Spoiler Alert! If you haven’t seen the film, I probably give away some stuff, and even if I don’t I’ll likely colour your impressions. If you haven’t read the comic, I’m not going to take responsibility.
Turning Watchmen into a film was always going to be a project fraught with peril. You’ve got source material that’s near-universally admired. You’ve got an intricate multi-level plot that isn’t going to fit into a three-hour film. You’ve got a story whose tone is drenched with Cold War anxiety and paranoia, to tell to a multiplex audience who will mostly be too young to have any visceral reaction to images of ICBMs, Vietnam and the Doomsday Clock. And you’ve got a story that’s not just about superheroes, but deeply references the history of American superhero comics. And you’ve got an author who considered it unfilmable, with good reason and the concurrence of the last accomplished director who tried to make it. Whatever you do, you’re going to have to compromise something, and Watchmen‘s flaws as a film come from not compromising enough.
It’s very strong on respecting the source material. All the characters are present, and their differing moral attitudes are intact. All the little details are there. The special effects are impressive. Shots are matched closely to frames of the comic. For a fan, it’s immensely enjoyable.
However, a 12-issue comic is not the same thing as a three-hour film. The film keeps the episodic structure, and the tension doesn’t build effectively because of it. The collected graphic novel gets around this by clearly marking the beginning and end of each chapter, but this isn’t done in the film, so it’s not entirely clear why the pace keeps changing. I’d like to have seen the Doomsday Clock image used as it is in the collected edition: something we come back to at the end of the chapter to indicate both that we’ve reached the end of an episode and that it forms part of a bigger story arc.
This structural problem is exacerbated by harsh editing within practically every scene. Given the time constraints of a feature-length film, it’s understandable that the editor needed to sacrifice pacing for plot, but the result is that every moment is fraught with significance, and there’s no time for the viewer to absorb and reflect on what’s happening. This is especially a problem at the climax of the story, where the comic slows down to dwell on the aftermath of the explosion with a series of massive full-page panels, but the film keeps moving. Ozymandias’s exultation is also diminished, and the babble of confused TV reactions from around the world are reduced to a single image of Richard Nixon reading a speech simultaneously on every screen.
To be fair, I have this problem with many films, and it could be I just like a slower build. I’m hoping a lot of these moments will be brought back in the extended DVD version.
There are a few other, more minor, problems, so I might as well get them out of the way.
The level of violence is, I think, ramped up too high at too many points. It’s not that I’m particularly squeamish, but there are some moments in Watchmen that need to be shockingly graphic, and they lose their impact if there’s no contrast with the moments that work without showing snapping bones and bloody stumps. As my brother pointed out, in some cases it also detracts from from the characters. It’s one thing to feel unsettled at how much Laurie enjoys fighting off the muggers, another to show her actually killing one with his own knife. I had always read the sequence in the comic as being violent but non-lethal.
This occurs in the sound effects as well as the visuals: they didn’t need to torture that many foley vegetables that loudly.
Adrian Veidt is presented as too dark, right down to the colours of his costume. He needs to seem like a self-obsessed but harmless and well-meaning celebrity when you first meet him, but in the film he’s too obviously sign-posted as a villain from the beginning.
Richard Nixon’s nose is too big. It works in the comic because people are used to seeing Nixon caricatured that way in cartoons. It doesn’t work in the film because it’s not a cartoon.
Finally on my list of grumbles, the music was intrusive and poorly-chosen. Again, I think this was mostly a problem of trying to stick too literally to the comic. Each issue ends with a quotation, and most of them are from popular music. Therefore, we should use that music in the film, right? The problem is that if you use the actual music, it feels like a music video: the music becomes the foreground and the imagery the background.
Where the music was newly selected for the film, it didn’t fit. Sounds of Silence is a beautiful song, but it’s about alienation from society, not the kind of conflicted personal grief experienced by the mourners at Blake’s funeral. Koyaanisqatsi is my all-time favourite film, but its distinctive trancelike Philip Glass music doesn’t work when slapped on top of Jon’s Martian scenes. Ride of the Valkyries in association with Vietnam is a much-parodied cliché, and can’t be done straight. And Hallelujah is a bitter song about the end of a love affair: it doesn’t make sense over a sex scene from a new romance. Besides which, even Jeff Buckley’s transcendent version has been done to death in film and television, so there’s no excuse for using one of Leonard Cohen’s worst manglings of his own song.
Perhaps the budget didn’t stretch to it, but I’d like to have heard original songs done in an eighties style. And to have them mixed way back as incidental music.
With all these issues, though, when the film does step away from the comic, it does so sure-footedly, and makes an immense improvement. In the comic I always found the details of Ozymandias’s plot to save the world somewhat disappointing. A fake alien invasion? Really? That people believe could happen again because Ozymandias genetically-engineered a giant psychic brain to make them believe it? Despite there being no hint of anyone in the world having psychic powers anywhere else in the story? I can appreciate that Alan Moore was writing in instalments with a pressing deadline, but I didn’t feel it was his finest moment.
Ozymandias’s plot in the film is a vast improvement. It uses elements already well-established in the story instead of throwing in tentacled horrors and telepathic powers at the last minute, and it forces the hands of the other characters more completely. There’s really no way any of them, including (especially) Jon can thwart him, and the threat he unites the world against is one we know the world fears even more than nuclear annihilation. It ties together the whole story from beginning to end without hand-waving. Nice.
So… we have an excellent, but flawed, comic made into a good, but flawed, film. The flaws of the film occur when it tries to emulate the comic’s finest aspects too slavishly, and the finest aspect of the film occurs when it fixes the comic’s worst flaw. Comics people have been arguing for decades that a comic is not just a film on paper, but it’s equally true that a film is not just a comic that moves. They’re different media, and they dictate different techniques of story-telling.
