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“Come writers and critics who prophesize with your pen, and keep your eyes wide — the chance won’t come again.” As in the original comic, two Dylan songs bookend Zack Snyder’s ambitious, admirable, and flawed adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, the critically-acclaimed tale of the rise and fall of Cold War superheroes (which I’ve now seen twice.) The first, “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” comes direct from Dylan himself, and scores the impressive, easter egg-filled opening credit montage that is one of the highlights of the film. Here, Snyder has taken the world of Watchmen, fused it with some quality Bob, and made something transporting and uniquely filmic. (Fanboys and fangirls, note the original Nite Owl saving the Waynes. By the way, Dylan, US History, and superheroes — yes, this sequence is easy for me to love.)
On the other hand, over the end credits, we get a a truly terrible version of “Desolation Row” by My Chemical Romance, whom I’m not particularly familar with but who, on the basis of this cover, would seem to be derivative, talentless hacks. Now, I’m not averse to Dylan played fast and loud. To hear it done right, check out Rage Against the Machine excavating the angry heart of “Maggie’s Farm”, or the White Stripes’ live takes on “Isis” or “Lovesick”, or, of course, Jimi’s “All Along the Watchtower” (also in the movie, right where it is in the book.) But MCR have completely missed both the power and the poetry of “Desolation Row,” and just play it fast, sloppy, and nu-punk like the faux-Green Day cover band (which makes them faux-faux-Pistols) they seem to be.
If I’ve spent a lot of time here talking about these two Dylan songs at the onset instead of Watchmen, it’s because they mirror the dichotomy present in the film. In certain sequences like the opening credits, Snyder manages to catch lightning in a bottle and really bring elements of the graphic novel to life, albeit in truncated form. There are moments in the movie, usually involving Rorschach or Dr. Manhattan, where I was struck by the sheer sensation of seeing the book leap off the page. (Short plot summary for the uninitiated: In an alternate-America 1985, on the eve of what appears to be nuclear Armageddon, one of a dwindling band of ex-superheroes is murdered in (and then out of) his New York City apartment. Rorschach, a borderline-psychotic right-wing vigilante who dresses like Philip Marlowe and rasps like Christian Bale, wants to know why. It’s a dangerous question.) The altered ending notwithstanding, it’s somewhat amazing to me that we got a Watchmen movie this close to the source material, and, by all accounts, Snyder had to fight tooth and nail with the studio suits for every cynical, resolutely uncommercial facet of it.
But, at other times, Snyder’s bad habits sadly leak through and undeniably taint the end product, most notably in the gratuitous violence present here. In interviews, Snyder can sometimes come off as a geekier version of the white fratboys in Harold and Kumar. (“Dude, that’s so extreme!“) And that better-harder-faster mentality results in some serious whiffs along the way in Watchmen, when Snyder ratchets up the gore and bone-breaking at the expense of the story. However close the movie gets to gorgeously capturing Manhattan’s reveries on Mars (although I wish the Doc’s living in an endless now was better emphasized.), it basically drops the ball completely on Rorschach’s “origin” (which I quoted in my pre-movie post), mainly because Snyder sidesteps the existential horror of Kovacs’ story to amp up the violence of it. In the comic, Kovacs has pierced the veil of the sheltering sky and discovered all is blackness. In the movie, he just seems to be on a torture-porn killing spree. Same goes for a scene involving Dan (Nite-Owl) and Laurie (Silk Spectre) getting jumped by the Top Knots gang in a dark alley. It’s bone-crushingly brutal when it doesn’t need to be, actually has these two kiling people Rorschach-style, and seriously detracts from the more interesting scene it’s intercut with, that of Dr. Manhattan inadvertently exposing his disinterest in humanity in an interview with Ted Koppel.
Now, as with loud, angry Dylan covers, I’m not averse to gore or over-the-top violence when it serves the narrative. To take an example, there’s a scene involving human entrails stuck to the ceiling (don’t you want to see this now?) which is also overly Snyderish, but I think works in context. (The voiceover is making Hollis Mason’s point that, with the arrival of Dr. Manhattan (i.e. the advent of atomic weaponry), the superhero game has forever changed — it’s no longer gallantly nabbing bankrobbers and pursesnatchers with a few “Wham! Pow!” four-color blows, but something much darker and more lethal.) But Snyder’s Watchmen is unnecessarily violent at the wrong times (see also Big Figure’s henchmen), and then inexplicably goes soft at the moments when gore is virtually required. I’m referring here to the consequences of the Big Plan, which feel strangely weightless in the movie, partly because (in this cut) no characters we’ve been following are anywhere close to Ground Zero and partly because, unlike every other action sequence in the movie, it’s all very PG-13 all of a sudden. (Contrast this with the opening of Chapter 12 in the comic, which is basically several pages of horrific imagery, unlike anything we’ve yet seen in the story.) Now, I’m willing to bet dollars-to-donuts that 9/11-squeamish studio types were unyielding about the soft-pedaling of the climax here (which, by the way, is elegant in its own way even without the squid.) Still, it’s hard to escape the feeling that, while Moore and Gibbons used violence in their tale to comment on its awfulness (and the awfulness of The Plan), Snyder often just uses it because it’s like, totally extreme.
Don’t get me wrong: I have no idea how it plays to people unfamiliar with the comic, but for the rest of us, there’s a lot to like here. Even notwithstanding some godawful, cringe-inducing age and Nixon make-up (I guess everyone was busy on Benjamin Button) and one of the worst movie sex scenes in recent memory (I’m offended on behalf of Leonard Cohen), Watchmen is a better film than some of the critical pans make it out to be. Jackie Earle Haley’s Rorschach is especially dead-on, and is rightfully drawing most of the acting kudos right now — This should be a career-defining role for him. But Billy Crudup’s Dr. Manhattan and, surprisingly, Patrick Wilson’s Nite-Owl are also pretty close to note-perfect. (So too is Matt Frewer’s Moloch, who absolutely nails his big moment — “You know that kind of cancer that you get better from eventually? Well, that ain’t the kind of cancer I got.”) And Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Comedian and Matthew Goode’s Ozymandias grow on you, even if Ozy seems a bit charisma-starved compared to his comic counterpart. (As for Malin Ackerman’s Silk Spectre…uh, well, let’s just say she’s in it too.)
So, in short, I liked the movie, would recommend it to readers and non-readers alike, and thought even more of it the second time around when I was less burdened by expectations. (Yes, it’s wayyyy better than 300, and I’m looking forward to the 30-minute longer cut, which is rumored to spend more time with Rorschach’s shrink and the two Bernards.) Still, it’s hard to shake the nagging sense that the things I really liked about Watchmen would’ve made it into any reasonably faithful movie version, and that a different director than Snyder might’ve brought about a better, richer film in the end.
Still, as my old boss was wont to say: We don’t need people who get the ball to the twenty-yard line; we need people who can bring it over the goal line. And, for better or worse, Snyder got this ball over the goal line where Terry Gilliam, Darren Aronofsky, and Paul Greengrass couldn’t. Let’s give credit where it’s due: After twenty years of trying, they actually made a Watchmen movie, and it ended up being surprisingly close to the source material and not at all an embarrassment or cash grab. I presume the Rorschach types probably loathe this end result, compromised as it is in certain places. But for the rest of us, I’d say this new Utopia, however flawed at times, is close enough for government work.
“It would be insulting to the genre and its readers, as well as fundamentally untrue, to say that Moore reinvented comics. Moore loved comics, in all their overheated melodrama and violence and passion and romance, and simply wanted them to fulfill their potential. He wanted comics to be better written (and more beautifully drawn; he has consistently brought out the best in his artists), to be more alive to the outside world and to other forms of culture, to be less imprisoned by the emotional ghetto of pre-adolescence.” On the precipice of Watchmen, Salon‘s Andrew O’Hehir sings the praises of Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing.
As for Watchmen itself, the early reviews for Zack Snyder’s adaptation are coming in pretty poor, unfortunately. Still, I remain cautiously optimistic that, with expectations suitably lowered, there’ll be some things to like about Snyder’s version. For one, a lot of the worst reviews of the film wallow in exactly the type of insecure, i’m-too-cultured-for-funny-books douchebaggery I just noted in my review of A Christmas Tale. (See, for example, Anthony Lane’s spoilerish New Yorker review, whose good points — for example, that Snyder’s film revels in the same fetishizing of power that Moore was trying to subvert — are buried beneath his puerile sneering at both the author and fanboys in general. (“‘Watchmen,’ like ‘V for Vendetta,’ harbors ambitions of political satire, and, to be fair, it should meet the needs of any leering nineteen-year-old who believes that America is ruled by the military-industrial complex, and whose deepest fear — deeper even than that of meeting a woman who requests intelligent conversation — is that the Warren Commission may have been right all along.“) Even for him and The New Yorker, which famously whined of The Matrix that we should all be reading Cheever instead, this review is a new low.
For another, and as I’ve said here many times before, Snyder isn’t my preferred choice of director for this project either. But, heck, even a stopped watch is right twice a day. So, here’s hoping there’s something salvageable from this long-awaited adaptation…I’ll know when the clock strikes midnight tomorrow.
“Rorschach’s Journal, October 13, 1985, 8:30pm. Meeting with Dreiberg left bad taste in mouth. The flabby failure sits whimpering in his basement. Why are so few of us left active, healthy, and without personality disorders? The first Nite-Owl runs an auto-repair shop. The first Silk Spectre is dying in a California rest resort. Dollar Bill got his cape stuck in a revolving door where he got gunned down. Silhouette murdered, a victim of her own indecent lifestyle. Moth Man’s in an asylum in Maine. Only two names remain on my list. Both share private quarters at Rockefeller Military Research Center. I shall go to them. I shall go tell the indestructible man that someone plans to murder him.”
With Midnight only two weeks away, there’re a quite a few more Watchmen clips popping up online (including a semi-entertaining riff on Martha Quinn-era MTV and one cringe-worthy clip of the prison melee that’s basically a show reel of Zack Snyder’s bad habits.) Still, this extended look at Rorschach’s sleuthing gives me hope that Jackie Earle Haley, at least, knocked it out of the park. (“All those liberals and intellectuals and smooth-talkers, and all of sudden nobody can think of anything to say.“)The clock’s still ticking…
It is twenty-two years ago, and I am reading the final issue of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen. It is three weeks from now, and I am watching the midnight show of Zack Snyder’s film of the graphic novel. It is ten minutes ago, and I am watching these five exclusive clips from the movie and thinking, “Hrm. These don’t actually seem very good…” (True, clips taken out of context can always seem strange. Still, Veidt muttering his lines and all that Snyderian sloooo-moooo — Silk Spectre at the fire, the Comedian off of Archie — gives me pause.)
In the third installment of Watchmen viral fun, we get to venture into the Gunga Diner and try out an 8-bit, Veidt-manufactured Minutemen arcade game. (It’s basically Double Dragon or Kung-Fu Master, except with Hollis Mason, Sally Jupiter, and Moloch.) Some nice touches in here — note the poster for Rolf Mueller‘s circus show. And the date of the game — 1977, a bit early for this sort of sidescroller — might suggest the accelerating influence of Dr. Manhattan…
“I think I just have a natural operatic aesthetic. I can’t help it. People have said to me, when they talk about the graphic novel, about how it’s gritty and real, and I always go, ‘Yeah, you realize also though that a lot of that book takes place on Mars.'” By way of a friend, Watchmen director Zack Snyder talks with the NYT about the recent lawsuit, the challenges of adaptation, The Dark Knight, Alan Moore, transient cephalopods, and other matters. (I’d really skip this one if you haven’t read the book and want to go in unspoiled.) “In the end, all I would hope is that geek culture, this movie gives geek culture a little bit of cred.“
Also, for the record, I could honestly care less about the lack-of-squid issue that’s riled up the purists. The squid was a means to an end (and a riff on the wildy convoluted Dr. Evil-ish plots and goofy villains like Starro one tends to find in Golden Age comics), not the actual point of the graphic novel. In fact, I’d say the absent Scouring of the Shire from PJ’s LotR trilogy is a much more glaring omission, in terms of changing the actual meaning of the story…and those turned out ok, didn’t they?