Watchmen (das movie)
Finally saw this last week, and had to take some time to chew on it. I mean, I knew I enjoyed it, but how much, and how does it compare to the source material? I also took the time to re-read the comic.
There’s plenty of good stuff.
The casting was amazing. Everyone suited the character amazingly well, and managed to actually get into it. This broke down some with the Comedian once in a while, he seemed to not really be in the part, so the lines came off a bit wooden. Not that I’m saying it’s easy playing the Comedian, or that those lines would roll off anyone’s tongue, I’m just saying. Nite Owl and Rorschach were absolutely spot on, playing up the characters brilliantly.
Nite Owl and Silk Spectre were actually better than their comic counterparts. Especially Silk Spectre, though almost any effort at making her better would be an improvement over the comic. Christ man, she was such a useless pile of Frank Millerosity. So she ended up coming off a bit more like a human being and less like a retired hooker in need of Xanax. In the comic, Nite Owl came off as someone who had sort of fallen into passivity, while in the movie it came off more as someone driving themselves into it, which seems more effective to me.
The absolute best part was the body langauge. It would have been easy to make this fall flat by just sort of posing through the scenes, but instead they managed to do the most appropriate form of storytelling for action characters, which is simply in the way they do things. Amongst normal people one gets the impression of tigers amongst lambs, and it’s an amazing metamorphosis from, say, Dan Dreiberg or Laurie Jupiter into their heroic alter-egos. Then there’s Rorshach, who radiates that all the time. When with friends, children, pets, you really can’t be certain he won’t just crack through your ribcage. Not because he doesn’t care, rather because he cares so very much, and he cares all the time. The flipside is Dr. Manhattan, who gives nary a damn about much, but also lacks that human component. Not so much all predator as all beams of light, a force as remote from a normal human as a shark. Every scene of him captures this, captures him going through the motions, though there are still some emotional speed bumps for him.
Of this absolute best part there is even an ultimate scene. Rorshach, confronting a kidnapper that has killed a little girl, goes through this episode that’s difficult to qualify. It’s short, really just a few seconds, but it’s beautiful. He is obviously not the same man as in the present, this man still moves like a human being sometimes. Chaining the kidnapper to a stove, his arm comes up holding the killer’s cleaver, and he looks at it as though the action isn’t of his own volition. Through a featureless mask, wearing a baggy coat, he projects this brief, but powerful, struggle as the tiger of Rorshach devours the weak human of Walter Kovachs. As his arm comes down you see Walter’s death spasms. This sort of thing is precisely what a comic book adaptation should be, giving the true gift of movement to the story.
Sets, CGI, and costumes are all top-notch. Everything is kept surreal enough that any given thing couldn’t possibly take you out of the moment, but without resorting to the starkness of Sin City, which would have detracted from such a shaded and detailed series of portraits. The costumes are removed from the spandex era, but without losing the fantasy quality. And Silk Spectre (II technically) isn’t dressed like some hooker. More like a roller-derby girl.
There’s one thing I’d call good, but inadeqate. Adrian Veidt, aka Ozymandias. He did well, playing the role he was given, but that role may as well have included him doing the shifty eyes in every scene. It felt dumbed down and telegraphed.
There’s a couple of things I’d just call bad. A vain attempt at lending some current day relevance, with Adrian going on about how war is caused by a fear of resource deprivation and there was some car company stuff. This, in itself, could have been ok, if it could have felt less wedged in and also if it hadn’t involved him talking to the public about it. Being public about this just isn’t in the man’s makeup. Nobody should know jack about what he’s doing, or even claims to be doing. Still, in large, it doesn’t hurt too much to invalidate the experience. The worst thing is the sense of compression. The movie is something like two hours and forty-five minutes, and it really just isn’t enough. It would have been nice to see a Kill Bill treatment of it, though who knows if the production staff and writers could have produced the same quality under lesser constraints. Also, that sort of thing is still seen as quite a gamble by Hollywood I’m sure.
In short, now that it’s too late to be brief, it was an amazing piece of work. Not perfect, but nothing is. The best part, as a fan of the comic, was that it actually brought forth a new appreciation for the story, causing me to evaluate the characters from new angles. Also, less of the “WOMEN ARE WHORES” vibe.
Anyway, that’s my two cents.