Who Judges the Watchmen? Or Really, Who Doesn't?

Alright! We doing this! Come on, Greatest Graphic Novel of All Time! Bring your Hollywood Blockbuster brother! I ain’t care! It’s on!

So, yeah, I saw Watchmen. I’d read the book several times – and reread it again in the days leading up to the film’s release, which, in hindsight, may not have been the best idea. But it’s clear that those who have read the book will have a pretty different viewing experience from those who are coming in with fresh eyes.

If you’ve never read the comic, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons, I honestly have no idea if you’ll enjoy the film. And I’m not sure that reading my review will be of much help to you. But I’ll try a quickie. The film looks amazing. Production design is awesome, special effects generally great, good fight sequences that aren’t too overdone. Patrick Wilson is particularly great as the nebbish Nite Owl, and Jackie Earle Haley’s intense few scenes out from under Rorschach’s mask are really satisfying. Most of the rest of the acting is good, though there are some weak links, and a few line readings fall flat. The retro soundtrack is pretty killer. And the plot moves so fast you can’t help but get swept up in its velocity; whether you can follow the intricate plotting or not, you’ll never be bored. At best, you’ll come out of the theater wanting to read the comic (and if so, good! Go out and buy a copy, you won’t regret it). At worst, you’ll be entertained for two and a half hours, and will have forgotten about most of it after a week or so.

But if you have read the comic before, or want to know how it translated – we’ve got a lot to talk about! And I am going to talk about a lot, including the ending, so here’s your Spoiler Warning! Come back later if you need to.

More than a few people have called Watchmen “unfilmable”, and while I don’t agree with that in a literal sense (in a perfect world, it would make a great miniseries or even a series of films), it makes sense from a practical standpoint. The Hollywood system being what it is, mass consumer culture and short attention spans being what they are, a fan of the comic couldn’t reasonably expect anything more than an imperfectly enjoyable 3-hours-or-less adaptation. And that’s pretty much what the film is.

A lot had to be taken out, obviously, but most of what’s there is slavishly faithful to the comics, for better or for worse. While most of the memorable images from the book have been recreated verbatim, so has a lot of dialog that sounds like it came from, well, a comic book from 1985. Some of the lines have not aged well. Many of the heroes’ costumes look pretty awful, but that was true in the comic, too (poor Doctor Manhattan went through four “outfits” in the series, and the least offensive, ironically enough, was his birthday suit), and I think that actually works to the benefit of the story, adding “lack of fashion sense” to the litany of flaws these characters have.

The story itself moves at a breakneck pace. It has to: there just isn’t enough time to get through everything the filmmakers want to tell, even after pruning almost half the plot of the book. And although there are a few times where the speed prevents a few character moments from really transcending, by and large I think the writers did a great job distilling everything into as compact a package as possible (especially the new ending, which I’ll get to in a moment). Yes, everyone has a favorite scene or character or theme that was cut, but that’s the nature of the beast. And the filmmakers are at least able to throw in references to the omissions where they could: the excellent and complex production design is full of fanboy nods, from the Gunga Diner blimp to the post-disaster Millennium billboards. Though Bernie the newspaper vendor and Bernie the young reader don’t get a story, we do see two extras obviously meant to be them during the climactic scene of disaster, so it’s not difficult to imagine that their story has been going on, perhaps in the theater next door. Even Laurie’s childhood snowglobe is there, if just for half a second. Snyder and co. earn a lot of goodwill from me just by making the extra effort to at least imply the presence of details that couldn’t be thoroughly examined.

But the film’s emulation is so exacting that the few moments of actual innovation feel out of place. Though most of the heroes in the story (actually called “The Watchmen” several times in the film, though not once in the novel, interestingly enough) are portrayed as sad-sack, out of shape or out of touch, each of them gets one or two shiny new Bad-Ass Fight Scenes, which may annoy the purists but were probably added to appease everyone else. And certain characters, once normal humans, can now punch through concrete and survive multiple-story jumps – also presumably for spectacle. It does kind of go against Moore’s painstaking effort to show these characters as humanly as possible, masks on or off. But if any of this increased bad-assery benefits anyone, it’s the Silk Spectre, who wasn’t given much to do physically in the comic beyond beating up a thug and leading folks across a bridge. I don’t think Moore treated the women in Watchmen very favorably; they’re forever only reacting to the men in their lives, too clearly defined by their need for affection or companionship to be able to do very much. Poor Janey Slater especially reads like a Fainting Nellie out of some old genre sci-fi, so it was good to see her get a moment of proactive payback (whether real or manipulated) in the film.

The biggest change comes at the end of the story, and by and large I think it actually works really well. Ozymandias’s manufactured threat now comes in the form of framing Dr. Manhattan, and though I miss the squid, it’s kind of astonishing how easily this new ending fits into the story, with far less exposition needed than having to detail secret islands and missing artists and psychic bombs. Going into the film knowing that the ending would be different – but not how – I actually grew really excited during the final scenes in Antarctica. Because – unlike most superhero films where the final battle is always won by the just and moral hero – in the world of shades of gray that is Watchmen, I genuinely had no idea what was going to happen. It was almost like reading the book again for the first time. And being able to produce that feeling, even for a veteran reader like myself, has got to be one of the film’s greatest triumphs.

There were only two changes that really bothered me, and the first is admittedly not a huge deal and more of a fanboy rant, so bear with me. The original Watchmen graphic novel is absolutely stuffed with visual symbolism – reflections, mirroring, image transposition, and, especially when Rorshach is involved, symmetry. Everything in the man’s life is symmetrical, from his mask to the locations he visits to the page layout of issue five. The effort Moore and Gibbons took to impress this upon the reader borders on obsession. So I was fascinated to note, upon rereading the book, the panel following Rorschach’s death in Antartica. Essentially exploded by Doctor Manhattan, all that remains is a spatter of blood on the snow. But where you might expect further, morbid symmetry, the remains are instead wild and random. There is no symmetry in Rorschach’s death, and purposefully so. But in producing the film, Snyder or Hayter or someone must have noticed the omission but missed the significance of it, because the film proudly displays a giant Rorschach blood blot in the snow; a perfectly symmetrical image that the camera lingers on so long that it kind of becomes the morbid punchline of the character’s existence. Zach astutely noted that morbid punchlines are exactly what Watchmen is all about, and that’s true, but I still feel it did the character a disservice that was actively avoided in the source material.

The other negative is far more significant, though it actually begins at almost the same time. In the film, Nite Owl witnesses Roshach’s death, and his reaction is the typical melodramatic “Nooooo!” which results in another failed fistfight with Ozymadias. “You haven’t saved humanity”, Nite Owl says, “You’ve twisted it! Perverted it!” And then he and Silk Spectre exit the building, looking down their noses in Moral Judgment at Ozymandias. Oz’s last scene in the film is a lingering shot standing alone and sad in his ruined home, ostensibly contemplating what’s been lost. As Dan and Laurie begin a happy life together, if not a new one (they appear to continue their costumed adventuring, which is a huge misread of the book’s intent), the film seems to be saying that they were in the clear moral right, that the ends did not really justify the means. Though it’s fine for some of the characters to voice such an opinion, the book itself never takes sides. Rorshach, the only one whose life was black and white, is gone, and the others continue to live in varying shades of gray. It’s one of the great and most unique moments of the entire story (especially for a mainstream comic book), and not a difficult one to understand. So it feels strange and false for the film to actually go to the same dark point the book did, only to make a moral apology for it after the fact. By the end of Watchmen the comic, there are no heroes left; our protagonists are either dead or complicit in the deaths of millions. But Watchmen the movie tries to have it both ways, making the tenuous argument that Dan and Laurie will keep Adrian’s secret but, dammit, that won’t keep them from always trying to do the right thing. It seems like the very definition of the dreaded Producer Note, so Snyder and the writers might not be to blame for this. We may never really know. But it’s there, and for me the 11^th hour sermonizing comes very close to undoing everything the story hoped to accomplish.

Was that change (or any of the others made) truly severe enough to justify Moore demanding his credit be removed from the film? I don’t think so. Yes, Moore’s films generally don’t translate well to the screen, whether in spite of best intentions (V for Vendetta) or due to simple Hollywood apathy (League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, or, God, LXG), so I can understand his vulnerability. But Watchmen the film is hardly hackery or mockery. Time and an impartial eye will tell if it can survive on its own merits, but it’s impossible to argue that the film hasn’t been beneficial to the source material in terms of sales. Thanks to excitement for the film, Watchmen the collected graphic novel sold over a million copies in 2008. That's an incredible achievement for any comic today, never mind one that's over 20 years old. Whatever you may think of the film, it’s brought many new readers to an industry starving for numbers; hopefully many will stick around, curious to read other books from the same creators or of a similar mold. Realistically, what more could you ask for?