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• Series: Watchmen

Flying over Watchmen

NO FLY ZONE: Flying Over Watchmen
© Mania

Greetings Maniacs, and welcome to this week’s installment of The No-Fly Zone. This is the column where we explore the many and varied corners of comicdom, leaving behind the shared superhero universes of Marvel, DC, WildStorm, and the like. Mania has Comicscape for that, and they do a damn fine job of it. Here, we talk about everything from obscure black-and-white independents to the offbeat imprints of Marvel and DC, like Vertigo, MAX, and Icon. And hell, we cover superheroes sometimes, too—but only the really interesting ones like Kick Ass and the grandfather of all postmodern cape books, Watchmen. Oh yes, Maniacs, it’s time for the movie review.

After over 20 years in development hell, the cinematic adaptation of Watchmen finally reached theaters last Friday. Anyone who thought they would never read that sentence stands in good company. The years of changed directors, botched scripts, fighting studios, and fan speculation finally came to an end when it opened. Helmed by director Zack Snyder with a script by David Hayter and Alex Tse, the film remains relatively faithful to the seminal graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. That serves as both a strength and a weakness for an interesting film often mired by a handful of glaring flaws. We’re not going to summarize Watchmen in this week’s No-Fly Zone, nor are we going to dance lightly over spoilers. See the film before you read this.

Watchmen looks perfect. Much like Snyder’s last film, 300, this one turns the flash-and-style dials up to 11, always looking as sleek as advertisements in a fashion magazine. That at once makes it pleasing to the eye and appropriate for the story’s otherworldly setting. Snyder took a gamble and, unlike so many other superhero films, kept the costumes largely in tact—from the ridiculous spandex of the original Minutemen to the more modern outfits favored by the principle characters. Both those and the many other visuals lifted right out of the comic show a reverence to the source material that proves almost overwhelming. The graphic novel commented upon superheroes and the comics medium. The film effectively does the same thing, for better or worse, making it almost redundant. In an effort to both honor the graphic novel and appeal to the nitpickers and basement-dwellers among us, the film carbon-copies much of the graphic novel. In the best instances, it reaches dizzying heights of brilliance because it apes Moore’s work so well. In lesser instances, it felt like nothing more than rereading the graphic novel. Most of us have already done that. Granted, one could do worse than reread Watchmen, but it makes one wonder what necessitated the film in the first place. In that regard, Watchmen walks a tightrope. If the film deviates too much, fanboys practically riot and bitch for years on blogs and message boards. If it changes nothing, then it becomes redundant. The best comic adaptations find a sweet spot that exudes reverence, but feel more inspired that imitative. No one can rightfully articulate that feeling until it happens on-screen. See the first two X-Men films for good examples, but try to explain it on paper. Bryan Singer and David Hayter got it, but they didn’t try to reproduce it down to the minutest detail.

Brilliant is brilliant, however, so we won’t deduct points for reverence. Read that sentence again, Maniacs. Snyder has already publicly recounted some of the ridiculous changes proposed by the studios: alter the setting to post-September-11^th America, make it PG-13, have Nite Owl crash Archie into Adrian Veidt to save the world, and eliminate so many of the story’s compelling subplots and character moments—bloody rubbish, all. With that, Snyder deserves credit for fighting for a Watchmen film that studios would have changed in a heartbeat. The murky moral character of the story and its protagonist remains in tact. The bad ending is still there, though without the manufactured vaginal squid alien. But still, many people die—in fact, more than in the comic. What could’ve been X-Men with Moore and Gibbons’s characters comes with the same bleak, uncompromising sensibilities. Everyone tries to act like a hero and do the right thing, with terrible consequences sometimes resulting. To stop nuclear annihilation, millions have to die through Veidt’s actions. To stop Rorschach from telling the world, Dr. Manhattan has to kill him—

one of the story’s most morally compelling characters, who happens to be a right-wing nut-job for his certitude. Much like the graphic novel, and for better or worse, Watchmen comes out swinging and never backs down. We here at The No-Fly Zone would rather muse on the ramifications of the film’s attention to detail than rage over its total disregard for the graphic novel. However, that very attention brings some moments to life that worked well in the comic and fail to do as much on-screen. The image of a giant Dr. Manhattan crashing through Veidt’s Antarctic headquarters looks fine on paper—superhero comic, after all. On screen, it looks awkward and unintentionally funny. In fact, a handful of unintentionally funny and awkward moments break the film’s spell—regularly enough, in fact, to downgrade Watchmen from a great film to a very good one. Some of the performances feel painfully awkward and cold. Richard Wisden’s Richard Nixon looks ridiculously unbelievable under a bunch of old-age makeup, and his performance comes off like a Saturday Night Live parody of the former president. Matthew Goode as Adrian Veidt initially acts more callous than clueless, as he does in the graphic novel. In the comic, Ozymandias slowly transitions from a supporting character—one distant and unbelieving of Rorschach’s “mask killer” theory—to the real villain of the piece (if Watchmen even has a villain). From the start of the film, his callousness shows through and he appears more aloof than good-natured. Most of the other criticisms about the performances stem from critics and bloggers eager to blast the film—either because they believe Watchmen remains un-filmable (and no cinematic adaptation will suffice) or because they hate Zack Snyder.

The film changes a fair number of things from the comic. The most obvious stands as the omission of the news vendor and the boy reading Tales of the Black Freighter at his side. In the comic, their interactions with the many passers-by serve as a kind of barometer of the street-level reaction to the impending nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. The second-most obvious should spring to mind for most of you. The film neglects the murder of Hollis Mason—the original Nite Owl—and relegates him to a single appearance. Granted, the eventual director’s cut on DVD—both of them—will restore many of these lost subplots. Tales of the Black Freighter—the aforementioned comic-within-the-comic—will be released on DVD soon, and incorporated into the film in a late incarnation. But right now, one has to look at the work at hand and not future incarnations. And yes, the squid is gone. In its place, Adrian Veidt creates a number of devices that duplicate Dr. Manhattan’s power that, when detonated, implicate the demigod in the murder of millions. Instead of uniting in response to a random inter-dimensional attack, the world’s nations unite against Dr. Manhattan. Initially that doesn’t seem fair, but it’s not supposed to. It stands in keeping with the graphic novel’s question about sacrifices in the name of goodness. In the comic and the film, Veidt sacrifices many lives to save even more. In the film, Dr. Manhattan sacrifices his place on Earth to save even more lives than that.

Many critics and fans have decried Snyder’s increased focus on violence in the film. Truly, the director takes the graphic violence from the comic and elevates it quite a bit. Many of the fights emphasize bone-breaking and bloodshed far more than Moore and Gibbons’s work ever did. Given his track record established with Dawn of the Dead and 300, Zack Snyder clearly loves violence and gore. The film provides those criticizing its violence with plenty of fodder. The alley fight with Dan Dreiberg, Laurie Jupiter, and the top-knot gang spends a lot more time focusing on the visceral aspects than did the comic, as does the heroes’ liberation of Rorschach from prison. Dr. Manhattan bloodily disintegrates many more people than he did in the comic. Snyder seems to have imbued his very human heroes—excepting Dr. Manhattan—with superhuman fighting abilities. For all of his awkwardness and sexual disfunction, Dreiberg fights like a black-belt martial artist. It looks great, but it seems hard to believe. Watchmen the comic wasn’t about kicking ass. For all its reverence, the film’s violence makes it come off as pandering and a bit too marketable. It seems like Snyder got all of the graphic novel’s subplots and its dark ending in exchange for putting extra fight scenes because, you know, we fans are all a bit too stupid to enjoy a superhero film without extra blood spilt and bones broken. After all, we have to sell those action figures and that video game.

Thus, Watchmen stands as a flawed masterpiece. Zack Snyder has still retained many of his shortcomings as a director. He favors spotless visuals over performance with a fetishistic emphasis on bloodshed—one that has few ends other than to thrill-and-chill. But, he often reverently copies a masterpiece and shows remarkable and laudable judgment in bringing Moore and Gibbons’s graphic novel to life. That might make him a better steward than a filmmaker, but the work still stands. In fact, it often copies so much of the comic that it almost feels like too much of a good thing. But that’s a small sacrifice in light of the atrocity that could have been, given the history of studio demands. You should, by all means, see Watchmen. Already, many have loved it and a few have hated it. The work gives overwhelming justification for the former, but enough justification to the latter to make their arguments worth a listen. It isn’t a perfect film, and it may not be the best film that could’ve been made from the material. Regardless, it stands as a remarkably good one produced by someone that clearly loves the graphic novel. Given Hollywood’s history of mishandling these things, we should, at the very least, be thankful that it’s as good as it is. But, watch the Watchmen and decide for yourself.

You are now exiting The No-Fly Zone.