Watching Watchmen

[ericmvan]

Well, it’s either phenomenally good, or merely great with some significant but minor flaws that will keep it out of the top of my all-time favorites list, but still near the top of this year’s Top 10. I will need another viewing or two to decide (and there will be no final verdict until we see the 30 minutes that were removed from this cut.)

What was great?

• The screenplay is absolutely brilliant in two aspects: its true grasp of the themes of the graphic novel, which it underscores and emboldens with authority, and its ability to compress the story into 2 hr 40 min. I can’t think of a single moment where the story was compressed or simplified and I reacted negatively: in every case I could immediately see the logic of the change. Speaking of which …
• The ending, which is to say, the replacement for the novel’s giant telepathic mock-alien squid, is actually a huge improvement on numerous levels. (Take that, slavish fanboys!) When I read the novel originally, and eleven issues of complicated plot climaxed in a rehash of the Outer Limits episode “The Architects of Fear,” which in turn leaned heavily on the Theodore Sturgeons’s “Unite and Conquer,” I was more than a little let down. I had always assumed that David Hayter and Alex Tse changed the ending because destroying NYC with a monster had become old hat (Godzilla remake, Cloverfield), and that singling out NYC had acquired unfortunate resonance. I was hoping they would come up with something different and adequate. I didn’t dare hope that they realized the original ending was stale and maybe kind of dumb and that they could come up with something much better. But they did.
• Jackie Earle Hailey is just spectacular as Rorschach, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Billy Crudup are very fine as The Comedian and Dr. Manhattan respectively.
• This may be a function of the difference between movies and books as they interact with my brain, but I found the movie emotionally moving, at times very much so, in ways I didn’t find the book to be. Hailey and Crudup and the thematic underscoring in the screenplay get the credit, I think.

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  What was perhaps less than great?
  
  
  • In the rare cases where they had to invent substantial dialogue, it’s usually just OK and once in a while flat; there’s nothing remotely like Boromir’s speech to Aragorn in Lothlorien, i.e., at no point do they channel Alan Moore the way that Jackson, Walsh, and Boyens were consistently able to channel Tolkien.
  • The rest of the cast is nothing special. Again, the obvious comparison is to LOTR, where the twentieth best performance (i.e., everyone but Elijah Wood) is better than the fourth best here.
  • I probably had my hopes for eye-candy way too high, but I was merely satisfied with the movie as a visual feast, when I hoped or expected to be stunned.
  
  
  It’s very clear that there are some critics who just aren’t getting this. Ty Burr, for instance, thinks that setting the sex scene between Dan and Laurie to Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” creates unintentional humor. I guess he missed the part where Dan is impotent when his clothes have been taken off but a stud when its his superhero costume that’s been removed, and it didn’t occur to him that the scene was mocking him.
  
  In the case of the really negative reviews, I can guarantee you that those critics went in with preconceptions about what the movie might be like or should be about. (As a movie to rival Iron Man, it does suck incredibly.) As the movie fails to slide neatly into the slot they had prepared for it, they start to tune it out, stop actually listening. When, for instance, Dr. Manhattan explains why he’s returning to Earth, they’re not even parsing the content, because they’re just assuming it must be pseudo-scientific babble rather than actual science, because they would never expect something that sophisticated from a comic-book movie. Viola! A very moving scene becomes “emotionally distant.”
  
  To sum up: this is a very fine and capable and in a few important ways quite brilliant adaptation of terrific source material. As such, a very easy **** or 10/10.