Month: March 2009

Everything you’ve heard about Watchmen, the movie, is wrong.

Honestly, I think you should just see it and make up your own mind. I finally had a chance to see it for myself this afternoon, and I quite enjoyed it. Maybe I had less invested in it than some comic book fans; the original book absolutely deserves its reputation — it’s arguably Alan Moore’s finest work — but it’s been years since I first read it, and it’s not a book I return to time and again. I discovered Watchmen in college, when I started getting serious about reading comics again, but it’s less a personal touchstone for me than, say, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman or the late-’80s X-Men books (from the last time I’d been serious about reading comics).

Reaction to the film has certainly been mixed — to the point where you almost wonder if everyone’s seeing the same movie.

Roger Ebert calls it “charged from within by its power as a fable,” while A.O. Scott found it “grim and grisly” and “interminable.” Certainly there’s room for differences of opinion, but Watchmen seems to have critics and fans split pretty evenly down the middle.

I avoided most online discussion of the movie all weekend — easy to do with only a couple hours of an iffy hotel internet connection every night — but now that I’m digging through some of it, I think my sensibilities lie most with Tasha Robinson, in her comparison of the movie and original graphic novel:

And so forth and so on. There are a bunch more little changes I could harp on, but frankly, in spite of all this—mostly attributable to the film coming from a different emotional place and a different creator, one who really loves the slow motion and the shock moment—I enjoyed the hell out of the film both times, simply because Snyder’s visual aesthetic is so close to the book: He really wants those characters onscreen just as they appear in the book, whether that means Rorschach’s shifting face or Dr. Manhattan’s eerie blue glow. And he wants it all to be as exciting and vivid and intense as possible; I can’t blame him for that, nor be too cross that his bar for intensity is higher than mine. And frankly, while many of these changes lost me little moments I was looking forward to, apart from the superheroing-up of the cast, they mostly strike me as cosmetic, the cost of a huge-budget action film. After decades of being positive Watchmen would never make it to the screen—or that it’d be completely rewritten, as a Terry Gilliam dark comedy or a 9/11 commentary film or who knows what else—I was delighted to get something this accurate to the broad storyline, and this reverential to Moore’s work. (Even if Moore himself doesn’t think so.)

So the movie is not the book, and it probably is the lesser of the two when all is said and done, but I think they’re both perfectly valid, perfectly entertaining ways of telling the same story.

And you know, even if the movie was — as Gerry Canavan and others have suggested — a creative failure, I’d still have great respect for director Zach Synder for making this kind of failure. For having a distinct creative vision (or at least a vision borrowed from Dave Gibbons) and for swinging for the fences. I don’t agree with everything Patton Oswalt says here, but I do agree with him on that.