When I first heard that a Watchmen movie was in the works, I was about as pissed off as the next Watchmen fan. How could anyone presume to even almost think about attempting to mess with the best graphic novel ever? I was not looking forward to its release.
Then it was 11:59 PM on July 17th, and I was a giddy little girl because I was sitting in the Jordan's Furniture IMAX theater in Reading, MA, waiting for The Dark Knight to begin. I had never been more excited for a movie in my life, so perhaps I was in a more forgiving mood than usual. Not surprisingly, there was a nerd sitting next to me. He had glasses, and a ponytail, and a strange-looking girlfriend. Actually they looked a lot alike. Anyway, he looked like a fairly well-versed nerd, so when he started talking about Watchmen, I wasn't surprised. He knew that the trailer for the upcoming movie was going to precede The Dark Knight, and he had definitely read the book. I expressed to him my grave displeasure at the very idea of making a movie adaptation of Watchmen, and to my surprise he did not share my sentiments. Then we watched the trailer. Check it out before you continue reading.Admittedly, I got excited when I saw it. Maybe it was because of The Dark Knight or the nerd next to me, but I went home and made a cute little facebook posted item saying that I was originally angry that they were making the movie, but that when I saw this trailer I got excited for it. It's a really epic trailer, after all. There's fire and explosions and hovercraft and fighting. And a blue guy. "FROM THE VISIONARY DIRECTOR OF '300'," "THE MOST CELEBRATED GRAPHIC NOVEL OF ALL TIME." Just epic. (Though I'm not so sure I would use the word 'visionary' to describe 300.) One of my friends said it was one of the best trailers he had ever seen.
There are many reasons I could give as to why I was excited upon seeing this trailer, but none of them would be a passable excuse. Please forgive me, other fans. Please forgive me, readers of my facebook posted item. Please forgive me, God/Alan Moore. I should have been sad. So sad.
The Watchmen movie cannot and will not be a satisfyingly faithful adaptation.
I read Entertainment Weekly's article about Watchmen, which is definitely not the source to end all sources, but I learned some general things - things that aren't secrets, just general things that the studio wouldn't mind people knowing - that made me angrier and angrier as I went along. Rather than bore you with excerpts, I'll give you the run-down on what got me so pissed off in sarcastic summary form.
Basically what we're getting is Zach Snyder's this-is-the-best-we-could-do-with-the-studio-breathing-down-our-necks version of Watchmen. Snyder talks about how stressed out he is because of how badly he wants to do the book justice. Apparently he read it, and liked it. Go figure. Anyway, he ends up mentioning that he's working with the studio to create a movie that will not just cater to the diehard Watchmen fans, but will also hold up as a good popcorn flick that lots of people will pay to see. Apparently he has a 3 hour cut right now - which, in my opinion, would probably leave a lot out - and apparently the studio is making him cut it down to a more 'realistic' length of 2 hours and 25 minutes.
Bullshit. This is bullshit. There is no way that 2 hours and 25 minutes could include everything in the story. It's just not enough time. The graphic novel is nearly 200 pages long, and the general rule is that 1 page = 1 minute, though it may translate to slightly less screen time because of larger panels that take up more space, as well as Comedian pin and Doomsday clock pages. And wait a minute, if you have a 3 hour version right now, what the fuck are you cutting out? Are you seriously going to sit there and tell me that there is a single plotline, a single page, a single panel of Watchmen whose inclusion is not fearfully urgent? 3 hours would not have been enough time in the first place, and now I'm hearing that they filmed some things and then just decided not to include them? Like they have the fucking right to make that judgment?
Terry Gilliam originally wanted to adapt Watchmen into a mini-series. That could have worked. If you legitimately were to take 6-8 hour-long episodes to tell this story, and tell it well, then it might work. And if Terry Gilliam directed it, then it actually may have been really good. What the fuck did Zach Snyder think was going to happen with a major studio like Warner Bros. producing this? All they want is money. Maximum profits. They know the fans are going to pay for their tickets anyway, if only to be able to bitch about how horrible it was, so they don't see the benefit of trying to make it a really good adaptation. As long as they can show fire and explosions and blue guys and do it within an average (shitty) moviegoer's threshold of how long they can sit still, they just don't give a shit. After all, one of the worst things that could happen for them would be a drove of average Joe's and Jane's going to see it opening weekend and then telling their friends that it was too long, or worse, that you have to be a fan to enjoy it.
Side note: I heard someone say both of those things about The Dark Knight, and I hated them with the anger of 20 lions.
The other, perhaps more pressing issue is one that fans (including myself) have been trumpeting from the minute they heard that this movie was going to be made: Watchmen uses the medium of serial/novelized comic books to its absolute fullest potential, and there are elements of its genius which could never be captured in a film. Part of Watchmen's whole deal is that it comments upon itself. It asks questions about heroism, vigilantism, and justice, and it deconstructs comic books as such. I doubt that any filmmaker could possibly do a more-than-mediocre job of capturing those elements. Perhaps it's just not meant to be a movie.
Apart from what I have already discussed, which are general criticisms, I have a list of specific things that I think the movie version of Watchmen will bastardize, or else exclude completely:
(Oh, and spoiler alert. Don't read this if you haven't read the book yet. And read the book.)
1) Too much CGI/Stylization - I did not originally have a problem with how the movie actually looked, but my longtime film-savvy friend and fellow fan of Alan Moore's masterpiece, Sam Osborn, mentioned to me that he thought there was too much CGI. I will give him credit for making that point, but I will take credit for my own feelings on why the CGI and stylization are a problem. I think it destroys the gritty, this-is-the-real-world feeling of the comic. Watchmen takes place in a slightly historically different version of our world, and I thought the artwork in the comic reflected the reality what that would look like. Realism. Lots of films go for realism. It's strange to think that it would be appropriate for a 'super hero movie', but I really think that's what's right for Watchmen. What is it really like for a regular person to dress up in a costume and beat up criminals?
Look at some of the fight scenes in the trailer. Obviously Doc Manhattan has to look kinda crazy, but part of Watchmen's charm is that apart from him, all of its masked vigilantes are just regular people kicking ass. They don't have superpowers, and while they are certainly more agile and dextrous than you or I, they can't do anything very spectacular. The shots of non-Doc 'heroes' I see in the trailer seem to parade them around as cool-looking, skull-cracking "super heroes" in the most traditional sense of the term. That's not what Watchmen was about. The real question for both the 'heroes' and the people they protect is whether they are anything more than freaks dressing up and prowling around at night. I want to see what it would really look like for an out-of-practice Night Owl II to beat up a bunch of guys in an ally with Silk Spectre, not a showy slow-motion bullshit kick that doesn't capture the truth of the comic.
2) Rorschach's Journal - Not only did this make use of the comic book genre really well by enlisting documents to help tell the story, but it was also the big punch at the end. Rorschach wins. Because that news guy finds his journal, Rorschach's story gets told, and that's the big payoff. He dies taking a stand, making the only choice that was within him to make, having no idea that anyone would ever come to know his story or realize the corruption which he uncovered, and it's totally badass. Moore presents the journal to us in scraps of paper over images of Rorschach's investigations and late-night prowlings, and it works perfectly for Rorschach because we can buy that he would write those things. He doesn't talk very much, but we get to see his thoughts anyway. That's part of why he, more than anyone, is the hero of the story, or at least the guy we're pulling for ('hero' can be a problematic term). The only way they could really do this in a movie would be with voiceover, which I think takes something away from the intimacy of the journal, and probably kills the bang at the end. They're going to have to show Rorschach writing in his journal (which I don't think we see very much, if at all, in the comic) just to establish its significance by the time the end rolls around. I also think it takes away from Rorschach's character to have him talk to us in a voiceover. He doesn't say very much, and it's part of who he is. I fear he will be changed severely if he becomes a Travis-Bickle-like character.
3) Visual Continuity - One of the coolest things about Watchmen was how well-integrated the story seemed because nearly every scene transition was visually continuous. A shot of the moon from Mars where Doc Manhattan and Silk Spectre are hanging out becomes a shot of the street light over the news stand where the kid is reading pirate comics, for instance. It felt like every single panel was absolutely essential, and it was a fantastic tool for weaving a story out of characters and occurrences that may not have anything directly to do with one another, or may not be aware of one another's existence. Watchmen is a mosaic. A seamlessly integrated scrapbook. It's not that I think visual continuity is impossible within a film - it definitely isn't - but I think we will lose that amazing feeling that comes from reading an intricately woven, multi-media collection of journal entries, pictures, flashbacks, thoughts, words, old newspapers, excerpts from books, etc. Cutting/dissolving/wiping from one scene to the next will never replace that feeling of looking from one panel to the next and feeling like this story was destined to fit together in this particular way. Maybe there's just no equivalent to that feeling within the medium of film.
4) Documents - My last point rather logically reminds me of one thing I think the film will really fail to capture. Excerpts from the Hooded Justice's memoirs, newspaper articles, letters - these are some of the elements that really give Watchmen depth. Watchmen deals with timelines effortlessly, allowing events from the past to shed light upon the future, and using the timely revelation of those events in an intrigue-heightening way. Other than what Sally Jupiter and Hollis Mason divulge verbally, these documents are what allow that oh-so-gritty backstory to unfold, as well as the central mystery of the story. They also shed light on what Rorschach is doing in trying to solve the murder of The Comedian. He's researching and digging through information. He's knocking on doors and asking questions. And that's what we do as the reader when we make our way through these sections. Logistically speaking, how is a movie going to render these sequences? Let the audience read them? Some of the chapter excerpts are 10-15 pages long. I don't see how they could possibly include these in the film, and I don't see how they could possibly succeed at faithfully adapting Watchmen without them.
5) The Pirate Comics - These were, for me, some of the coolest sections in Watchmen. It was so intelligently reflexive because it asked the question of what comic books would be like in a world where there really are masked 'heroes'. Not only did it contribute wonderfully to the mounting apocalyptic vibes in the story as it went along, but it provided what I thought was the smartest self-examining question of the book: what is it that you, the reader, are reading? This is a comic book, but how would that be different in a different world? What do comic books say about us and the ever-changing world in which we live in? Some heavy shit. Plus, the pirate comics were really fucking cool. I would read those or things like them if they came out. I hear they are attempting to do something in homage to the pirate comics with old film reels in the movie, as if to comment on the medium of film. That could work, and it sounds like a good idea, but it had better be as brilliant as the most brilliant part of the most brilliant graphic novel ever. Good luck with that, Zach.
Those are my criticisms, and the reasons for my sadness. I give Zach Snyder some credit, because the vibes I get from reading his interview and press for the movie suggest that the rights were optioned, and that there was going to be a Watchmen movie no matter what. Since Zach is a fan, he's probably doing the best he can. Maybe that's all we can ask for as fans. Maybe, in a sad and backward way, the non-creation of a movie is asking too much in this case. Or maybe we deserve to have our baby left alone.
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