Watching Watchmen

You find small moments of genius in the strangest places. In Men in Black, a good movie but not a work of genius, we get the genius line, courtesy of Tommy Lee Jones, "A person is smart, but people are stupid." No sentiment sums up the adaptation of Watchmen better than that.

Take it how you will: either that the adaptation sucked and was made by stupid people or that the adaptation was formed because of the nature of the audience dynamic of the movie-going experience. I think the adaptation was a success. The movie was good. It was exciting, violent, gritty, well-realized, engrossing and dense without being too overbearing. Of course I'm coming from having read the story, so that gave me a good sense of what was transpiring onscreen. I know a lot of people who hadn't read Watchmen before, and they were a little lost at the winding storyline.

A single person watching or reading something can handle a wider range of weirdness than an audience in a theater. For some reason there is a place where an audience will become a complete organism and reject what is happening onscreen. I think the filmmakers were nervous about the original ending in the book, so they re-wrote it so it would play better in front of the collective American audience. They did a great job, because the ending is still the same, it's just different. (I know I'm being vague, but I'm not giving away either ending in detail.)

Watchmen has always been touted as the unfilmable book. That is partly because the script had been tossed around all over the place between companies for about twenty years prior to this release. At the end it seemed that two studios had rights to the story, so one of them got international rights and the other got domestic rights. It's a messed up tangle of lawsuits and copyright BS. Long story short, we have a Watchmen film and it's good. The other reason that Watchmen was considered by some to be unfilmable is because it is a dense tale with lots of characters and side-stories that come together to form a wonderful whole, but would make a 6 hour movie necessary.

There are a couple of big changes, one big blue change, and a few smaller alterations that are curious. The most obvious is that there is a lot more Dr. Manhattan...a lot more shown onscreen in fact. He wears more clothes in the comic than in the movie. I'm not sure why they chose to do it that way, but if you want to see a large blue penis, run out and buy a ticket for Watchmen. Another change is the added violence in the prison, where a thug's arms are cut off with a circular saw instead of just his throat being slit. Not sure why the added change with that one. I like gore as much as the next horror fan, but a scene like that will make some people stay away from the theater. It just wasn't necessary.

** Spoilerishness ahead **Casting was strange. When you cast a film based on a novel, it makes sense that there would be some disparities, but when you cast a comic book movie, don't you know what the characters are going to look like? Some people were way off, and it changed the tone a bit. Take Dan Dreiberg for instance, (Nite Owl 2). In the book he has fallen out of shape. In the movie he doesn't look out of shape at all. That detracts from the humanity that the book has to offer. The original story is all about how human these people are underneath their costumes. The movie makes them all amazing physical specimens, and that is counter intuitive to the book. Also Ozymandias is not how I thought he'd be. He seems like an evil genius bent on world domination, not a good guy who feels hemmed in by the only apparent solution to world peace. In the book, Ozymanidas is defeated by his own intelligence. He does what he feels he has to, but he doesn't want to do it. The ends justify the means though, so he goes through with his plan.

Everyone's favorite character, (even if he's your second favorite, he's still who the movie is about in my opinion), Rorschach, is awesome. There's not much to say about him. The filmmakers spent the most time on Rorschach and every part of his performance, look and voice is perfect. He brings the characters and the film together.

Apart from that, the movie works. You can't have everything from the book in the movie anyway, so there were always going to be some elisions. I think the movie works very well in conjunction with the book. They are both required reading and viewing. If you have seen the film, read the book and still want more, you can buy/rent Tales of the Black Freighter, an animated movie that is direct-to-DVD which is a movie version of the story-within-a-story from the Watchmen graphic novel. You can also buy/rent Watchmen: The Motion Comic. The Motion Comic is about 5 hours long and it is the entire graphic novel, panel by panel, slightly animated, but exactly the same as the graphic novel. It's an interesting experience from what I've heard.