired by cen­sor­ing movies for every­one else. So I don’t object to Watchmen’s notably extreme vio­lence and gore per se, but rather to its inju­di­cious use by all its char­ac­ters, irre­gard­less of whether it is moti­vated by their indi­vid­ual natures.

All of the so-called super­heroes in the Watch­men movie are shown to be bru­tal killers. It does makes sense in the cases of Ozy­man­dias (a mega­lo­ma­niac pre­sum­ing to kill a few to save many), Dr. Man­hat­tan (an unemo­tional non-human that finds noth­ing extra­or­di­nary in life), The Come­dian (a mis­an­thropic, nihilis­tic mer­ce­nary), and, most espe­cially, Rorschach. One of the most difficult-to-watch sequences of the entire film is a flash­back relat­ing Rorschach’s (Jackie Earle Haley) ori­gin story. His voiceover nar­ra­tion states that, early in his career as a cos­tumed vig­i­lante, he was orig­i­nally “too soft on crime,” mean­ing to him, that he used to let crim­i­nals live. He goes on to recall the spe­cific case in which he cracked. He tracks down the hide­out of a creep that has kid­napped and killed a lit­tle girl, and fed her to his dogs. This case is beyond the pale for a street-level vig­i­lante more accus­tomed to bust­ing up orga­nized crime and purse snatch­ers. Rorschach sees no point in appre­hend­ing him on the police’s behalf, and sum­mar­ily exe­cutes him in a rage. This sequence is unbe­liev­ably vio­lent, but it speaks vol­umes about Rorschach, why he is the way he is, and what dif­fer­en­ti­ates him from his peers, the vig­i­lante fraternity.

But all this is under­cut when we also see Nite Owl (Patrick Wil­son) and Silk Spec­tre (Malin Aker­man) exe­cute an entire gang of would-be mug­gers. Mug­gers, not demonic child moles­ters! What’s their excuse for splin­ter­ing bones and sev­er­ing spines? At what point in their careers did they adjust their moral com­passes and decide it’s jus­ti­fied for them to kill? To kill is totally out of char­ac­ter for both of them, and under­cuts the entire point of the Rorschach sequence. Their actions make them no dif­fer­ent than Rorschach. If the point is that they think they are dif­fer­ent than Rorschach but are not, the movie doesn’t seem to be aware of this con­tra­dic­tion. Silk Spectre’s fight­ing style, inci­den­tally, seems inspired by Madonna’s “Vogue” dance and max­i­mized to strike sexy poses (not that I’m complaining).

The movie also alters the already-horrific rape scene in the book in two very strange ways: it makes it con­sid­er­ably more vio­lent, but also explic­itly clear that the actual act of rape was inter­rupted before… there is no word for the crime… com­ple­tion, I’ll say. In later scenes, it is explic­itly spelled out that Sally (Carla Gug­ino) and The Come­dian (Jef­frey Dean Mor­gan) have con­sen­sual sex some years later, con­ceiv­ing Lau­rie (who assumes his mother’s man­tle of Silk Spec­tre). My inter­pre­ta­tion of the rape scene as it appears in the book has always been that Lau­rie was con­ceived dur­ing the rape, and that there is no evi­dence in the text that Sally and The Come­dian had any kind of rela­tion­ship after­wards. In both the book and the movie, the aged Sally cries and kisses a pic­ture of the orig­i­nal hero group The Min­ute­men, which included a young Come­dian. The scene is totally ambigu­ous in the book; I always assumed that Sally’s feel­ings were very com­plex — cer­tainly not that she for­gave or loved her rapist, but more that she was sad and nos­tal­gic for a world long-lost. Laurie’s bio­log­i­cal father (for bet­ter or for worse) and most of the pop­u­la­tion of New York were all mur­dered. Her hap­pi­ness and glory days are long gone. Wouldn’t you cry too? But in the movie, it’s made utterly clear that she vol­un­tar­ily slept with The Come­dian some time after his attempted rape. If we are expected to believe that a fic­tional woman could do that, the movie ought to spend some time exam­in­ing her psy­chol­ogy and moti­va­tions, which it does not.

In fact, this scene was so squea­mish that the crowd in the the­ater became unruly (an opening-night screen­ing on Manhattan’s Upper West Side), and at least one per­son (a man, as it hap­pens), got up and walked out, loudly com­plain­ing all the way. I also note with­out judge­ment that a few other peo­ple also walked out dur­ing the absurdly long sex scene between Nite Owl and Silk Spec­tre. Per­son­ally, the most offen­sive aspect of that scene for me was its ironic sound­track of Leonard Cohen’s lovely Hal­lelu­jah. The Onion’s A.V. Club reports on even more sig­nif­i­cant walk­outs.

Sally’s com­plex feel­ings for the past

II. HERE’S WHAT’S WRONG WITH: Adrian Veidt

To pull off a work­able movie ver­sion of Watch­men, I would argue that the one char­ac­ter it would be most impor­tant to get right is Adrian Veidt. Strangely for such a visual direc­tor as Sny­der, Veidt’s ori­gin story is told not as a flash­back (as with all other char­ac­ters) but as a dull lec­ture given to a bunch of indus­tri­al­ists. He takes plea­sure in explain­ing that he has pat­terned his hero per­sona after no less grandiose his­tor­i­cal mod­els than Alexan­der the Great and Pharaoh Ramesses II, also known as Ozy­man­dias. Every­one should have known that this one would be noth­ing but trou­ble. A statue in Veidt’s arc­tic hide­away (his ver­sion of Superman’s Fortress of Soli­tude) is inscribed with the Percy Bysshe Shel­ley verse:

My name is Ozy­man­dias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair.

One of the key details that makes the super­hero char­ac­ters in the book so inter­est­ing is that only one of them is actu­ally “super.” Dr. Man­hat­tan (Billy Crudup) is a non­hu­man being that exists on a quan­tum level of real­ity, but every other “hero” char­ac­ter is mor­tal. Exem­plary and/or dam­aged in cer­tain ways, but all human. We know from the book that Veidt has honed his body to near-perfect phys­i­cal fit­ness, but the movie clearly shows him to pos­sess super­hu­man strength and speed. It’s a pity to make Veidt more than human, because, like all of history’s great­est heroes and vil­lains, he is just a man.

Most curi­ously of all, the movie implies Veidt is gay. If you think my gay­dar is on the fritz, bear with me here for a moment. First, we see a brief flash­back of Veidt hang­ing out in front of the leg­endary Man­hat­tan night­club Stu­dio 54 with gay and/or androg­y­nous pop icons The Vil­lage Peo­ple, David Bowie, and Mick Jag­ger. Addi­tion­ally, actor Matthew Goode made the bizarre choice to give his char­ac­ter a speech defect, per­haps meant to be the sort of lisp that codes movie char­ac­ters as “gay.” It’s so dom­i­nant that some lines of dia­logue were actu­ally dif­fi­cult to under­stand. Goode seems to speak clearly in Match Point and Brideshead Revis­ited (in the sex­u­ally ambigu­ous role of Charles Ryder), so we can rule out it being nat­ural for him. The orig­i­nal graphic novel does not make any sug­ges­tions as to Veidt’s sex­u­al­ity at all, which makes a kind of sense, as he is a mega­lo­ma­niac that prob­a­bly doesn’t want or need any­body, male or female.

Ozy­man­dias speaks the only instance of the word “Watch­men” in the book

III. HERE’S WHAT’S WRONG WITH: The New Ending

Veidt’s final solu­tion to save the world is utterly insane, but one aspect in par­tic­u­lar is bril­liantly manip­u­la­tive. He dis­tracts his for­mer com­rades from his machi­na­tions with a con­spir­acy the­ory per­fectly tai­lored to their own lit­tle psy­chodrama: an invented ser­ial killer tar­get­ing for­mer super­heroes. While the world slides towards armaged­don, they are pre­oc­cu­pied run­ning around the globe fret­ting about a “mask killer.”

Mean­while, Veidt plots to save the world from imma­nent nuclear war, a threat the other heroes are aware of but never con­sider to be some­thing they can affect. In the graphic novel, he fab­ri­cates a nonex­is­tent extrater­res­trial threat, and stages a mas­sive alien attack on Man­hat­tan that kills thou­sands (mil­lions?). Human­ity is effec­tively united in a new but frag­ile world order, look­ing out­ward for foes, rather than at each other. Veidt’s plot in the movie is sig­nif­i­cantly dif­fer­ent, fram­ing Dr. Man­hat­tan for the destruc­tion of New York. Both end­ings imag­ine a kind of 9/11 in 1985, but the movie ver­sion is more self-contained and less absurd, per­haps meant to be eas­ier for audi­ences to digest. The comic ver­sion is admit­tedly utterly bat­shit insane, which is part of the point: the faux attack is so shock­ingly unprece­dented that it shocks the entire world into sub­mis­sion. It also under­scores Veidt’s true dia­bol­i­cal evil genius: he’s the only one of his kind that sees out­side of the super­hero psy­chodrama, and he knows that to truly unite the world behind a fic­tion, it has to be some­thing new, not some­thing human­ity has already rejected: the super­hero. Also, as con­tribut­ing Dork Reporter Snark­bait notes, why would the Sovi­ets nec­es­sar­ily react peace­ably to the threat of Dr. Man­hat­tan? He was already a threat to them for decades, but had long since stopped becom­ing a deter­rent (as the story begins, they were encroach­ing on Afghanistan any­way). It shouldn’t have sur­prised any cit­i­zens of this fic­tional world that Dr. Man­hat­tan might blow some­thing up. But it would shock the entire world if a gigan­tic alien squid were to dec­i­mate a city.

New York suf­fers again: the movie shows only the attack, the book shows only the aftermath

Another issue entirely is the pathetic cop-out of depict­ing only the dec­i­mated build­ings of Man­hat­tan, and not the accom­pa­ny­ing piles of bod­ies (some­thing the book does not shy away from). Co-screenwriter David Hayter chalks it up to a fact of the movie being a big-budget prod­uct of a major studio:

The end­ing of the book shows just piles of corpses, bloody corpses in the mid­dle of Times Square, peo­ple hang­ing out of win­dows just slaugh­tered on a mas­sive scale. To do that in a comic book, and release it in 1985, is dif­fer­ent from doing it real life, in a movie, and see­ing all of these peo­ple bru­tally mas­sa­cred in the mid­dle of Times Square post 2001. That’s a legit­i­mate con­cern, and one that I shared.

If you’re doing the movie for $40 mil­lion, fine — bloody bod­ies every­where. And that’s fine, and it’s a niche film, and only the hard­core fans would go see it. But if you’re doing it on this big of a scale, I just don’t think that’s… I under­stood their [Warner Bros.’] ret­i­cence to putting those images on screen.

I’m hard pressed to decide which Silk Spec­tre cos­tume is more impractical

IV. HERE’S WHAT’S RIGHT WITH WATCHMEN

Quite a rant this is turn­ing into. Who needs this much neg­a­tiv­ity in their lives (and blogs)? The movie was not a crime against human­ity, and cer­tainly could have been a lot worse. As io9.com reports, for all its flaws, Snyder’s flawed alter­ations look like genius com­pared to the rude bas­tardiza­tion the stu­dio Warner Bros. wanted: to set it in the present day, cut all flash­backs, cut the sequences on Mars, cut Rorschach’s psy­cho­analy­sis, and worst of all, end with the vil­lain Veidt dying, appar­ently based on the con­ven­tional wis­dom that audi­ences are con­di­tioned to expect vil­lains to die.

The movie kept one of my favorite lit­tle char­ac­ter moments of the book: when the old crime­fight­ing duo of Nite Owl and Rorschach are reunited, Nite Owl finally snaps and tells him peo­ple only put up with him because he’s a lunatic and they’re afraid of him. Rorschach shows a final glim­mer of the last bit of human­ity left in him, and puts out his hand: “you’re a good friend, Dan.” But he doesn’t let go. Rorschach has long since lost his abil­ity to inter­act normally.

Nite Owl and Rorschach get the old band back together

Watch­men is, remark­ably, a period piece. Sny­der keeps the orig­i­nal set­ting of the book in the 1980s, com­plete with nos­tal­gic easter eggs: includ­ing a vin­tage Apple Mac­in­tosh desk­top, Pat Buchanan, Annie Lei­bovitz, John McLaugh­lin (of The McLaugh­lin Group, not the jazz fusion gui­tarist), Andy Warhol, Henry Kissinger, Ted Kop­pel, Lee Iacocca, Tru­man Capote (seen in Warhol’s Fac­tory), Fidel Cas­tro, Mick Jag­ger, and David Bowie. But one back­ground detail in the book (a repeat­edly reelected Nixon) is expanded to an absurd degree.

Jackie Earle Haley was extra­or­di­nary, far and away the best asset of the movie. More than any other cast mem­ber, Haley seemed to really under­stand the com­plex char­ac­ter. Rorschach is undoubt­edly an unhinged, right-wing, sex­u­ally stunted nutjob, but in a strange kind of way, he becomes the moral cen­ter of the very lib­eral graphic novel. The same utterly uncom­pro­mis­ing nature of his char­ac­ter that causes him to appoint him­self an exe­cu­tioner of crim­i­nals also makes him unable to live with the grand lie that Veidt archi­tects. For all his sins, Rorschach is right about one thing: the world deserves the truth. Haley’s final scene was per­fectly per­formed, and the one moment in the entire movie imbued with real emotion.

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Some of the best bits of Watch­men com­men­tary, clips, humor, and eso­ter­ica that bub­bled up on teh inter­webs dur­ing the buildup to this geek apocalypse:

Offi­cial movie site: watchmenmovie.warnerbros.com

Offi­cial iPhone game: watchmenjusticeiscoming.com

Offi­cial DC Comics Watch­men site: ReadWatchmen.com — down­load a free PDF of the first chap­ter of the orig­i­nal graphic novel.

Offi­cial expanded, inter­ac­tive trailer: 6minutestomidnight.com

Three vin­tage pieces on Watch­men by bud­ding jour­nal­ist Neil Gaiman: The Comics Explo­sion from Time Out, Moore About Comics from Knave, and Every Pic­ture Tells a Story from Today.

Todd Klein’s Watch­ing Watch­men, the best-written review of the film I’ve yet read. Klein is the comics let­terer extra­or­di­naire, and friend to both Moore and Gibbons.

Read­ing the Watch­men: 10+ Entrance Points Into the Esteemed Graphic Novel by Tom Spur­geon. A sober look at the phe­nom­e­non from the point of view of one who’s fallen in and out and in love with the book, and has no inter­est in the movie. Via The Comics Jour­nal Jour­nal­ista

Levitz on Watch­men, in which DC Comics CEO Paul Levitz reveals the heart­en­ing sta­tis­tic that DC hur­riedly ran hun­dreds of thou­sands of addi­tional copies of the book to meet demand. (also via The Comics Jour­nal Journalista)

5 Rea­sons a Watch­men Movie was Unnec­es­sary by Christo­pher Camp­bell. Pre­judges the movie “redun­dant, rehashed, irrel­e­vant, ridicu­lous and inescapably dis­ap­point­ing super­hero cin­ema.” I’m jeal­ous they received more com­ments than my own 10 Rea­sons the Watch­men Movie Will Suck, despite hav­ing pre­cisely twice the num­ber of bul­let points! Via Snark­bait

This is Not a Watch­men Review by Sean Axmaker, ask­ing not only why the world needs a Watch­men movie, but why it would need another Watch­men review. Guilty.

Why Alan Moore Hates Comic Book Movies by San Shurst. Total Film’s brief exclu­sive inter­view with Moore in which he pith­ily nails the prob­lem with movies: “every­body who is ulti­mately in con­trol of the film indus­try is an accoun­tant.” On Watchmen’s 100 mil­lion dol­lar bud­get: “Do we need any more shitty films in this world? We have quite enough already. Whereas the 100 mil­lion dol­lars could sort out the civil unrest in Haiti. And the books are always supe­rior, anyway.”

Will You Watch the Watch­men? by Jason A. Tse­len­tis. A con­sid­er­a­tion of the then-forthcoming movie from the point of view of a designer. I posted what I thought was a decent com­ment but was rejected. Ouch!

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Buy any of these fine prod­ucts from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report:

 

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