The Trouble With Watchmen

I don't think Watchmen is a very good movie. 

I say this not because I'm a hater, like this guy. I first read Watchmen, the comic book, as it was published in 12 installments in 1986. A few years later, I bought the collected version so I wouldn't wear out the originals. Then DC published an oversized hardback version, allegedly with new color separations or something; I bought that too. I've probably read it cover-to-cover 15 or 20 times. 

And that's likely part of the problem. Watchmen is not a comic book adaptation like Spider-Man or The Dark Knight. It's much more a translation in the vein of Robert Rodriguez's Sin City, or 300, which got Zack Snyder the Watchmen gig. Like those movies, it repeats much of the source dialogue and, more importantly, the same progression of images that form the narrative backbone of the film. Good as a story might be, it starts to wear thin on the 21st viewing. 

As for the rest of the trouble--it isn't the acting. Malin Ackerman should stick to comedies, but otherwise everyone is good. Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Billy Crudup, and Jackie Earle Haley as, respectively, The Comedian, Dr. Manhattan, and Rorschach, are very good. There are a few terrible scenes, like the, um, encounter in the Owlship after the building fire, and a lot of the gore is distractingly gratuitous. Snyder re-stages the left-to-right, horizontally framed, speed-up / slow-down fight scene from 300 during the prison break for no particular reason other than it was cool the first time. But the atmosphere of Cold War dread is there and the characterization is totally faithful, so we get Moore's explorations--now somewhat dated, but a revelation 23 years ago--of traditional superhero archetypes set in a version of the real world. So the masked urban avenger is an unbalanced right-wing fanatic; the man who suddenly gains God-like powers is promptly co-opted by the military, until he starts to become unmoored from his--and our--humanity. People who beat up other people while wearing leather costumes have a penchant for fetishization, egomania and/or cruelty. It's good stuff, yet it doesn't save the film. 

Nor does the problem lie in what didn't make it into the movie. Rather, Watchmen suffers from the opposite issue. Sin City and 300, both originally by Frank Miller, made sense to translate because both are straightforward dramas told in an inherently cinematic visual style. Watchmen, by contrast, stretches a thin plot over nearly 400 dense and multi-layered pages, much of which is devoted to flashbacks, side stories, background material, and snippets of a pirate-themed comic-book-within-the-comic-book that serves as a thematic counterpoint. Snyder tried to include as much as of this as possible, apparently on the theory that the first duty of a director is to feed the passions of obsessive Internet message board-dwelling comics super-fans. He seems convinced that, as a recent Wired profile put it, that "Even slight changes to Watchmen, changes that will enhance its appeal to the masses, seem certain to alienate the very people who loved it in the first place." 

If such people exist--and I suspect there aren't nearly as many of them as Snyder believes-- they're insane. I loved it in the first place and found myself fidgeting throughout most of the dragging, disjointed 2 hours and 45 minute running time. The single major deviation from the original comic is the ending, and it's arguably an improvement. 

But the real problem with Watchmen the movie isn't the story or the running time or Malin Ackerman or Zach Snyder's unwillingness to risk the wrath of geek fandom for the sake of narrative drive. It's that Watchmen the comic book really is, as its author Alan Moore has said, "unfilmable." Or, to be more precise, the aspects of Watchmen that make it a great comic book are unfilmable, because they're inseparable from the medium itself. Said Moore in 2003:

The stuff that makes Watchmen radical is not really the stuff that's in the plot. It's not the dark treatments of the super-heroes...the most radical thing about Watchmen was the storytelling, the ideas behind it, things that only emerged in the telling...We had a ton of intellectual ideas, but it was just around about issue #3 when we suddenly noticed that something interesting was happening with the storyline. It was just borne out by the fact that Dave [Gibbons, the artist], was capable of putting in all of this incidental detail and that I was capable of writing narratives that have more than one strand to them...The story seemed to demand a specific way in telling it, a specific way of seeing the world. It had to be seen all at once rather than in a strictly linear way...All these tiny, little moments, coincidences, linkages--that all boiled up into this sort of complex tapestry or piece of machinery. It turned out very much like a piece of watchwork. It was like--well, there was a kind of Swiss watch feel to the structure of it, as though it was sort of jeweled flywheels and everything all completely in place in their settings...there are some sequences that you've got two or three separate narratives all going on in the same sequence and occasionally linking up with each other in ambiguous ways or non-ambiguous ways. We were trying out a whole new repertoire of things...

It's not a coincidence that the best part of Watchmen the movie is the one that hews most closely to the actual experience of reading the book--the sequence where Dr. Manhattan tells the story of his life, shown in brief fragments, some only a few seconds long, jumbled up out of sequence, with Philip Glass' beautiful score to Koyaanisquatsi (Hopi for "life out of balance") playing in the background. Watchmen the comic is an exceptionally complex symphony of words and images that can't be untangled any more than one could pull apart and re-arrange in another medium a Glass composition and expect not to lose the greatness of it in translation.