Watchmen (Zack Snider, 2009): USA, UK, Canada

Reviewed by Richard Feilden.  Viewed at AMC 30, Orange

watchmen In 1986 a comic book was issued that couldn’t be called a comic.  It changed the way that the entire industry was viewed, both from outside and within.  The man who wrote it was Alan Moore and it was called Watchmen.   Almost twenty years later, and after more battles, rewrites and talent changes than any film should suffer, the graphic novel has been made into a film and today it hits the big screen.  But who is Moore, and why is everyone so damn interested in his little story?

For those of you who are under the impression that graphic novels are for children, that they are just oversized comics, extended versions of the funny pages, I’ll try to give you some perspective.  Moore was responsible for classics such as The Ballad of Halo Jones, published in UK comic 2000AD, The Killing Joke (a Batman tale which inspired Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan and was given to Heath Ledger as reference point) The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (made into a derisible film by Hollywood) and V for Vendetta (made into a barely passable film by Hollywood).  He shuns celebrity, has denounced the film adaptations of his work and has appeared, as himself, in The Simposons.  He is *that* important.  If he were a director, Moore could be considered to be on a par with Scorsese and Watchmen his Taxi Driver and his Raging Bull combined.  It is still regarded as one of the greatest graphic novels ever written, if not the greatest.  It is listed in Entertainment Weekly’s top 50 novels of the last 25 years and within the last year appeared on a similar Time magazine list, the only graphic novel to do so. With its interwoven stories, fragmented timeline, multiple perspectives and a darkness which makes last year’s comic box office smash look like Little Orphan Annie, it was also declared impossible to film.  So, has Zack Snyder managed the impossible?  Has the director of 300 managed to create a great film and, perhaps more importantly, has he managed to do Moore’s magnum opus justice?  In the first instance I’ll go with a resounding ‘sort of’ but sadly, in the case of the latter, no.  So, hang up your cape, take off your mask, pull off your spandex jumpsuit and I’ll explain why.

Watchmen takes place in a world where masked heroes are a part of people’s lives.  Not fantastic heroes like Superman and Spiderman, just extraordinary people who decided to stand up and make a difference in the world.  Then, through an accident, a true super-hero was born.  Jonathan Osterman died and was reborn as Dr Manhattan, a being who could manipulate the structure of reality; a god, walking amongst the people.  And America loved these vigilantes, right up until it didn’t.  They were rejected, cast out by the society they had sworn to protect. The Comedian and Dr Manhattan began working for the government.  Ozymandias, a genius, unmasked and became a humanitarian businessman.  Uncompromising, unforgiving, unrelenting Rorschach refused to bow his head and battled on, hunted by the police and the underworld alike.  The rest simply hung up their tights and vanished.  But, years later, The Comedian is murdered and Rorschach is convinced that someone is out for vengeance and tries to convince the others ex-heroes that they are in mortal danger.

A simple start to a complex story.  To say any more would reveal too much to those unfamiliar with the source.  But the complexity of Moore’s work runs far deeper than the plot threads.  Each of the characters is complex, nuanced and developed.  Each is subject to human failings and none of them are cookie-cutter good or bad guys.  And it is here that the film fails to live up to Moore’s vision – he has recreated the appearance, but lost the soul.  This is best demonstrated with The Comedian and Rorschach.  The former, Snyder has decided, is a Bad Man.  Now, this isn’t entirely unfair – with a couple of exceptions everything he does in the film he does in the novel and it is all pretty grim.  But the film removes any of the seeds of doubt that Moore planted regarding his actions and his motivations.  He is just a Bad Man.  Rorschach on the other hand is a Good Guy in Snider’s opinion.  He is our anti-hero, Watchmen’s version of the X-Men’s Wolverine.  Snider has smoothed off his paranoid schizophrenic, psychotic edges.  Sure, his methods are a bit rough, but they are always aimed at the right person.  Compare that to the comic book where Rorschach thinks nothing of working his way through a dozen bars, breaking limbs and beating people in his search for someone who knows something.  Sure, the characters in the film call him a sociopath, but we are shown nothing of Moore’s unwashed, unkempt killer of killers whose purity is birthed from his insanity.  The question of which is his ‘real face’ (the mask or the man beneath – you thought that was an original idea at the end of Batman Begins?) is reversed and the characters most interesting facets removed.  These two are just two examples, but they are symptomatic of the film’s problems.  It is beautiful on the surface, but dig down you find nothing beneath. The sad irony is that Snider has turned Watchmen into the one thing that it wasn’t – a comic.   And then there is the ending…

Snyder has said in the past that he wanted to change the ending so that people who knew the book would have a surprise in store.  That’s a little like saying ‘I’m going to stage Romeo and Juliet, but for those who’ve read the original, we’re going to add a bit of a twist!’  That twist better be pretty damn good if you’re going to mess with a classic.  Unfortunately the changes in Watchmen (excluding those which are there in an attempt to make the unfilmable filmable) seem to have been made for the hell of it.  This ending is less fantastical than the original, but it also has a huge flaw in its logic.  It is hard to say more without spoiling things, but if you see the film, ask yourself whether pursuing the original use for the devices used at the end of the film couldn’t have had the same outcome with a lot less mess.

On the plus side, the cast is pretty damn good.  The decision to avoid the ‘pretty boy’ stars whose names have been attached during the project’s obscenely long gestation period and instead choose faces with a bit of life ground into them was a good one.  The film is also beautiful.  The involvement of the novel’s original artist Dave Gibbons is writ large across the film, although it does come across at times as being Blade Runner-light.  Snyder also hasn’t backed away from the violence or the nudity in the scenes that he retained from the original work.  And although the film is very long, coming in at a little under three hours), I was never bored.  I just wanted it to be more.  More Moore, I suppose.

So, I can’t recommend the film wholeheartedly.  If you’ve never seen the comic it might be a little hard to follow and, far worse, it might prejudice you against ever reading the original.  If you have read the graphic novel, you can’t go in expecting this to be the same and you will be, in some respects, disappointed.  Snyder has knocked one straight down the middle, missing both camps pretty much equally.  The only person this film is ideally suited for is Snyder himself.  So, this film is far better than last year’s Indian Jones, but not up there with the less flawed Dark Knight.  My advice?  By all means go and see the film, but you’re better off reading, not watching, the Watchmen.

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Published:
03.06.09 / 8pm
Category:
Films