Who watches the Watchmen when it's three hours long and not very good? (Watchmen (DVD))

Member Name: hogsflesh

Product:	Watchmen (DVD)
Date:	19/03/09 (284 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Looks good, competently acted

Disadvantages: Much too long; over-literal; feels like it misses the essence of the original

This film is currently on general release.

After 20-odd years they've finally made a film of Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' revolutionary comic series. It's helmed by Zack Snyder (the 'visionary director of 300' as posters hilariously tell us). As with Twilight and Harry Potter, this is a film that comes with a lot of baggage - it has to both satisfy the fans and be something normal people can enjoy.

It's rather handicapped by the fact that Alan Moore himself has been extremely vocal in his displeasure about the film's very existence. I suspect some fans are going to be predisposed to dislike it right from the start for that reason. I hoped for the best, but feared the worst.

The story is fiendishly complicated, but to sum it up briefly: a bunch of ageing, mostly retired costumed heroes (who aren't really 'heroes' at all as they're either fascist or neurotic) become embroiled in a murder plot against a backdrop of imminent nuclear war in an alternate version of mid-1980s America. Characters include godlike Dr Manhattan, psychotic right-wing vigilante Rorschach, and frustrated sexpot The Silk Spectre.

I'm a fan of the comic, which has inevitably coloured my reaction to the film; it won't be possible to review it without discussing some of the differences between the two. Some things are missed out that shouldn't have been, while other things are included that aren't necessary. It's a fiendishly dense comic, both in its plotting and its dialogue, and the film could probably have been chopped down to a more manageable length without losing its basic essence.

To have any worth, an adaptation has to capture the spirit of the original; but it also has to justify its existence by bringing something new to the story that only film can. Sadly, Watchmen does neither. Much of what made the comic great was stuff that's specific to comics and unrepeatable in film - the way the individual, static images interact with one another, things that you notice by being able to take the time to examine the artwork at length. Losing the stuff that made the comic exceptional is inevitable, but crucially, the film doesn't try to replace it with anything. The other big part of the comic's innovation was in bringing a supposedly more mature sensibility to superhero characters, but that's been copied so much that it now seems rather clichéd. I'd imagine anyone seeing this with no knowledge of the comic would wonder how on earth it came to be regarded as 'the greatest graphic novel of all time'.

Another part of the comic's innovation was the fact of its very existence - it was seen at the time very much as a 'revolution' in mainstream comics, and self-consciously marketed as such. To grind out an over-literal movie adaptation 25 years later rather misses the point. It crams in as much as possible from the comic, but even in three hours it struggles. By missing out the 'heavy' stuff it'll annoy the fans; by including too much plot and not explaining it properly it'll annoy people who just want to see a movie without any fanboy baggage.

What's most disappointing is the lack of ambition. It regurgitates as much of the dialogue and plot as possible in the time allowed. This just makes it feel like a TV miniseries, like those Stephen King adaptations that take very long novels and film them as obviously as possible while making no effort to recapture the way the originals made their readers feel. If nothing else, this suggests a certain timidity on the part of the director, who has in no sense set his stamp on this project - there is very little here that isn't directly lifted from Moore's writing and Gibbons' art. On the few occasions it does veer away from what Alan Moore wrote it flounders.

It's not completely terrible. It looks good for the most part (the 'visionary director' has obviously just used the comic as a storyboard; it doesn't quite capture the look of the original - it's a bit too dark - but has a decent stab at it). The dialogue is almost all lifted verbatim from the comic, and Alan Moore's pretty good at writing dialogue. The opening credits sequence is genuinely great, a series of witty tableaux which explain how the film's world is different to ours (and is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about - it's a great example of how film could enhance the story. But it's literally the only time the film does something interesting with the comic's ideas).

It's made with enough technical competence to pass muster, although as ever, many of the CGI effects are unconvincing. The 'exploding glass castle on Mars' is particularly poor. On the other hand, Rorschach's ever-changing mask works very well, and a couple of effects sequences (Dr Manhattan's origin, for instance) look as good as you might hope.

None of the actors are names I'm familiar with, which adds to the TV movie feel. They've mostly done a good job finding actors who look like the characters as drawn by Dave Gibbons, although they're all a bit too young. It must be tough on the actors that their facial expressions and body language have to closely mimic comic book art from 25 years ago, but they do fine. Rorschach's voice is terrible, though, a barely comprehensible croak (this matters, as he narrates a lot of the film). And the Richard Nixon impersonator they've got looks absolutely nothing like him.

The superhero costumes aren't so good - they've gone for the generic 'rubber armour' look made popular by Tim Burton's Batman - the heroes in Watchmen are meant to look a bit pathetic, paunchy guys dressed like owls, or middle aged women in Britney-style minidresses. Here they look too much like the thing they're supposedly parodying.

The music veers wildly between dull orchestral stuff and well-known songs, all used much too knowingly to do anything other than annoy. Famous songs are used here like they are in advertising - as a lazy trigger to make us react in certain, predictable ways. Given that many of the songs used are associated with rather better films (Apocalypse Now, Withnail & I, The Graduate etc) this feels especially tawdry.

The whole film feels like the kind of thing a 15-year-old would think of as 'great art' - Mozart's Requiem playing over shots of people walking in slow motion is a rather adolescent attempt at profundity. Of course, 15-year-olds won't be able to see this. It's extremely violent (it feels like we're meant to enjoy the elaborate fight scenes, to cheer on the 'heroes', which really - really really really - misses the point of the original). It's also quite sexually explicit, including a distasteful attempted rape and a *lot* of male full-frontal nudity.

It's three bladder-straining hours long, which certainly doesn't make me feel more well-disposed towards it. What's curious is just how unmemorable it is, how unengaging. The audience I was part of was made up of well-behaved cineastes, but even so, they were curiously unresponsive, rarely laughing or reacting in any way to what they saw.

All in all this is disappointing. It's not quite as bad as I feared, but the high hopes of the first few minutes rapidly dissipated as the film got bogged down in detail. It's difficult to believe it will make that much money - the 18 certificate, excessive running time and lack of stars will work against it - so hopefully it will kill off the over-literal comic book adaptation trend started by Sin City (which was a good film, but they didn't need to try and do every other comic under the sun. What's next? Maus?)

I tried to like it. Unfortunately I just couldn't. It's a failure as an adaptation of the comic, but is far too reliant on it to work as a film in its own right. Pretty it may be; engaging it certainly isn't.

Summary: A poor comic book adaptation