Weeks ago in this very blog, my east coast cohort Eric Kohn offered a discouraging report on the first fifteen minutes of Watchmen, a film spun from the groundbreaking comic by writer Alan Moore and artists Dave Gibbons and John Higgins. As you may be aware, the film opens in wide release today. The film preserves the comic’s story of an alternate 1985, in which President Nixon has cracked down on the costumed heroes who once protected America, and in which a plot appears to be in motion to assassinate the mostly-retired heroes.

Eric’s chief concerns revolved around what he felt might be a too-faithful approach to the subject material by director Zack Snyder (”the visionary director of 300″, as we are constantly being reminded). The question of whether or not a film could be made that took in Watchmen’s intricate plot, complex characters, and novelistic structure has hovered over the comic for twenty years, with Terry Gilliam declaring the comic unfilmable. Though as a longtime comic fan who believes Watchmen is, in fact, one of the great works of the form, I tried to keep an open mind when I went to a midnight screening of the film.

Sadly, Eric’s fears were well-founded, and borne out by the rest of the film. The problem with the film isn’t that there’s not enough of the comic in it, but that there’s not enough of the film. Snyder has slavishly captured many of the film’s iconic images, most of Moore’s notable lines of dialogue. But faithfully rendered images and scenes do not a movie make, and in the film they don’t hang together organically: characters seem to enter a dark alley for a fight scene or arbitrarily decide to split for Mars motivated solely by the fact that, well, that’s what happened in the comic. The CGI employed makes the images move, but they don’t breathe: the shot of an airship rising from the water is pretty, but it doesn’t take the breath away. (Snyder’s heavy-handed music choices don’t help matters, either.)

A handful of the actors employed for the film do what they can within certain scenes: Patrick Wilson brings humanity to Dan Dreiberg (aka Nite Owl), a former hero left impotent (in various ways) in the face of a coming apocalypse; Malin Ackerman, as Laurie Juspeczyk/Silk Spectre, is a woman too strong and too passionate to stay sidelined for long (there’s real joy in her action scenes); and best of all is the very intense Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach, the sole active vigilante whose singleminded devotion to justice goes hand-in-hand with outright sociopathy. Much of the feeling of humanity that comes from the film can be credited to these three, who often seem to have been working a quality scheme behind Snyder’s back.

But a film like Watchmen, based as it is on a work so beloved by so many people, is impossible to evaluate. When a poetic scene brings tears to our eyes, is it simply because it reminds us of how the original material made us feel? Is Snyder damned whether he makes a slavishly faithful adaptation or a more cinematic, less reverent one? I’d be curious to know what someone who hasn’t read the novel makes of the movie. Do comment either below or on the Forum discussion once you’ve seen the film and let us know what you think.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 6th, 2009 at 6:22 am and is filed under David, Reviews, Bloggers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.