Watchmen
Several months after buying Watchmen, I finally got round to actually watching it the other night. I wasn't really expecting too much from it, and it didn't disappoint me or surprise me. It wasn't a dreadful film, but it wasn't an especially good one either.
Consider this a spoiler warning if anyone thinks it actually matters for this film.
The film did have its good points. The cast was one of them. Jackie Earle Haley was absolutely perfectly cast and I don't think anyone could have done a better job with the character. The Comedian could have stepped straight out of the comic book on to the screen, and the Silk Spectre and Nite Owl were both quite well portrayed. Dr. Manhatten's voice was also ideal for the character. The only negative I found in the main cast was Ozymandias, who didn't work at all. (But why was Nixon played by some guy in a gigantic comedy prosthetic nose?)
There's two ways to think about the Watchmen movie: how it works as a film in its own right, and how it works as an adaptation of the book. I don't think it was successful as either. It often seemed like I wouldn't have a clue what was going on if it wasn't for the fact that I'd already read the book. There were some strange choices of scenes from the book placed into the film that made absolutely no sense without the context of other scenes that were missing. Characters enter and leave the film with no real purpose and with any relevance they might have had to the story gone.
The director also seems obsessed with gore. Several times changed were made to the plot from the book with no other purpose than to make it more violent and gory. Usually the changes were for the worse. For example, instead of Rorscach chaining a criminal up and passing him a saw before setting the building on fire as he does in the book, here he just grabs a cleaver and starts hacking him to pieces. Rubbish. And there's a gratuitous scene in the prison of a man getting his arms cut off with an electric saw.
The violence is similarly over the top. The death of The Comedian which is only shown in a couple of brief flashback panels in the comic becomes a 5 minute over the top fight scene. At one point, The Comedian punches through a wall. It was quite worrying when this was the very first scene in the film, as it seems to miss the point entirely. These are supposed to be costumed vigilantes, they're not supposed to have super strength. Likewise, when confronting Ozymandias at the end, there's a huge fight scene where punches send people flying miles through the air. All these fights and the gore make it seem like the director would have rather been making a standard action movie than Watchmen.
There's a few instances where things were changed that weren't to do with gore, and I was baffled by these too. It's hard to express the disappointment I felt when the fridge door was opened and Rorschach failed to come flying out of it and instead had merely left a note. These sorts of things are more minor changes that would go unnoticed by people who hadn't read the book and wouldn't have a major effect for them, but the fact is that the changes were almost all for the worse.
The biggest change of all is the ending, which is now complete nonsensical rubbish. In my opinion, the actions of Ozymandias here are more likely to have increased tensions between Russian and the US rather than united them. The whole point of the book was that it looked like an attack from something completely alien, where now it simply gets blamed on Doctor Manhatten. Who works for the USA. Smart move.
Anyway, some of this might sound like nitpicking, and the film isn't terrible. It was, however, quite average as films go and there was nothing to make me want to watch it again. And that's a shame, because I consider the book to be one of the greatest ever written, graphical or otherwise.
Consider this a spoiler warning if anyone thinks it actually matters for this film.
The film did have its good points. The cast was one of them. Jackie Earle Haley was absolutely perfectly cast and I don't think anyone could have done a better job with the character. The Comedian could have stepped straight out of the comic book on to the screen, and the Silk Spectre and Nite Owl were both quite well portrayed. Dr. Manhatten's voice was also ideal for the character. The only negative I found in the main cast was Ozymandias, who didn't work at all. (But why was Nixon played by some guy in a gigantic comedy prosthetic nose?)
There's two ways to think about the Watchmen movie: how it works as a film in its own right, and how it works as an adaptation of the book. I don't think it was successful as either. It often seemed like I wouldn't have a clue what was going on if it wasn't for the fact that I'd already read the book. There were some strange choices of scenes from the book placed into the film that made absolutely no sense without the context of other scenes that were missing. Characters enter and leave the film with no real purpose and with any relevance they might have had to the story gone.
The director also seems obsessed with gore. Several times changed were made to the plot from the book with no other purpose than to make it more violent and gory. Usually the changes were for the worse. For example, instead of Rorscach chaining a criminal up and passing him a saw before setting the building on fire as he does in the book, here he just grabs a cleaver and starts hacking him to pieces. Rubbish. And there's a gratuitous scene in the prison of a man getting his arms cut off with an electric saw.
The violence is similarly over the top. The death of The Comedian which is only shown in a couple of brief flashback panels in the comic becomes a 5 minute over the top fight scene. At one point, The Comedian punches through a wall. It was quite worrying when this was the very first scene in the film, as it seems to miss the point entirely. These are supposed to be costumed vigilantes, they're not supposed to have super strength. Likewise, when confronting Ozymandias at the end, there's a huge fight scene where punches send people flying miles through the air. All these fights and the gore make it seem like the director would have rather been making a standard action movie than Watchmen.
There's a few instances where things were changed that weren't to do with gore, and I was baffled by these too. It's hard to express the disappointment I felt when the fridge door was opened and Rorschach failed to come flying out of it and instead had merely left a note. These sorts of things are more minor changes that would go unnoticed by people who hadn't read the book and wouldn't have a major effect for them, but the fact is that the changes were almost all for the worse.
The biggest change of all is the ending, which is now complete nonsensical rubbish. In my opinion, the actions of Ozymandias here are more likely to have increased tensions between Russian and the US rather than united them. The whole point of the book was that it looked like an attack from something completely alien, where now it simply gets blamed on Doctor Manhatten. Who works for the USA. Smart move.
Anyway, some of this might sound like nitpicking, and the film isn't terrible. It was, however, quite average as films go and there was nothing to make me want to watch it again. And that's a shame, because I consider the book to be one of the greatest ever written, graphical or otherwise.