Finally saw it. Enjoyed myself.
People have issues with various bits and I can understand those issues, if not agree with them all. My primary problem would be in switching up the bodycounts. What the hell is the deal with Laurie twisting some guy’s head off (well, almost) before spinning around and slamming a knife into someone’s neck?
When Dan and Laurie are basically killing an alley full of assholes, it makes the fact that Rorschach kills his bad guys stand out just a little less.
To be fair, they didn’t kill all of the people in the alley.
Just watched the Director’s Cut. The Hollis additions are welcome (although the Knot-tops are truly as awful as mentioned above…wow), but overall I still feel it doesn’t work very well. I maintain that to make a movie out of Watchmen is to miss the point of Watchmen, and it loses something intangible but real when removed from the page and put on the screen. I can’t fault it for much, I just don’t get the same experience in cinematic form, not even an equivalent.
The one fault I will hold against it is the change to the ending. I know this has been gone over again and again, but I simply don’t buy that world peace would be the outcome of Dr. Manhattan turning on world capitals. The world powers would blame the U.S. for fucking up in supervising/controlling/utilizing Manhattan, and would potentially retaliate (what’s left to lose, after all?). The genius of the plan in the comic is that it was a wholly alien (pun intended) threat, requiring humanity to come together as a whole, united agains the unknown. The film’s version is too susceptible to the old Politics As Usual pitfall.
Also, there’s zero reason for Bubastis to exist in the movie, both because she does nothing of interest or value and because the technology used to create her is no longer part of the plot in the film. I was hoping the Director’s Cut would improve some of this for me, but it didn’t. My Watchmen film verdict remains a thumbs down.
So, I watched the Director’s cut twice now. I really enjoyed the theatrical, I’m in love with this one, and so are the people I’ve shown it to who haven’t ever seen or read Watchmen. So much so I wonder why they didn’t do the full three hour cut theatrically.
I’m going to skip buying Ultimate edition I think. Black Freighter was fairly good, on its own, but I can’t see it working intercut into the movie. Same goes for Under the Hood (which was excellent, by the way, and is on the Black Freighter blu-ray, not sure if it’s on the DVD version). I can’t tell if that’d work either, though, worked into the movie. It’s 45 minutes long, for one, a full 1-hour TV documentary. Really gets into the Minutemen though, and adds a lot to the story. But cut into the movie, I think it’d be distracting.
I’d absolutely suggest picking it up for 10-15 separately, though, since no doubt the Ultimate Edition will cost 50 bucks anyway. Or just rent it.
Also, with Ultimate, you’re paying for the awful motion comic, and…I’d just feel bad about that, really.
Expand, amplify, elaborate, please.
Well either option will end up as zero-sum anyways. I thought that was the point.
I’ve warmed a bit more to the changed ending; the problem is the framing and presentation of it, really. There shouldn’t have been any retention of the “humanity will join together to fight this common threat,” but instead a succession of world leader alikes humbled and small, like ashamed children, and more “we cannot fight this threat” with undertones of “we all deserved this.” Added bits scattered through to build up to a media narrative of “Doc Manhattan’s power has only grown since the event that created him,” additional weight on the “…God exists…but no longer only favors America.”
That approach also would have added quite a bit more weight to Nite Owl’s choking “you haven’t saved humanity, you’ve mutilated it!” bit. The goofy Ozy plan in the comics was about tricking and leveraging the better aspects of people, the ability to pull and work together; the goofy movie Ozy plan would have become tricking and leveraging the worse aspects, cowing to authority and good behavior based on untouchable external threat.
It’s pretty straightforward, really, but I’ll break it down a bit by saying that Watchmen is so intensely and intrinsically about comics and the comic book format that to remove it from that medium is to destroy part of it. The framing of numerous scenes using the nine-panel layout and the breaking of that layout in key moments is lost, the color choices are lost, the details you can pick out be re-reading that certain piece of dialogue is lost, and the visual symmetry that Gibbons uses constantly and to great effect is mostly gone.
Snyder certainly gave it his all, but even when he emulates the way the comic presents things, it still doesn’t work. The slow pullouts from the smiley faces on the sidewalk, on Mars, and on the guy’s shirt at the end just come off as visually slow and boring. Part of the key to why comics work is that you can move over the images at varying speeds with your eyes and make it all match up in your head between the panels. In a movie you have no control over how fast the camera pulls back or what have you, and it can simply be dull, and I would say that the Watchmen film is very dull in many places.
I didn’t think the movie was bad either time I watched it, but it certainly doesn’t capture much of what made the comic so excellent. It’s only above-average, but frankly I think that’s about as good as a Watchmen movie could be, which is another reason I find the effort to translate it to film to be a wasted one. I’m glad the film has exposed people to Watchmen (the comic) who might never have read it otherwise, but I can’t consider it anything more than a well-intentioned curiosity.
I finally saw it also, and I thought it was good, but it started to fray by the end, and the ending felt unsatisfying.
Next someone should do Grant Morrison’s Animal Man run as a movie.
Matt, I completely agree with you, and may have said so earlier in this thread. My one line review was, and remains: “It’s a fine movie, but a completely un-necessary one because the conversion to film added nothing interesting.”
Well, it does bring the story to those of us who have no desire to read the comic book of The Watchmen. I mean, I’m sure it’s a fine comic and all, but I’d much rather watch Zack Snyder’s interpretation of it than flip through a bunch of funny pictures.
-Tom
P.S. Okay, so I was probably trolling a little too hard, but the sentiment about Snyder bringing the story to a wider audience remains.
It worked pretty well for me as a film, but Alan Moore is a master of integrating the medium into his stories. You can’t translate that without perhaps abandoning the comic and reimagining it for film. It’s interesting how the medium can impact interpretation. In V for Vendetta, I came out of the film despising what felt like a lot of self aggrandizing masturbation of the film medium and Hollywood because of the tale of the actress*. But it’s true to the comic (once I read it) and works much better because of the difference between the medium and the story told.
Anyway, I want a spin off series for the hot lesbian superhero, Silhouette.
*Another hot lesbian by the way.
Curse You!
I very nearly put a comment in my post that it “added nothing…except opening the story to a wider audience.”
But, I do think that while it brings a nice little cold-war era sci-fi story to the wider audiences, it misses a lot of the essence of what made the story effective. So, it brings a story to a wider audience, but not the same story, because the story actually derived a lot of its power and effectiveness from the comic medium itself. Which is why I think that people like Matt and myself feel it sort of…misses the point.
Basically, Watchmen: The Movie is as good a movie as you could make of Watchmen, and as close a translation of the comic as you could make in film, if you for some reason wanted such a thing. This is meant as both high praise and a condemnation of its essential identity.
But their point about the validity of the driving point of the story only being viable in its original media still stands.
It’s not one I totally agree with, because I think Snyder has found some new ways to integrate comic style storytelling into film, although not enough to make Watchmen really “work” unfortunately.
But it’s not only their point, it’s Alan Moore’s as well.
Man, you guys suck at being comic book nerds. Everyone know Neil Gaiman inked The Watchmen.
Seriously, though, I can’t imagine what you guys are talking about. I only know the movie. Based on what Snyder did, I thought it was a fine story and very well told. Even without some silly thing with a giant squid eating New York at the end.
I’m not sure what driving point you get when you read the comic book, but there were several great driving points in the movie about sacrifice, accountability, deceiving people for a greater good, the distance that comes with power, whether God can love, and so forth. It was a smart, fascinating, and gorgeous movie, even if it supposedly missed Gaiman’s driving point.
-TomIt’s how the story is told. In just the first few pages you see the difference. In the comic, the paneling is a great visual metaphor about the layers of society as the camera rises up from the literal gutters to the apartment and then inter cuts the cops going over the crime scene and to the window with the fight and the Comedian’s fall. It then transitions to Rorchach’s climb up from those same gutters into the building as Rorchach gives his monologue.
That’s the kind of technique that’s lost in the translation to film as scenes are played straight.
Sure. But the point is that there are unique elements of the medium that allow you to tell a story in a Iway than film. As an example I’ve made the point numerous time that Doctor Manhattan’s powers are ones that primarily exist in between the panels of comics. Teleportation, time manipulation, etc. They are all about the things he can do in a panel to panel format.
There’s also the ability to compose the same shot in an entirely different context, the “uncool” nature of comic book heroes (which the fake tits story is an allegory for) and a number of other ways that Moore shows that comics allow you to create a tapestry of elements to build your experience of the book.
I’m not arguing an interesting Watchmen film can’t be made, but there’s an entire level of the story (and I mean story) that the film just can’t have, and it doesn’t.
Well, Andrew, panels are just montage. I figure anything that could be demonstrated panel to panel should be able to be demonstrated using editing. I just think that Moore uses paneling so intricately, that in motion, it might be more confusing or disorienting.
Edit: By the way, is there a thorough deconstruction of the comic online?
Okay, fair enough, Andrew. But I don’t see how it’s any different than any literary work. Or, indeed, anything adapted to film. Seeing a live production of Chicago is going to have a whole different quality from seeing Rob Marshall’s movie*.
It seems to me – contrary to what I think Matt Keil was trying to say – that nothing central to Watchmen was lost in the adaptation to film. Instead, it just had to make some of the same sorts of compromises as any film adaptation, particularly in the way Moore used the medium.
One thing that I totally accept is lost in the film is an assumed familiarity with comic book and superhero motifs. All that stuff is lost on me, and I suspect it’s one reason I never really had the patience to read the whole Watchmen book. So I imagine Snyder can’t really hit on that stuff the way Moore did.
-Tom