Who Watches The Watchmen

Like millions (though not quite as many as hoped), I saw Watchmen over the weekend. I'm still not sure if I liked it. There were plenty of good things about it, but the sum of its parts are greater than the whole. It looks cool, and it isn't boring (an achievement in a film close to three hours) but it should be moving, and rarely is.

The original graphc novel was dark, and much of the narrative harsh. The too-faithful adaptation ends up being so dark it's generally joyless. Also, the novel was originally a serial, built up out of separate, stand-alone chapters--it could take its time telling the story through a framework of connected characters. This doesn't work as well in a movie, which needs to be more unified.

Nevertheless, the characters are, for the most part, well drawn. We get to know The Comedian, Rorschach, Doctor Manhattan, Ozymandias, Nite Owl II and Silk Spectre II. Except for Ozy (who was weaker in the comic as well), most of them register. But I wish the movie had gone deeper, as hard as that is with so many leads.

After a prologue, the film starts with interesting (near-) tableaux showing the alternate history of the Watchmen world. One thing I like about the comic and the movie is the use of real names from our world. When you create fictional stand-in characters for real ones, it always seems extra-fake.

The movie cuts a bit (could have cut a lot more, if you ask me--I see no reason to have almost any rerence to the Minutemen era), but stays quite faithful to the original. It also keeps the story in its original setting. I usually don't like updating a story, but the political resonance of the 80s, so much part of the comic, doesn't really play today, and this is a rare film where I'd say, as Hollywood regularly does, bring it into the present. (I might add the politics in general are a weak spot of the film--it's at its worst when the politics are at their most obvious--and the Strangelove scene with Nixon and Kissinger is a low point.)

Another problem, believe it or not, is there are almost no real action sequences. Sure, there's a tremendous amount of violence--exceedingly gruesome violence--but a true action sequence has a goal to it, creating tension and advancing the plot. Almost all the violence in the film has one or more of the Watchmen dispensing a lot of pain to characters who don't have a chance. Once the fighting is over, and the bodies are lying unconscious or dead, the story can start again. I think this as much as anything else is likely to hurt the commercial prospects of the film. I know it's a meditation of what a hero is, but it'd be good to be able to root for someone during the fighting.

The action would have been solved, along with other problems, if they hadn't been so faithful. The basic story, when you think about it, is solid. In this world, real people have decided to dress up and act like superheroes (and a physicist has an accident and becomes a real one). However, after helping fight crime and win wars, they're banned and they hang up their capes. They miss their former selves, but life goes on. Then someone starts killing former heroes--so you have the micro-mystery driving the plot--while the world is teetering on the brink of nuclear war, which perhaps the Watchmen can prevent.

If they'd kept the main characters and the general outline, they could have done something. Among fans, there's a controversy over the new ending, but I actually like it. It kept aspects of the original, but tied it in better to the characters and removed some of the sillier aspects. Imagine what the film would have been like if they'd managed to write the whole script that way? It may have disappointed fanboys, but if you want to make a classic, you gotta break a few eggs.