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We can talk about what exactly made you mad...
I guess I've had enough entertainment from raging geeks whose lives were ruined by The Phantom Menace or Matrix Revolutions that I owe this. So I'll go into detail. But I do acknowledge that Jack Fear's
It wasn't perfect; therefore, it sucked. The movie could not possibly have ever been perfect, because the book is perfect, and the movie is not the book, and therefore cannot be perfect.
is an absolutely valid criticism of everything I have to say.
Okay. Beginning at the beginning, I liked the title sequence just like everyone else. I didn't feel like the movie was a failure until about halfway, in fact. But the opening fight between Veidt and the Comedian exemplified one of my big issues.
There have been a whole bunch of successful superhero movies now, each one to some extent building on the success of the one before and using the same visual vocabulary, the same tropes. Fights are orchestrated one punch at a time, like in kung fu movies. Knives go swish. Property is damaged, the Matrix films firmly establishing this for all the comicbook movies that followed. (I count them as comicbook movies.) Costumes are kept in display cases made of brushed blue steel.
Watchmen, and that opening fight, was done exactly from this playbook. Quite possibly it had to be, because otherwise there's very little time to establish these guys as superheroes. But it lost the downbeat subtlety that was so much of the book. The tone was completely different. And that in turn meant that the cliches of the book, which perhaps were easier to miss when it was all viewed through this despondent filter, were unavoidable. Veidt, the businessman in the suit promising a fantastic new source of energy, was so obviously the bad guy from his first scene. Forget the performance; any businessman promising a new dawn for the world from his glass office is always the bad guy in an action movie. The new source of energy is always derived from boiling children alive or some shit.
The opening couple of chapters were translated pretty much entire because they're all about the superpeople. (I thought we could have done without Rorschach's Pagaliacci speech without the images that accompanied it, though.) After that the plot began moving at breakneck pace because of the elimination of pretty much everyone who wasn't super. This, again, changes the tone; it also eliminates the threat. Without a Greek chorus to dread the approaching holocaust, without all the little visual cues making it clear that this is a society consumed with the apocalypse they're all expecting any day now, then nuclear annihilation is just a Maltese Falcon. It's what our heroes will be averting in the end because that's what heroes do.
Books which take time out to go and do something else, like Jon's chapter on Mars, always suffer in adaptation. Look at the movie of Hannibal; the book could quite happily move to Florence for 150 pages and fill us in on what Doc's been up to. The film had to keep cutting back to Starling in the records lab, reassuring us that yes, it was the same movie, and Julianne Moore will be back as soon as we're done with this Italian action. Calling the narrative momentum of an action film to a halt to expand on the origins of a main character who's barely featured thus far and who requires suspension of disbelief way beyond Batman or Spider-Man was a brave move, but it meant his story was rushed. We found out everything about Dr Manhattan's supercareer but nothing about his personal life, so there wasn't an emotional element to his decision-making. My partner, who kindly accompanied me to the cinema, found the Mars bits baffling. Without the subtlety, without the character moments, they didn't have much reason to exist.
Time was also a problem. In Jon's origin obviously, because recreating his sense of time was either something that couldn't be done in this medium or something there just wasn't space for. But the medium has its own issues with time. I don't know who I'm misquoting - some director or cineaste - who said that films can do days passing and they can do years passing but they have trouble with weeks and months. I felt that here. Laurie seemed to jump from bed with Jon to the sofa with Dan. Rorschach was in prison for all of five minutes. The action was nonstop to squeeze every scene in.
I may as well say at this point that I won't be tipping Malin Akerman for any Oscars, either. Two of the big three emotional moments in the story are hers - finding out who dad was and telling mum she knows - and both passed without a ripple. Laurie's probably the most difficult character in the book, a woman who's inextricably connected to all this superstuff but also reserved from it, the one who's always known it's just dressing up and playing. I didn't get that from her performance. And thigh-high latex boots are, I accept, standard wear for the superheroine however wrong that is. But when you're fucking wearing nothing else then you've crossed the Rubicon to the land of fetish porn.
How long did that sex scene have to go on, incidentally? Long enough to hammer home the point that these ain't your daddy's superheroes, kid? And then a bit longer? I'd never seen the flamethrower as a very obvious ejaculatory metaphor before. Paging through the book, I saw it wasn't; it happens, at least from my interpretation of the storytelling, early on. But that could be changed and subtlety eliminated. So it was.
Laurie's Mars revelation, which is the big turning point in the book, didn't seem to have any impact in the film. Likewise her conversation with her mum was just a postscript. The other key emotional moment for me is the sequence which opens #12; we've been in this city, on this intersection, so long doing so many different scenes in so many nine-panel grids filled with dialogue and captions and people, and now we're there and it's silent, still, unframed, the shoals of double-meanings there to be picked up later but an afterthought to the deaths. The apocalyse has come and it's not even ours, it's not even human. The price of Veidt's actions is apparent well before we find out that he has bought a peace. And that's gone, replaced with a bloodless dead New York that's overfamiliar from all the other action movies that kill New York for laughs.
Without that emotional punch, without feeling every death as Veidt does, it's just an action film with a weird ending. I do wonder what audiences made of that - the bad guy gets away with it, and maybe he isn't the bad guy - but I didn't make much of it. By that point I just wanted to leave.
Zack Snyder hasn't raped my childhood. I'll still enjoy the book and I don't really know if the film could've been better without being that mini-series everyone used to talk about. But it did hurt me, painful though that is to admit, to see something so carefully and painstakingly constructed miss the mark so thoroughly. Because of such little differences in style and in tone.
To steal a quote from Terry Gilliam that's linked to from CBR this week:
"[Watchmen is] really dense, and when you try and reduce it down to a couple of hours it's just comic book heroes again and it doesn't have real meaning." |
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