The Panoptiblog

I am a devoted fan of Watchmen as originally realised by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. I start with that for two reasons: (1) it seems a convention of Watchmen reviews to establish one’s bona fides up front; and (2) it means I haven’t the slightest idea whether it works on its own as a movie, for non-fans. If The Dark Knight was comics’ first great crime film, then from my seat it looked like Watchmen was comics’ first great government conspiracy epic.

I had little respect for Zack Snyder before last weekend; I didn’t see his remake of Dawn of the Dead, and I thought 300, though admittedly beautiful, was one of the most wretched, mysoginist, racist, homophobic films that has ever seen the dim light of a theater. I am now willing to at least lay most of the blame for the latter film at the feet of Frank Miller, whose work gets sketchier every year (and I don’t mean he’s spending less time on the visuals). I still question Snyder’s taste–and his “five essential movies” for Newsweek did little to disabuse me of that–but I now need to give him the benefit of the doubt. While he is gospel-true to the source material, I’m more impressed by his additions. The opening sequence, the only original scene of the film, was brilliantly executed; the soundtrack was inspired, brought to mind the kinds of films with similar epic, politico-historical films like those about Vietnam from the 70s and 80s. While I did feel bludgeoned by “The Sound of Silence,” the uses and placements of Bob Dylan toward the beginning and Jimi Hendrix toward the end were terrific. I can think of very little I wish Snyder would’ve done differently.

I was also pleasantly surprised by the acting. Jeffrey Dean Morgan is terrific as the Comedian, channeling Mickey Rourke and Robert Downey Jr.; Patrick Wilson makes an appealing Nite Owl; but for me, nobody was better than Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach. Maybe it was because I wasn’t familiar with the cast beforehand, but I was expecting this to be the cringeworthy part of my Watchmen experience, and with the exception of overwrought dialogue (i.e., Nite Owl’s too-sincere, “What happened to the American Dream?”, which looks fine on the comic book page, but sounds ridiculous spoken aloud).

The film’s critics have a variety of gripes. The simplicity of the politics. The nihilism. The full-frontalness of Dr. Manhattan. None of these make sense to me. Comics have always had a tint of the morality play; anyone familiar with Alan Moore expects some degree of nihilism; and to cover up the swinging blue phallus would’ve really fucked with the character, and the only point of doing so would be to protect the delicate sensibilities of viewers who almost certainly wouldn’t have liked the movie anyway. (I was actually relieved that Snyder, and more importantly Warner Brothers, had the balls not to cover Dr. M. up.)

Two criticisms stick, in my view, but neither are Snyder’s fault. The first is that the film’s sensibilities feel very dated. The Cold War angst just doesn’t play in the same way anymore, and being handcuffed (by fear of fans or his own devotion) to the original text, Snyder had no room for creating contemporary relevance. I have heard some say that although the story is rooted in a Cold War paradigm, it is newly relevant in a post-9/11, post-Iraq invasion world. Snyder says as much himself, as the camera rises near the very end of the film, over the skyline of a Manhattan under reconstruction, the World Trade Center resting majestically at center screen. But for me, the ending of the film reiterated just how impotent such a promise of “world peace” really is in an age of Islamic terrorism. If the last eight years have taught us anything, it should be that shocking, violent events can lead to world unity, but that unity is fragile and fleeting.

I’m not convinced that Alan Moore thought this even in 1987, when the series ended. You can view the ending one of two ways, I think: either Rorschach’s journal ending up in the young reporter’s hands represents (a) the triumph of anarchy over fascism, or (b) the tragic failure of a beautiful plan, destroyed by a paranoid schizophrenic. A reader of Moore’s other work would likely be inclined to go with (a), I think.

The other problem is that Alan Moore, even when his heart is in the right place, couldn’t write female characters well and didn’t even seem very interested in trying. Silk Spectre gets into Night Owl’s hovership… thing… and it takes her about 20 seconds to push a button with a picture of flames on it, setting the basement on fire. And any reasonable contemporary viewer is thinking, Christ, are you kidding me? This is supposed to be a woman in her thirties, isn’t it? You half expect her to start giggling and flap her wrist, saying, “God, I’m so clumsy!” Meanwhile, Night Owl picks up the fire extinguisher sitting five feet away, and puts it out. I would like to expect this would be noticable even to the comic nerd viewer, but those hopes are dimmed by remembering the guy sitting a few rows behind me who noted, before the movie started, “Do you think they’ll include the rape scene? That would be awesome.” Where does A. O. Scott get his opinions about comic book fans, again?

Flaws and all, I’m betting people look back at Watchmen as a breakthrough. The fact is, Moore broke through in the mid-80s, doing things with mainstream superhero comics that hadn’t been done before. While some of the tropes of Watchmen had been seen in films from Batman to The Incredibles, it took a nearly-pure adaptation of Moore’s work to break some of the same barriers in superhero films over twenty years later. Creative filmmakers who are invested in the genre will look back at Watchmen as the film that let them tell adult stories, too.