- Writers:
- David Hayter and Alex Tse, based on Alan Moore (uncredited) and Dave Gibbons's comic book series.
- Director:
- Zack Snyder.
- Cast:
- Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode, Carla Gugino, Jackie Earle Haley.
Silhouette celebrates Japan's surrender the old fashioned way.
Zack Snyder’s feature film debut, Dawn of the Dead (2004), had a kinetic, visually exciting opening sequence, but the rest of the film was fairly pointless. His second film, 300, was all flash and no substance, and, frankly, I found it a bit boring. And now, he’s tasked with bringing the Tristram Shandy of comic books, Alan Moore’s Watchmen (1986-7), to the silver screen. So, a comic book by a wizard, adapted by Solid Snake, and directed by a man who made his name with a zombie film remake. If that isn’t the definition of the post-modern condition, I don’t know what is; the creators are mash-up of pop-culture mythology.
The first thing I wrote in my notebook while watching Watchmen (pun intended) was, “I don’t remember the comic being this violent.” And, indeed, if there’s one thing film does better than comics, it’s loud slow-motion violence, and Snyder knows it — surround-sound bone crunches never sounded this good. But other than this, and the ending, the film is surprisingly faithful to the original. The key events are all there, only with added fight scenes. This faithfulness is a strength if you’re trying to please the fan-base, but it’s also a weakness: the problem with comic-book adaptations is that comic-book narratives have a fundamentally different structure to film narratives. Watchmen more so than most — it really is Shandyesque, constantly breaking from its A story for snatches of back story in the forms of flashbacks or fictional documents. That’s a hard thing to translate to the screen, at least if you’re spending millions of dollars on the film and want to have chance to make them back. It’s necessarily a truncated version of the comics and because it’s so nervously faithful to its source material it can’t add anything to it. Honestly, it feels a bit superfluous.
NKOTB announce their reunion tour. Fans remain concerned about Jordan Knight's eerie blue glow.
What I’ve always liked about the Watchmen comic books is that there really are no heroes: The Comedian is a war criminal, Rorschach is a sociopath, Veidt is a Knight Templar, Manhattan is barely human (and becoming less so by the minute), and the rest of the capes are largely ineffectual. The reason Rorschach became a fan favourite is that he’s uncompromising, but he’s also deeply, profoundly fucked up. Watchmen‘s claim to importance rests on its willingness to take a long, hard look at what exactly it is that makes a person put on a mask, and what it finds ain’t pretty. I like that there isn’t, really, anyone to identify with; there is no decent place to stand in a massacre, as Leonard Cohen sang. The film does this fairly successfully, too, but the above-mentioned action aspects works against it somewhat; there’s a superficiality to the violence that undercuts the story.
Still, I enjoyed Watchmen. Yes, Snyder gets caught up in the action and it probably would’ve been smarter to take a few more liberties with the story, but it’s a very good looking film (the art direction is fantastic), it’s fun as an action spectacle, and the strict adherence to the source material means the brutal clear-sightedness of the comic books remains mostly intact.
