The lone and level sands stretch far away
I was among the throngs who saw Watchmen in its Seattle opening, midnight Thursday night at the Cinerama. There were at least two people in full Rorschach outfits, one very good. Nobody I saw came as Dr. Manhattan, for which I'm probably grateful - although it was chilly enough out that if you went for the costume honestly, you might not have needed blue makeup.
In sum, a bit of a mess. An ambitious mess, often a pretty mess, at times a glorious mess, and yet. I was entertained, but I was watching it in light of the original. I hate to reference other reviews in one of my own, but I think Eric Ditzien (MTV) hit it on the head when he observed that early reviews were splitting into three camps: you loved the book and therefore love the movie, you loved the book and therefore despise the movie, and you never read the book and therefore wonder why this got everyone so excited. Anyone who knows me can probably guess that I can cheerfully see all three camps.
So let's get the "loved the book, can't see it as a movie" part out of the way first, since that's usually the one that could have been written before you even saw the movie and is thus the weakest. In my case, it's an even weaker argument, because it extends to the collected graphic novel: a big part of the charm Way Back When was the fact that it was a serial, that information was being doled out in gradual chunks, with time built in to speculate and chase down every little red herring. Today, there are parts of the plot that we had to be oblivious to, start to suspect, and then only see confirmed two thirds of the way through that are assumed by reviews that are confident they are spoiler-free. Heck, that's true of some promo materials from the production itself.
That's a distinct loss here - while there are some genies that can never be put back in the bottle when you're adapting an existing work, distilling the story and especially its whodunnit aspect down, even to almost three hours of screen time, means you miss a lot of the skeleton that allowed what may ultimately have been the more lasting parts of the story to be told from the margins without clubbing you over the head.
The clubbing-over-the-head part was the real problem, which gets me to the core of "the mess" of this specific movie. Alan Moore's dialogue does give you a challenge to work with (much like it's almost impossible to read segments like "must... not... black... out..." in Miller's original Dark Knight without thinking of The Tick mocking it) but the visuals, the delivery, even the intrusively stylish soundtrack were chewing the scenery so much that people were regularly giggling. That's neither necessarily inevitable to a comic book adaptation, nor necessarily fatal: movies like the newer Batman adaptations, Sin City, even (whatever else a purist might say about it) V for Vendetta have managed to capture the darker feel of the grittier comics without leaving the audience laughing at all the clichés. Alternately, Iron Man went for a lot of laughs - but importantly, it was always clear that everyone involved was going for that intentionally, that it wasn't a mistake in execution.
Unfortunately, this isn't the first time director Zack Snyder has had that problem: 300 suffered from many of the same problems. Sure, you can point to the astonishing job that many of the scenes did capturing the exact same composition and color of the most striking images from the original book, but a movie (by definition) isn't just image, it's movement and pacing, and Snyder hasn't really proven that he can turn comic books into bona fide motion pictures nearly as well as he can create promotional stills. For a story that was defined by the intention to take comic book heroes, with all of their two-dimensional Adam West baggage, and re-imagine them as three-dimensional warts-and-all people, regressing to BIFF/BAM/POW/heehee may actually be criminal.
ALL of that being said, I was entertained. I went into this quite familiar with the original, so watching all the old, classic moments from the book brought to life was often a great deal of fun. The vast majority of the actors were inspired choices, doing very good jobs both in superficial appearance and in capturing the spirit of the originals (what they had Matthew Goode do with Veidt/Ozymandias is a notable exception, and they were a little too enamored of the fact that they could show Dr. Manhattan's schlong and still keep their R rating, but those were the biggest exceptions). They were remarkably faithful to the central plot, and any two fans would almost certainly disagree about which changes or omissions were the most unforgivable (even if I could go into my own "awww" list without spoilers). Given that it probably never could have been made perfectly, there are alternatives that could have been far worse ways to leave it.
In sum, a bit of a mess. An ambitious mess, often a pretty mess, at times a glorious mess, and yet. I was entertained, but I was watching it in light of the original. I hate to reference other reviews in one of my own, but I think Eric Ditzien (MTV) hit it on the head when he observed that early reviews were splitting into three camps: you loved the book and therefore love the movie, you loved the book and therefore despise the movie, and you never read the book and therefore wonder why this got everyone so excited. Anyone who knows me can probably guess that I can cheerfully see all three camps.
So let's get the "loved the book, can't see it as a movie" part out of the way first, since that's usually the one that could have been written before you even saw the movie and is thus the weakest. In my case, it's an even weaker argument, because it extends to the collected graphic novel: a big part of the charm Way Back When was the fact that it was a serial, that information was being doled out in gradual chunks, with time built in to speculate and chase down every little red herring. Today, there are parts of the plot that we had to be oblivious to, start to suspect, and then only see confirmed two thirds of the way through that are assumed by reviews that are confident they are spoiler-free. Heck, that's true of some promo materials from the production itself.
That's a distinct loss here - while there are some genies that can never be put back in the bottle when you're adapting an existing work, distilling the story and especially its whodunnit aspect down, even to almost three hours of screen time, means you miss a lot of the skeleton that allowed what may ultimately have been the more lasting parts of the story to be told from the margins without clubbing you over the head.
The clubbing-over-the-head part was the real problem, which gets me to the core of "the mess" of this specific movie. Alan Moore's dialogue does give you a challenge to work with (much like it's almost impossible to read segments like "must... not... black... out..." in Miller's original Dark Knight without thinking of The Tick mocking it) but the visuals, the delivery, even the intrusively stylish soundtrack were chewing the scenery so much that people were regularly giggling. That's neither necessarily inevitable to a comic book adaptation, nor necessarily fatal: movies like the newer Batman adaptations, Sin City, even (whatever else a purist might say about it) V for Vendetta have managed to capture the darker feel of the grittier comics without leaving the audience laughing at all the clichés. Alternately, Iron Man went for a lot of laughs - but importantly, it was always clear that everyone involved was going for that intentionally, that it wasn't a mistake in execution.
Unfortunately, this isn't the first time director Zack Snyder has had that problem: 300 suffered from many of the same problems. Sure, you can point to the astonishing job that many of the scenes did capturing the exact same composition and color of the most striking images from the original book, but a movie (by definition) isn't just image, it's movement and pacing, and Snyder hasn't really proven that he can turn comic books into bona fide motion pictures nearly as well as he can create promotional stills. For a story that was defined by the intention to take comic book heroes, with all of their two-dimensional Adam West baggage, and re-imagine them as three-dimensional warts-and-all people, regressing to BIFF/BAM/POW/heehee may actually be criminal.
ALL of that being said, I was entertained. I went into this quite familiar with the original, so watching all the old, classic moments from the book brought to life was often a great deal of fun. The vast majority of the actors were inspired choices, doing very good jobs both in superficial appearance and in capturing the spirit of the originals (what they had Matthew Goode do with Veidt/Ozymandias is a notable exception, and they were a little too enamored of the fact that they could show Dr. Manhattan's schlong and still keep their R rating, but those were the biggest exceptions). They were remarkably faithful to the central plot, and any two fans would almost certainly disagree about which changes or omissions were the most unforgivable (even if I could go into my own "awww" list without spoilers). Given that it probably never could have been made perfectly, there are alternatives that could have been far worse ways to leave it.