The Only Watchmen Review You Need To Read

 

To perfectly encapsulate what is wrong with the movie version of "Watchmen", I turn no further than the song playing over the film's end credits–a cover version of Bob Dylan's "Desolation Row" by My Chemical Romance. The song takes a work of simple, beguiling meaning and poise and layers on hisitronic vocals (layered with–what? three other people singing in the chorus?), jangly, blasted pianos, furious, 'epic' guitars, and more and more levels of sonic meaninglessness than I can count. It results in a loud, colorful, splashy miasma of bone-jangling FEELING. What that feeling is, I can't quite tell. Anger? The titular desolation? Confusion?

Similarly, I don't know what the movie was trying to impart to us, the audience. Certainly to the comic book geeks who have read and loved Watchmen the comic book, they were trying to impart a sense of loyalty; a winking, slavishly referential obsession with the minute details and memorable panels from the pages of the book. But what about the remaining 90% of the rest of humanity who just want to be entertained (and possibly edified) by a movie? What are they left with up on the screen? Sadly, I've read the book at least four times and love it dearly–I can clearly see why it is considered one of the (if not THE) pinnacles of the comic book medium. Its usage of the comic pages itself (most evident in issue #5's self-referential 'Fearful Symmetry', in which the panels on one page mirrored the panels on the next page) to impart more meaning and heft than mere pictures on paper, its brilliant structure, its inclusion of an added comic story and other text to underline and support the meaning of the main story, its twisty, thorough deconstruction of the very meaning of superheroism itself which calls upon 40+ years of knowledge, reference, and love for the comic book medium all add up (amongst other aspects) to a fantastic, resonating, heady work of genius.

Unfortunately, what seems to have been lost in translation is a lot of the overall meaning, the PURPOSE of Watchmen itself. To me, Watchmen is a meditation on the inescapability of the human condition (which–I'll be fair–IS raised as an issue in the movie) and our propensity for war, violence, lust, greed, annihalation, etc., and what can be done to escape or address that by those who would be our protectors. What can a superhero–who is, essentially, a regular person in a costume–really do to save the world? And if you DID have powers grand enough and great enough to actually affect the world-would you even want to? I've got a sneaking suspicion, deep in its DNA, beneath the glitz and the gauze and the glamour, the movie understands that this is the point of the story. This is what we should care about, this is what Alan Moore was going for (and nailed) in his book all along.

But they seem to have been caught up in the trappings of adaptation and couldn't free themselves enough to make a compelling movie. I was constantly reminded of how much reverence they had for the source material, at how cleverly they integrated background elements, at how they used the same font for the newspapers that the comic did, but what I was missing were the elements that go into making a good MOVIE.

A movie should sweep you up in the story of a group of characters that you can identify with and care for. It should compel you to keep watching, to care, to be involved. And it should do this through the careful crafting and guidance of emotions elicited by how the characters act, what they're saying, and what they're going through. With Zack Snyder's Watchmen, we are thrown headlong into a verbose, overly complex situation that reeks of desperation–the opening, with a faux-McLaughlin Group setup featuring actors doing their damnedest to play real-life people like Pat Buchanan ("Isn't that clever? That's supposed to be Pat Buchanan, get it? See how much we know about the world?", I hear the filmmakers whispering in my ear), screams IMPORTANT EVENTS ARE HAPPENING to us, but it doesn't allow us to feel them. Shouldn't the audience feel like the world they're watching is swept up in paranoia and fear and hopelessness? Shouldn't we be afraid for the future of the people onscreen? Instead, right off the bat, we're given a showy, lazy display of Adaptative Malaise–they're getting the details right, they're saying lots of the same words as the comic, we're in the Comedian's apartment just like we should be, that Doomsday clock looks like the one in the book, etc.–but as soon as the haggard old man on the couch utters his first line of dialogue, delivered with all of the effectiveness of a guy who doesn't quite understand the source material but wants to get his lines right, as soon as we see the Doomsday Clock and its just THERE, a corny, cheesy idea that doesn't come across as meaninful beyond its own existence–we are thrown back into the real world, watching an actor play a part poorly, getting into a brutal fight that is more stage-y and false than it should be–too fancy for its own good–and spouting off more dialogue that no one in the real world would say and, even if they would, in a way no one would ever say them UNLESS THEY'RE ACTING.

"Oh, but it's a comic book world, it's supposed to be fake", I can hear people saying, or "But that's what's said in the comic", even. To which I say: I don't care. Once you decide to make a movie, with real, living people, you're choosing to engage the audience in a real, functioning world, with real, relatable people in it. No matter what world you're in–Middle Earth, Tattooine, 1930's gangster-era Chicago, or alternate-1985 Nixon-presidency Watchmen America–people are people. People act, speak, and feel the same no matter what. When you let your actors rely on flat line readings and one-dimensional interpretations, as Jeffery Dean Morgan does throughout each and every one of his scenes, you are falsifying a very, very basic rule of engagement and participation in 'fantasy' movies. You are declaring that what you're seeing isn't real, couldn't possibly be real, and therefore, you shouldn't care. You should just sit back and watch. So the movie answers the clever tagline from the book and the movie that references the Roman satirist Juvenal–"Who Watches The Watchmen?" in the very first moments. YOU, the audience, are watching the Watchmen. But that's all you're doing. Watching.

You aren't engaged. You don't care. You aren't there, with them. The images are passing in front of you, and you're processing it on an intellectual–and, in the fight scenes, VISCERAL and admittedly enjoyable–level, but that's all. And this is where Watchmen fails.

I can't help but think if the performances were a little more controlled, if as much care and attention were given to the tone, pace, and emotional intention of every scene as was lavished on the minutae of the source material, we would have a truly great movie on our hands. Instead we have a superficially faithful adaptation that attempts to nail the details while completely overlooking the essential, impactful, broad strokes.

Case in point: the strongest portions of the movie deal with Rorschach, the tragic, crazed masked crimefighter who investigates what we're told is the main investigation of the movie–the killing of the Comedian, and the motive behind the murder. We are TOLD there is an investigation, and that Rorschach has a 'masked killer theory', but we are never a part of that. We never feel that there is an investigation or a mystery going on, we are just presented with scene after scene of characters engaging themselves in faithful recreations of scenes from the book–plenty of sound and fury, signifying nothing. But Jackie Earle Haley brings an undeniable fierceness to his Rorschach, a spot-on, pitch-perfect growl and surprising physical presence that draws us in the way no one else in the movie does. Even with a mask on, we know how he feels, we get a sense of the character's history, of his motivations and obsessions. We are, finally, ENGAGED by him, because we can understand him as a person, not a cypher, not a two-dimensional–dare I say it?–comic book character. He is a person–one who wears a mask and costume, granted–but a person nonetheless, and when his rage-fueled unmasking is laid bare before us, we feel it with him. We don't want him to be caught, we don't want the cops to win, we don't want the mask to come off. We are connecting to him the way we should be.

This continues as we follow Rorschach into his impromptu prison sentence and see the man beneath the mask is quite a bit scarier than the mask itself. Paraphrasing what he maniacally growls to the prisoners hungry for his blood ("You all think I'm locked in here with you. You're wrong. You're all locked in here with ME."–one of the greatest lines from the comic), what is scary and upsetting about his character isn't that he puts on a mask to fight crime, it's that he needs to in order to control the man beneath it–what he believes, what he feels, what he can't abide in the world around him. What does that say about the world?

Just about every scene with Rorschach is what you would hope for, and I found myself wondering where the credit for that lies. After some reflection, I think the majority of that credit goes of course originally to Alan Moore, who created the character and scenarios the character finds himself in, and the rest goes to Jackie Earle Haley, who understands and imparts that character in ways I wouldn't have believed possible. Since even actors in the same scene with Haley aren't capable of making themselves into breathing, existing PEOPLE, I'm left to conclude that the actors in the film were not DIRECTED. They were told 'here are your lines, they are from the comic book, read them'. And that was that. Haley goes beyond what everyone else in the film seems capable of–he crafted a true performance, created a person we care about and feel for, and threw into glaring daylight the inequities of the rest of the performances, and, sadly, the film itself.

A glaring omission from the comic is Rorshach's origin. I have a feeling Snyder felt it was the origin of his inkblot mask and only that, but I believe it was the lynchpin of the story's message. Walter Kovacs became Rorschach not because he found an 'experimental material' that cleverly reflected his own black-and-white worldview and the messy, shifting complexities of the Watchmen world itself; he became Rorschach because he heard about a brutal murder of an innocent young woman, which hundreds of people watched and listened to, but did nothing to prevent. He saw the depths of human neglect; the ugly, twisted lack of humanity that can exist in everyone, and railed against it. He became crazed with the need to right those wrongs, to fight against humanity's worst instincts. This scene is not in the movie. What scene IS in the movie? The scene that occurs later in Rorschach's career when he stumbles upon the aftermath of a six year old girl's brutal murder and dismemberment. That incident is what pushed him over the edge and made him REMAIN Rorschach, but it is not what MADE Rorschach. As it's presented in the movie, it's a sensationalistic, lurid, fearsome accounting of what can push someone over the edge, but it is not the scene that should have been included. I believe Snyder threw it in there out of some dim understanding of its meaning, and the fact that it would be seen as 'brutal' and 'hardcore', not out of the necessity of telling the story and understanding the character as wholly as possible.

Because it's Rorschach's initial origin–hearing of the murder and subsequent failure of fellow human beings to do anything about it–that throws the ultimate plan to save the world by destroying part of it into light, that emphasizes and shows it for what it is, the end point of seeing mankind's ugly nature and working to change it for good. Rorschach is the pathetic, well-meaning, but horribly flawed flipside to Ozymandias's glowing, supercharged, infinitely more complex (and horrifyingly successful) plan to save the world. Removing this from the movie hollows out the core of the book's complexity. What we're left with is a movie-style James Bond uber-supervillain plot, not the morally twisted, difficult-to-resolve-emotionally character that Alan Moore crafted so carefully.

Yet the movie can be enjoyable–again, superficially. There's lots of beautiful shots and viscerally exciting fight scenes (and even these are an affront to the intended simplicity of the comic–compound fractures spurting blood at the screen are pure, dunder-headed indulgences that should be left to far more simplistic stories like '300'), and mayhem and excitement, sure. And on that level I can see people walking away with a sense of satisfaction. Since it's impossible for me to remove the memories of the comic from the reality of the movie, I can't tell how much of the original story's impact–its revelations and by-the-throat moments–comes across to the uninitiated and therefore add to the overall enjoyment of the movie as a whole.

Watchmen the movie captures the look and re-creates the scenes and much of the dialogue from the book. What it doesn't capture is much more fundamental to the success of a movie in and of itself: a reason to care.

The fanboys will be satiated, for the most part, because yes, it is apparently loyal to the book. But it is not nearly as loyal to moviegoers who want something more than conflicted-because-they-tell-us-they-are characters and stage-y, been-there-done-that, kung-fu-in-rubber-suits fight scenes. It could have been worse, I suppose, but not by much. It's a shame that one of the greatest, most complex storylines ever to grace the comics page is only paid lip service in its only filmed adaptation. The book deserved better. We deserved better. And, note to My Chemical Romance: Bob Dylan deserved better.