Okay, okay: REVIEW
Went and saw Watchmen for the second time last night, and it was still awesome and ooh, that reminds me, I've still got half a pack of peanut M&Ms in my bag.
Just a point: I've read the comic four times. Every time I read it, I find new things, new points, more hints and ties and clever metaphors. When I went into the cinema the first time I saw this, I had spent the last half-hour trying to psych myself down, thinking about all the myriad ways it could really suck, really miss the point, could fail not in a spectacular way, but in a frustrating, just-missed-the-mark way. As it turned out, I didn't have to; as a comics fan and as a film student who is fascinated by the process of adaptation, I was pretty much thrilled with it. Here's how:
As I've said to numerous people, what I found most impressive was how well it captured the tone of the comic. It wasn't perfect, because Snyder is not Alan Moore* and does tend to amp up the violence to bone-crunching Tarantino levels - but the mix of period politics, philosophy, psychology and absurdity was present and balanced well for a cinema audience, so while there were titters, they were always in the right places**. Unlike a lot of reviews I've read, I actually thought Dan and Laurie's sex scene in the clouds to the strains of "Hallelujah" was perfectly appropriate precisely because it made you grin - their romance is the one bright thread through the whole dense, dark tapestry, and the fact that it isn't (and is not portrayed on film as) a One True Love meant-to-be-type epic that is more important than anything else is something I adore.
Instead, there's a schlubby, intimidated middle-aged man with a costume fetish, and a bored, frustrated heroine who is frankly embarrassed by her crime-fighting past, and they take some comfort in each other while trying to figure out how to survive a frighteningly imminent nuclear war. I actually liked Dan and Laurie more in the film than I did in the comic - I was surprised by how alone I seem to be in liking Malin Akerman's performance. Comic-Laurie always seemed too constantly angry to be relateable, face set in a permanent scowl, but Akerman just made her seem like an exhausted, frustrated adult who would like to make her own fully-informed decisions now, please, and does so. Patrick Wilson was even better: he made Dan so immensely relateable and likeable, and when he and Laurie try to have sex for the first time and it doesn't go right you just laugh and think "Aw, poor guy." Later, you get such a perfect sense of how he loves crime-fighting, not just as a sexual thrill but as an act of goodness and public service, which makes his despair and horror in Antarctica all the more sympathetic.
He and Laurie are the everymen - the guys most people in the audience can relate to, and their last scene comes as a relief after all that upheaval, because (leaving aside Ozymandius for the moment) it's not the Comedian's nihilism, John's detatchment, or even poor Rorschach's insane but dedicated good/evil dichotomy that prevail - instead, it's the ordinary desire to keep going, to pick things up and dust them off and try to make them work, no matter how hard or complex that is. It almost doesn't matter whether Dan and Laurie stay together forever; what matters is that they give it (whether 'it' is their relationship or crime-fighting) their best shot.
Speaking of Dr. Manhatten: I was really surprised by how much I liked Billy Crudup's portrayal, because it was nothing like I imagined the character when I read the comic, and now I can't think of him any other way. I cringed at his voice in the trailers, because I'd always imagined something deep and unnaturally resonant, but instead the voice was the most human thing about him, yet made sufficiently alien by his detatched tone. It was unexpectedly perfect. And to anyone who thought the wang was gratuitous: no. Trust me, that was exactly the wang-to-John-appearance ratio there was in the book.
Ozymandius was another performance that diverted from what I'd imagined in the book, and that was good in a different way. Ozymandius was always kind of a blank, to me; prior to the ending, his character's just unrelateable. But while Goode was physically slighter and more delicate in manners, it worked, especially since I kept thinking, Possibly homosexual? Must remember to investigate further. A good job of showing rather than telling, there, which is something Moore (blasphemy!) didn't quite manage. Plus, Ozymandius was mercifully not as young as I'd thought he looked in the publicity; another worry averted.
He even made Adrian's attitude in the end relateable; condescension, in contrast to the Comedian's nihilism, yet even more destructive. He really does believe in what he's doing; when Dan and Rorschach confront him in Antarctica, he manages to avert the cackling villain thing, not just by the "I did it 35 minutes ago," line (which, when delivered, made me actually punch the air), but because his attitude isn't smug triumph but frustration - he has made this hard decision, damned himself to save the world, but it worked, and why won't they see that? That he manages to put that attitude across makes it believable when Dr. Manhatten is convinced, and Dan gives in. They are highly intelligent; enough to realise the damage has been done, and revealing the truth would make things even worse. I even liked the change to the ending: fake psychic Elder Gods from outer space worked on the page, but would have been way too WTF for a casual audience; making it pan-global worked better than making it only about New York, since we know how little a devastating attack there did to unite the world, and pinning the blame on Dr. Manhatten tied the story threads together even better.***
Also, Bubastis was pretty. It is the 21st century; where is my genetically engineered purple lynx?
Rorschach and the Comedian were always the most interesting characters, though, and here the casting is really impressive. Jeffrey Dean Morgan is just flat-out perfect - I can't imagine a more perfect match of actor to character, though, um, that may not be such a compliment if the character is a sociopathic, child-killing rapist. But still, he's so damned good he manages to make Eddie Blake fascinating rather than just repellent; he's self-aware and perfectly sane, and even kind of charismatic, which makes him far more terrifying (and his acts more heinous) than if he were just a crazy psycho. Yet at the same time, things like his night-time visit to Moloch, the picture he keeps of Laurie (visible for about a second when Rorschach investigates his wardrobe), and the fact that Laurie was the product of a consensual encounter make him human. It doesn't mean I wouldn't cheer at the news of his death were he a real person, but it does make him an interesting character in fiction, and adds to the complexity of the characters around him.
Jackie Earle Haley, on the other hand, took a while to convince me. Rorschach's a difficult character to translate from page to screen, because he's as absurd as he is badass. He's crazy in a deranged, violent sociopath way, but also in a delusional, right-wing, terrified-of-sex, incapable-of-caring-for-himself way. He's short, and ugly, and stinks; he steals food from the houses he breaks into, wears elavator shoes, and in his diaries he refers to his father as an upstanding, hard-working American ideal as if Walter Kovaks wasn't the illegitimate son of a prostitute. It'd be pretty hard to get that across to a cinema audience without cutting the legs off the character and making him impossible to take seriously, so instead, Snyder just alludes to it, making it clear that he's unstable and delusional while still portraying him as a shadowy terror: the line about so few of the costumed heroes being left healthy and without mental disorders, delivered without a hint of irony as he effortlessly breaks into a secure military base, drew nervous titters from both audiences I saw it with. "Good," I thought, "that's putting the point across."
It wasn't until his arrest, though, that I was really convinced: taking the mystery out of who Rorschach is is the real test of the actor, and it was when the mask was off that Haley really shone. He was, I was pleased to see, fascinatingly ugly: all hard lines, hollow cheeks, and flat, dead eyes. Hearing that low, Batman-esque growl coming from a visible face actually made it less absurd, and the scene with the psychologist, truncated though it was, was very well done; it both delivered his backstory and made it clear that Rorschach really does belong in a psychiatric hospital.**** He was quite mesmerising, and keeping that face in mind made his subsequent masked scenes more interesting. The bit where he awkwardly apologises to Dan was lovely; they were believable as former teammates, and it was also believable that Dan would be the kind of guy who puts up with a mentally ill friend who won't accept explicit help. And that friendship made their confrontation with Adrian in Antarctica, and its aftermath, more affecting. The team back together, like Rorschach clearly wants, but under the worst possible circumstances, and in his final scene, out in the snow, knowing that he's failed and John's going to kill him, he's absolutely pitiable. It's his first real show of emotion aside from anger: there's despair, horror and fear, and he's crying and I just made little whimpering noises and tried not to blink. Very affecting performance; a difficult character done well.
There were bits that weren't so good. The sound guys were clearly too in love with their music, which was jarring and intrusive at times, for all that it's well done in others (Adrian's elevator muzak, I admit, was genius, and All Along the Watchtower was an awesome choice for Dan and Rorschach's ride to Antarctica). Changing the method of Rorschach's first murder seemed gratuitous. Carla Gugino didn't act well, apart from in the rape scene, which was so hideously well done that I spent most of it with my hands over my ears the first time, and walked out of the second. However, the really, really excellent parts outweighed all of these quibbles: Rorschach's final scene, as I mentioned above; the opening title sequence, getting so much backstory into a few beautifully-edited minutes; the sequence explaining how John Ostermann became Dr. Manhatten; Laurie recalling how the Comedian wanted to get to know, "y'know, his old friend's daughter?" and putting the pieces together. So many great sequences strung together with flawed-but-good ones. For an adaptation of a novel that people have spent the last twenty years swearing was unfilmable, I'm more than happy with what I got.
* For which the world may be grateful. THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE ALAN MOORE.
** Unless it was just people going "Hee hee sparkly blue peen!" which was still understandable.
*** P.S: I'm not saying any of these differences are better than the comic; I'm saying they work better in a movie. It's a very different medium with a very different suspension of disbelief, which is why, as a rabid comics fan, I can see this shit and be pleased rather than angered by it. If they work with the story, keep the tone and aren't gratuitous, I can congratulate the director on a thankless job well done. I will still fight my non-Lord of the Rings-reading brother to the death every time he says Peter Jackson should have had Boromir killed at Helm's Deep and streamlined the trilogy into two movies, max.
**** I'm eager to see whether this scene is expanded on in the DVD release, actually; I've heard hints of an animated version of The Black Freighter and a documentary version of Under the Hood, so a full psychiatric report or story from the point of view of the psychologist would be... well, awesome.
And now I must go to my Film lecture and it is raining. WHY?
Just a point: I've read the comic four times. Every time I read it, I find new things, new points, more hints and ties and clever metaphors. When I went into the cinema the first time I saw this, I had spent the last half-hour trying to psych myself down, thinking about all the myriad ways it could really suck, really miss the point, could fail not in a spectacular way, but in a frustrating, just-missed-the-mark way. As it turned out, I didn't have to; as a comics fan and as a film student who is fascinated by the process of adaptation, I was pretty much thrilled with it. Here's how:
As I've said to numerous people, what I found most impressive was how well it captured the tone of the comic. It wasn't perfect, because Snyder is not Alan Moore* and does tend to amp up the violence to bone-crunching Tarantino levels - but the mix of period politics, philosophy, psychology and absurdity was present and balanced well for a cinema audience, so while there were titters, they were always in the right places**. Unlike a lot of reviews I've read, I actually thought Dan and Laurie's sex scene in the clouds to the strains of "Hallelujah" was perfectly appropriate precisely because it made you grin - their romance is the one bright thread through the whole dense, dark tapestry, and the fact that it isn't (and is not portrayed on film as) a One True Love meant-to-be-type epic that is more important than anything else is something I adore.
Instead, there's a schlubby, intimidated middle-aged man with a costume fetish, and a bored, frustrated heroine who is frankly embarrassed by her crime-fighting past, and they take some comfort in each other while trying to figure out how to survive a frighteningly imminent nuclear war. I actually liked Dan and Laurie more in the film than I did in the comic - I was surprised by how alone I seem to be in liking Malin Akerman's performance. Comic-Laurie always seemed too constantly angry to be relateable, face set in a permanent scowl, but Akerman just made her seem like an exhausted, frustrated adult who would like to make her own fully-informed decisions now, please, and does so. Patrick Wilson was even better: he made Dan so immensely relateable and likeable, and when he and Laurie try to have sex for the first time and it doesn't go right you just laugh and think "Aw, poor guy." Later, you get such a perfect sense of how he loves crime-fighting, not just as a sexual thrill but as an act of goodness and public service, which makes his despair and horror in Antarctica all the more sympathetic.
He and Laurie are the everymen - the guys most people in the audience can relate to, and their last scene comes as a relief after all that upheaval, because (leaving aside Ozymandius for the moment) it's not the Comedian's nihilism, John's detatchment, or even poor Rorschach's insane but dedicated good/evil dichotomy that prevail - instead, it's the ordinary desire to keep going, to pick things up and dust them off and try to make them work, no matter how hard or complex that is. It almost doesn't matter whether Dan and Laurie stay together forever; what matters is that they give it (whether 'it' is their relationship or crime-fighting) their best shot.
Speaking of Dr. Manhatten: I was really surprised by how much I liked Billy Crudup's portrayal, because it was nothing like I imagined the character when I read the comic, and now I can't think of him any other way. I cringed at his voice in the trailers, because I'd always imagined something deep and unnaturally resonant, but instead the voice was the most human thing about him, yet made sufficiently alien by his detatched tone. It was unexpectedly perfect. And to anyone who thought the wang was gratuitous: no. Trust me, that was exactly the wang-to-John-appearance ratio there was in the book.
Ozymandius was another performance that diverted from what I'd imagined in the book, and that was good in a different way. Ozymandius was always kind of a blank, to me; prior to the ending, his character's just unrelateable. But while Goode was physically slighter and more delicate in manners, it worked, especially since I kept thinking, Possibly homosexual? Must remember to investigate further. A good job of showing rather than telling, there, which is something Moore (blasphemy!) didn't quite manage. Plus, Ozymandius was mercifully not as young as I'd thought he looked in the publicity; another worry averted.
He even made Adrian's attitude in the end relateable; condescension, in contrast to the Comedian's nihilism, yet even more destructive. He really does believe in what he's doing; when Dan and Rorschach confront him in Antarctica, he manages to avert the cackling villain thing, not just by the "I did it 35 minutes ago," line (which, when delivered, made me actually punch the air), but because his attitude isn't smug triumph but frustration - he has made this hard decision, damned himself to save the world, but it worked, and why won't they see that? That he manages to put that attitude across makes it believable when Dr. Manhatten is convinced, and Dan gives in. They are highly intelligent; enough to realise the damage has been done, and revealing the truth would make things even worse. I even liked the change to the ending: fake psychic Elder Gods from outer space worked on the page, but would have been way too WTF for a casual audience; making it pan-global worked better than making it only about New York, since we know how little a devastating attack there did to unite the world, and pinning the blame on Dr. Manhatten tied the story threads together even better.***
Also, Bubastis was pretty. It is the 21st century; where is my genetically engineered purple lynx?
Rorschach and the Comedian were always the most interesting characters, though, and here the casting is really impressive. Jeffrey Dean Morgan is just flat-out perfect - I can't imagine a more perfect match of actor to character, though, um, that may not be such a compliment if the character is a sociopathic, child-killing rapist. But still, he's so damned good he manages to make Eddie Blake fascinating rather than just repellent; he's self-aware and perfectly sane, and even kind of charismatic, which makes him far more terrifying (and his acts more heinous) than if he were just a crazy psycho. Yet at the same time, things like his night-time visit to Moloch, the picture he keeps of Laurie (visible for about a second when Rorschach investigates his wardrobe), and the fact that Laurie was the product of a consensual encounter make him human. It doesn't mean I wouldn't cheer at the news of his death were he a real person, but it does make him an interesting character in fiction, and adds to the complexity of the characters around him.
Jackie Earle Haley, on the other hand, took a while to convince me. Rorschach's a difficult character to translate from page to screen, because he's as absurd as he is badass. He's crazy in a deranged, violent sociopath way, but also in a delusional, right-wing, terrified-of-sex, incapable-of-caring-for-himself way. He's short, and ugly, and stinks; he steals food from the houses he breaks into, wears elavator shoes, and in his diaries he refers to his father as an upstanding, hard-working American ideal as if Walter Kovaks wasn't the illegitimate son of a prostitute. It'd be pretty hard to get that across to a cinema audience without cutting the legs off the character and making him impossible to take seriously, so instead, Snyder just alludes to it, making it clear that he's unstable and delusional while still portraying him as a shadowy terror: the line about so few of the costumed heroes being left healthy and without mental disorders, delivered without a hint of irony as he effortlessly breaks into a secure military base, drew nervous titters from both audiences I saw it with. "Good," I thought, "that's putting the point across."
It wasn't until his arrest, though, that I was really convinced: taking the mystery out of who Rorschach is is the real test of the actor, and it was when the mask was off that Haley really shone. He was, I was pleased to see, fascinatingly ugly: all hard lines, hollow cheeks, and flat, dead eyes. Hearing that low, Batman-esque growl coming from a visible face actually made it less absurd, and the scene with the psychologist, truncated though it was, was very well done; it both delivered his backstory and made it clear that Rorschach really does belong in a psychiatric hospital.**** He was quite mesmerising, and keeping that face in mind made his subsequent masked scenes more interesting. The bit where he awkwardly apologises to Dan was lovely; they were believable as former teammates, and it was also believable that Dan would be the kind of guy who puts up with a mentally ill friend who won't accept explicit help. And that friendship made their confrontation with Adrian in Antarctica, and its aftermath, more affecting. The team back together, like Rorschach clearly wants, but under the worst possible circumstances, and in his final scene, out in the snow, knowing that he's failed and John's going to kill him, he's absolutely pitiable. It's his first real show of emotion aside from anger: there's despair, horror and fear, and he's crying and I just made little whimpering noises and tried not to blink. Very affecting performance; a difficult character done well.
There were bits that weren't so good. The sound guys were clearly too in love with their music, which was jarring and intrusive at times, for all that it's well done in others (Adrian's elevator muzak, I admit, was genius, and All Along the Watchtower was an awesome choice for Dan and Rorschach's ride to Antarctica). Changing the method of Rorschach's first murder seemed gratuitous. Carla Gugino didn't act well, apart from in the rape scene, which was so hideously well done that I spent most of it with my hands over my ears the first time, and walked out of the second. However, the really, really excellent parts outweighed all of these quibbles: Rorschach's final scene, as I mentioned above; the opening title sequence, getting so much backstory into a few beautifully-edited minutes; the sequence explaining how John Ostermann became Dr. Manhatten; Laurie recalling how the Comedian wanted to get to know, "y'know, his old friend's daughter?" and putting the pieces together. So many great sequences strung together with flawed-but-good ones. For an adaptation of a novel that people have spent the last twenty years swearing was unfilmable, I'm more than happy with what I got.
* For which the world may be grateful. THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE ALAN MOORE.
** Unless it was just people going "Hee hee sparkly blue peen!" which was still understandable.
*** P.S: I'm not saying any of these differences are better than the comic; I'm saying they work better in a movie. It's a very different medium with a very different suspension of disbelief, which is why, as a rabid comics fan, I can see this shit and be pleased rather than angered by it. If they work with the story, keep the tone and aren't gratuitous, I can congratulate the director on a thankless job well done. I will still fight my non-Lord of the Rings-reading brother to the death every time he says Peter Jackson should have had Boromir killed at Helm's Deep and streamlined the trilogy into two movies, max.
**** I'm eager to see whether this scene is expanded on in the DVD release, actually; I've heard hints of an animated version of The Black Freighter and a documentary version of Under the Hood, so a full psychiatric report or story from the point of view of the psychologist would be... well, awesome.
And now I must go to my Film lecture and it is raining. WHY?