Posted on March 6, 2009 - by sarahsamudre

Watchmen Review: Pick a Character, Any Character

I love midnight showings. I absolutely love them- specifically at the Seattle Cinerama, a movie theater that really shows off what an awesome city Seattle is. It gathers the cream of the cinephile crop and stuffs them together in a lavish 1960’s built theater, with 808 seats and a thirty by ninety foot screen. I am SUCH a movie fan, and as a Cinema Studies major, I recently learned how incredible our local theater is. It’s one of four surviving and thriving Cinerama’s left in the world, (see Wikipedia’s History of Cinerama for more information) and Cinerama is not just a great theater downtown, but an amazing monument to the history of cinema in general. In short, I feel so lucky to have this in my hometown.

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So Watchmen was an iconic film, firmly cementing the “graphic novel movie” as its own distinct genre, separate from the “comic book movie”. Following 300 and Sin City, Watchmen is a stylized movie that feels less like your typical movie, and more like a moving graphic novel, which is of course, what the fans wanted.

So here’s my review:

(Milhouse from The Simpsons episode “Husbands and Knives”)

First off, Watchmen the movie is more violent than Watchmen the graphic novel. Be prepared for skull hacking, arm sawing, guts dripping from the ceiling kind of action. Go into it prepared to either enjoy the gore or look away. Even my husband and my sister’s boyfriend were a little shocked how much screen time Zack Snyder gives horror, even departing from the book a little when it comes to Rorshach’s encounter with the kidnapper, in order to up the gore level of the film. As long as you know it’s coming it’s not that big of a deal, but a warning: this movie is not Spiderman. It’s not the Fantastic Four. It’s not a summer “comic book movie” (and I LOVE comic book movies, btw). It’s a serious, violent movie, and if you haven’t read the novel (which you should!) you need to be prepared to walk into this movie with that in mind.

Watchmen is based (reverently so) off the graphic novel written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons. It is the ultimate graphic novel, having won a Hugo Award and is the only graphic novel to have been featured on Time’s 100 Best Novels. True comic book fans swear by the dystopian graphic novel, citing it as the genesis for the deconstructed superhero trend we see in other movies these days. In the story, which the film holds to perfectly, nuclear war is imminent. It is 1985. America, which enjoyed dominance thanks to superheroes, huge military and Dr. Manhattan, has dominated all it’s wars, but made intractable enemies of the Soviets. However, by the mid-eighties, superheroes have been banned, Richard Nixon is in his third term as President, the public is too scared to elect anyone else. The USSR has not been disbanded and America and the Soviets inch closer and closer to an all-out nuclear Armageddon.

Events are set in motion when a superhero named The Comedian is murdered. His death leads the other superheroes in the film to reevaluate their pasts, the lives of their predecessors, and their futures within society, all while on a hunt for whoever is behind the murder. In the novel we follow Rorshach, the only superhero not to relinquish his mask to the government, as he obsessively tracks down the mysterious mask-killer. In the film, we only sort-of follow him.

Let me just say I love the film stylistically. Dave Gibbons, the illustrator of the graphic novel, worked closely with Zack Snyder and every visual is so perfectly constructed, that fans of the book are going to be able to freeze frame the DVD and drool over the slavish attention to the source work. Snyder’s cinematography is just amazing, and almost every shot in the film sent shivers down my spine. It felt less like a movie, as I said above, and more like peering through the actual pages set into motion.

Narratively, there were some problems. As loyal as the film stays to the book, it does so mostly visually. The framework of the novel is incredibly faithful, but one big piece of the book was lacking in the film: narrative cues to invest in Rorshach’s journey. In the book, you follow Rorshach around as a masked vigilante and as the street bum Walter Kovacs. He is focused on more so than any other character in the novel for a reason: even though he is a questionable, and obviously sociopathic, you cannot HELP cheering for him and get emotionally invested, and as obsessive as he is, in finding out who the killer is- which feeds into the emotional climax of the film.

In the movie, Snyder sacrifices scenes of Rorshach as Walter on the street in favor of 5 minute sex scenes and extended fight sequences. Because of that, some serious elements that would help the average film-goer who HASN’T read the novel, and even those of us who have, feel invested in the film. Snyder gives each character their due, dividing up exposition between every character equally (with the sad exception of Ozymandias, who had almost no exposition). But because he didn’t choose to focus on one character heavily, specifically Rorshach, the film felt detached in a way.

If Snyder does focus on any set of characters to help the audience get involved, it’s Laurie and Dan (Silk Spectre II and Night Owl II). Their blossoming romance is intelligently focused on, since they have the happiest ending, and honestly, the casting of Patrick Wilson as Night Owl was beyond brilliant. He was the best actor of the bunch, although Jackie Earle Haley as Rorshach is also captivating up on screen. But Wilson’s Night Owl was heroic and sympathetic, subtly comedic and most of all, endearing in a very emotionally detached film.

He was my favorite part of the film. Casting was great, and I’m very happy Snyder went with so many unknowns. Nixon was a little difficult to watch onscreen though. One great thing about going to the Cinerama with such an active crowd is that you can really get a feel for what works well with audiences. The makeup on Nixon to create a perfectly aging Nixon was overdone. Even in the most serious moments, giggles erupted from all over the theater whenever Nixon’s mug showed up on screen. It was a little too faithful of a representation. But that’s such a little thing. This is a great movie, with a great message about humans- our need to always have an enemy in order to have a reason to be good, and how we rely on enemies for unification is a timeless message that is as poignant today as it was when More and Gibbons created Watchmen in the 80’s.

And again, being too faithful is the biggest criticism that this film is getting from all the critics. And that’s not such a bad thing. My friend Matt (who dressed up as Walter Kovacs, see my other post for pics) talked about how hard comic book movie directors have it. They’re either torched by the fans for not being faithful enough, or derided by the critics for being too faithful. Yeah, Snyder could have left out the stylized sex and violence to focus more on Rorshach, or cut an important visual in order to give us more character, but it’s not that much less of a movie for it. At some point, you have to give the discussion a rest and say, “Whatever. It’s just a movie and I had a TON of fun seeing it”.

And I did. And so will you. So go watch it.