Daniel Woolstencroft's Little Movie Blog Thing

Can I write anything about Watchmen and not come across as a moaning fanboy? Can I avoid giving the impression that I’ve got nothing better to do than pick holes in a project that critics thought was doomed to fail? Probably not, so apologies if this strays into obsessive fanboy territory at any time.

If this write up does wander off into the realms of the obsessive and disappear up its own arse, it probably won’t be painting an accurate picture. I’m not really one of those special kind of geeks that thinks Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s original graphic novel should be placed on a pedestal and worshipped three times a day. I first read it when I was an impressionable teen, and didn’t really “get” it. I thought it was “OK”, but it wasn’t until recently when I read it again and at that point I was completely captivated by it. I’m a geek who rates the book highly – geeky enough to have a blog, and be writing about Watchmen on it – but I’m open to a little poetic license. In fact I expected it.

The thing that makes writing about Watchmen The Movie so bloody tricky is Watchmen The Graphic Novel. Adaptations are always going to walk a fine line between remaining one hundred percent faithful to the source material and reinterpreting things, but I don’t know if anything has ever had its work cut out quite like Watchmen. Watchmen fans aren’t like normal fans. Probably because Watchmen isn’t, or wasn’t, like normal graphic novels when it was originally released.

There’s no avoiding the fact that it’s deep, it’s challenging, and it’s widely regarded as unfilmable. Even if you hate the novel, you can’t ignore its influence or not recognise the admiration it’s received from scores of readers over the years.

Do you simply consider whether Watchmen is a success as a movie, or as an adaptation? Can someone who’s already read the novel approach the film with a blank slate and take it for what it is? I can’t. My feelings towards it are skewed by my appreciation for the original. I wanted to like it. Maybe that’s part of the problem; I broke my own rule and got stupidly excited about seeing it. That sort of expectation is rarely good, and usually works against you. It’s the ones that you’ve not built yourself up for that usually leave the biggest impression.

Let’s pretend I’ve not read the graphic novel, and start to look at things from a purely cinematic perspective, ignoring any elements of adaptation. There’s a good chunk of things I didn’t like.

Some of the performances downright suck: Malin Akerman (Laurie/Silk Spectre II) is just rubbish. She never really gets to grips with the character at all, and just seems happy to coast from scene to scene, sometimes appearing in costume, sometimes poncing about in slow-me for no other reason than someone thought it would look cool. She’s moderately attractive, but nothing special, and I spent most of her time on screen really bored, just waiting for her to move over and give a more interesting character a go.

If Akerman is boring, Patrick Wilson (Dan/Nite Owl II) practically induces narcolepsy. There’s nothing to like about him. He’s not funny, you don’t get behind him as an audience, and he’s totally unconvincing in any of the movie’s tiresome fight sequences. (I’m pretending I don’t know anything about the novel at this stage, remember, so the fact that elements of his character are written that way is unknown to me. But he’s nowhere near this dull in the original).

The third and probably most damningly crap performance is Matthew Goode’s Ozymandias. He nails the look of a suicidally bored pantomime villain. Why would anyone want to buy action figures of the world’s most boring super hero? We’re supposed to accept that he’s made his fortune because people want to buy Ozymandias dolls? He’s like a cheap Bond villain! There’s footage of him hanging out at “groovy” parties with icons like Bowie and Jagger – perhaps it was his constant lectures on Alexander the Great that drove them to a variety of illegal substances.

Billy Crudup and his amazing blue member aren’t as bad as the above (indeed, the blue wang gives a marvelously understated performance), but he still doesn’t set the screen alight. Dr Manhattan is a tough character to do right; he’s such an emotionless creation, and yet he’s got some really emotionally charged things happening around him. I wasn’t moved by anything Crudup does during the film, and I think I was supposed to be.

I found the fight scenes to be far too “Matrix”. They’re inoffensive enough to someone who knows nothing about the graphic novel (me, as I write this bit). But the most damning thing is this strange lack of atmosphere (and I’m not just talking about the bits on Mars). There’s are some great moments, but overall it feels really, really cold. The musical choices occasionally work well, but most of the time they reminded me of a bad episode of Heartbeat – period songs are shoe horned in for the sake of it, and they’re mixed with high intensity dance style tracks during the fight scenes. And there’s one particular musical choice that’s so awful it requires its own paragraph.

I thought X-Factor winner Alexandra Burke had pretty much ruined Hallelujah for me, but I was wrong. Thank you Zack Snyder for that one. The film’s most gratuitous sex scene – between the film’s least interesting characters Akerman and Wilson – doesn’t even have the honour of being hilariously bad. It’s just bad. I mean Showgirls bad. The sight of Wilson’s thrusting naked buttocks, backed by Leonard Cohen’s vocals and Akerman’s screams of delight brings a new meaning to the term Torture Porn. For a few minutes, the film becomes a sub-Austin Powers sex comedy without the humour. It tries to diffuse the situation by including a…no, wait, I haven’t read the comic. Can’t mention that yet. I think it’s supposed to be funny, but then it feels like it’s trying to be smoking hot sexy at the same time, and the two don’t meet.

If you haven’t read the novel then, Watchmen is an ultimately tiresome period piece about boring costumed heroes, an emotionless naked blue God, with bad music choices and a lack of atmosphere.

Or is it? Not quite. There are three things (probably 3.1) that mean this isn’t a total waste of time.

Watchmen would be an absolute stinker if it didn’t include two fantastic performances by Jeffery Dean Morgan and Jackie Earle Haley. Morgan’s Comedian has a brilliant amount of complexity and depth given the relatively short amount of time he’s on screen. You should hate him, but you can’t quite. The film’s undisputed star though, is Haley.

As Rorschach, Haley is the film’s anti hero. He’s the most interesting character here, even though he’s wearing a mask for most of the film, and the only one outside of Morgan that you can genuinely accept as being a deterrent to crime. He growls his way through the movie, achieving a sound that Christian Bale’s (slightly silly sounding) Batman would’ve killed for. When he’s not on screen, you want him to come back and inject some life into things, and when he is, you just don’t want him to leave. When Haley delivered the “I’m not in here with you, you’re in here with me” line, I got chills. He’s acting his nuts off during the film’s last few scenes, and it’s like everyone else has gone to sleep around him.

The third great thing about Watchmen, and it’s available online, is the opening title sequence. It crams in so much stuff in a really short space of time, looks fantastic, is set to an iconic song, and blows you away during the first few moments of the film. You watch the title sequence and think you’re in for a real treat. The problem is, no one sequence ever manages to dazzle quite so much for the rest of the film.

The .1? Matt Frewer as Edgar Jacobi aka Moloch. He’s not around for long, but I’m always a fan of Frewer, and he does really well here. He manages to act Akerman, Wilson, and Goode off the screen even in the brief appearances he makes.

So if you’ve never read the book, Watchmen is a heavily flawed, odd super hero movie, with an epic runtime, two superb performances, and an awful lot of dullness.

But what would I know? I’ve read the book. I know exactly which bits have been removed. What’s worse, I know which bits have changed.

We’re about to embark on the worst kind of nitpicky, fanboy indulgence; moaning because this character is left handed in the original version, or this other character would never wear a green shirt because they were raised by mountain bears, and actually it was always implied that x was y during z, so how could they ignore that on film, I WILL NEVER GIVE HOLLYWOOD MY MONEY AGAIN DAMN THEM ALL TO HELL!!!

Indulge me for a moment. I can’t help it.

(And here there be spoilers for anyone who’s totally unfamiliar with Watchmen).

There are three key things that made me hopping mad after seeing Watchmen. I can accept the alteration to the end sequence – a giant inter-dimensional squid beast might have been too weird for audiences to accept. It’s a bloody shame, because the film’s ending just doesn’t have any kind of WTF element to it. The great thing about the book is you could never see it coming. A Giant Squid? That’s just insane. And that’s the beauty of it. There’s no beauty in the evil genius plan that Ozymandias has dreamt up here. When he says “I’m not a comic book villian” I couldn’t help but think “you weren’t, but you’ve been reduced to that now”.

I can accept grudgingly that chunks would need to be removed. Anything that takes place around the news stand is gone, including the Black Freighter comic book. The removal of these makes sense cinematically – they’d have bloated the runtime even further, and made things even harder for audiences to follow. When moving something from the page to the screen, you’ve got to cut certain things. I get that. The consequence of this particular change though, is that we don’t give two farts about anyone in New York. So when things reach their conclusion, there’s no reason for the audience to be terribly upset.

And here’s the first thing on my big fanboy list of stuff I hated about Watchmen: Dave Gibbon’s magnificent aftermath panels that opened the last issue aren’t present. The audience aren’t subjected to the brutal aftermath of Ozy’s plan. David Hayter claims it couldn’t be done – that a film costing this much money, in this post 9/11 world that we live in, couldn’t have displayed that level of horrific devastation and gotten away with it. Then don’t bother making it at all.

I’m comfortable with the fact that certain great subtleties of the novel aren’t present: there’s no Gordian Knot reference that I could find (even though Dan does say at one point “I’ve had these locks changed”). There’s a hint of Veidt’s perfume (“eau de bored?”) in there, but it’s mostly just Snyder winking at the fans, desperately trying to get them onside by saying “look, we got references to all kinds of crap in here”.

Watchmen proves that just because something makes a good, or great, panel in a graphic novel, doesn’t mean it’ll look good on screen. The Doomsday clock, which gets very brief references in the novel, is front and centre in the film. It’s a heavy handed, moronic symbol, and the film does draw attention to this, but it shouldn’t have to. The jet of flame during Nite Owl/Spectre’s love scene is subtle on the page – the whole scene is understated – but on film it’s just crap. You can use the images in the novel as an inspiration, but all too often Watchmen uses them as its storyboard and doesn’t bother – or perhaps have the balls – to think it can improve things. It’s constrained by its so called appreciation of the source material.

The inclusion of lots of silly Dr Strangelove Nixon segments in the War Room just don’t work either. Nixon’s got a big fake rubber nose and seems to be played for laughs. It distracts you from what should be the real meat of the thing.

The most soul destroying thing about the adaptation is the alteration in subtle ways of two of the main characters origins. Maybe it’s just me, maybe I just connected with these two things more than other people, but for me they’re deal breakers.

The first of these is Rorschach’s epiphany moment. When he takes his first life in the novel it sets the precedent for the calculated way which he goes about his business. He’ll kill people, because that’s what they deserve. It’s a binary switch that’s flicked and he never goes back. He’s the walking definition of uncompromising. In the adaptation, he’s been turned into some sort of rage fueled avenging Jason Voorhees; going psycho on his victim with a meat cleaver, while blood splatters his mask (creating its own rorschach pattern, eh Mr Snyder? Oh, you’re so clever).

Worse is the alteration to Dr Manhattan’s back story. For a character so distant from humanity, it’s important to do everything in your power to have your audience connect. The odds are stacked against you; there’s the blue mangina for a start – I’ve heard the schlong can be off-putting, resulting in unexpected sniggers, involuntary eye contact, etc. There’s the fact that he sounds like some sort of human wind chime whenever he moves. And the fact that he talks like a man forced to read the phone book for the rest of eternity. Maybe if there was a touching back story, something that you could identify with, feel sorry for, really get caught up in. Something like…I don’t know…being a forgetful half-wit who leaves his watch in an extremely dangerous test chamber regardless of the fact that the LARGE RED COUNTDOWN on the door says there’s only a few seconds before you’re vaporised. That’ll sell it.

The whole point of Osterman’s accident is that the watch – not his watch, but the watch of his lover Janey Slater – is so important to him. It’s been through a lot, he’s fixed it for her, and when he realises that he’s left it in harm’s way he risks everything to get it, ultimately dooming himself to an untimely death. The Mars sequence in the novel weaves this origin in the most incredible way, culminating in the birth of Dr Manhattan. The film version misses the point.

And that’s the feeling I get: the point has been missed here. Through a process of adaptation, over all these years, after all these versions, somewhere along the way the whole point of the endeavor has fallen by the wayside. The fact that Rorschach leaves prison in his costume, the excessive use of gore, including a very silly rorschach shaped Rorschach splatter at the end, Dr Manhattan suggesting to Laurie that she go and have dinner with Dan, his eventual jump straight to Mars meaning that logically nobody could know where he’s gone, the out of context creation of the symbol on his head, all miss the point. Worst of all, the super human fight sequences, carried out by characters who should have no more super powers than Batman, but yet are still capable of Agent Smith style combat – smashing chunks out of walls and and furniture – misses the point.

The individual flaws are like a partner leaving the top off the toothpaste or the toilet seat up: one or two you can overlook as minor annoyances. But taken as a whole they’re infuriating, disappointing, and ultimately doom the relationship to failure. It’s impossible for me as a fan of the original material to enjoy the film. It’s also impossible for me as a fan of cinema to overlook the problems with the adaptation.

Watchmen has been adapted with no subtlety and no emotion. It chugs along thinking it’s cleverly turning the pages of the graphic novel into a great cinematic experience, when in actual fact it’s just a tired mess. Less colossal squid, more colossal failure.