By Kent M. Beeson
So you could say that Zack Snyder hit the comic-book movie jackpot. Not only does he make an extremely successful adaptation of Frank Miller's
300, but then he's tapped to helm the big kahuna of them all, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons'
Watchmen. With only three films under his belt (
Watchmen wrapped in February), he's already adapted two of the most celebrated comic book writers of all time, the two men who are partly responsible for the comic-book movie boom we're now enjoying. If he could just slip
Spider-Man 4 in there, that'd be the trifecta.
But which Zack Snyder is going to show up?
Dawn of the Dead was loose and lean, filled with human moments while demonstrating great skill in building tension and terror, but only a modest hit.
300 was a commercial smash and a faithful adaptation in the
Sin City mold, but a lousy film, stagy and synthetic, with an over-reliance on slow motion that seemed less like fascist filmmaking and more like a ploy to pad out an already thin narrative. (Although the racist subtext is disturbing, what really got my goat was the hunchback subplot, the resolution of which was literally anti-American. Could you imagine the equivalent in, say, a WWII picture?) My fear is that Snyder learned the wrong lessons, and a quick look at the
Watchman trailer seems to confirm that -- slo-mo abounds, and that same kind of cheap artifice hangs over it like a toxic cloud.
But, as anyone who saw Martin McDonagh's outstanding
In Bruges knows, trailers lie, and Snyder has been very vocal about making sure
Watchmen fans are satisfied come March. It's not hard to find his campaign to win the hearts and minds of fanboys appealing -- aside from the monthly behind-the-scenes videos that reassure uptight critics like me that yes, there will be actual sets in the movie, there's the commitment to faithfulness: keeping it set in 1985, keeping the ending, even attempting to retain the Black Freighter sidestory via DVD special feature. Not that that hasn't stopped nitpickers -- Nite Owl's not fat enough! Ozymandias has Bat-nipples! Nonetheless, it's kind of amusing that amidst all this, Warner Brothers would, under the auspices of promoting the live-action movie, release the most faithful adaptation of the book possible.
Directed by Jake S. Hughes, and animated by Hughes and Richard Gaubert,
Watchmen Motion Comics is an issue-by-issue, page-by-page, panel-by-panel animated retelling of the story using the original artwork, with frequent audiobook narrator Tom Stechschulte providing all the character voices. However, "animated" isn't quite the right word; instead, Hughes and Gaubert take each panel of the comic and make something move -- a character's limbs, a passing car, or, most spectacularly, the plummet of the Comedian from his penthouse suite. Occasionally, they combine panels into one smooth tracking shot, like the famous opening that starts on the bloodied smiley face and travels up to the smashed window at the top of an apartment building. Still, using only Gibbons' art (from what I can tell, there is absolutely no new artwork) puts strict limits on what can be done -- it feels more like a puppet show using cut-out pictures than what we usually think of as a cartoon. The closest analogue I can think of is
Richard Sala's Invisible Hands, from MTV's old
Liquid Television show, but even more limited.
It's pretty weird, and I don't know what, exactly, the point of it is as a promotional tool. It's bound to look cheap to viewers used to
Batman: The Animated Series or even the
Teen Titans cartoon. I don't think it's for newbies -- it's intended to tell the whole story from start to finish, and certainly one of Watchmen's chief pleasures are the surprises and shocks of the narrative, and revealing them early would seem to undermine the much more expensive and risky feature film. Despite the limited animation, it looks like it takes a lot of work for the small production team, and I have to wonder if they'll finish it. (As of this writing, only the first chapter is available from iTunes
[iTunes link].) In general, it just sounds terrible, and honestly, I avoided it when I first heard about it.
So imagine my surprise when it turned out to be pretty good. After all, it's still
Watchmen, and the animation doesn't ruin it by any means. The cinematic tricks on display here -- pans, tracking shots, rack focus -- are used intelligently, always trying to do more than just jazz it up. The music, by Lennie Moore, is appropriately moody and symphonic, and the sound design by Bill Storkson gives the flat images some depth. (Gotta love that little ditty on the passing knottops' boombox.) Still, the biggest thing it has going for it is Gibbons' art. I've never been really impressed by his stuff outside of
Watchmen, but here it's one of the most perfect matches of artistic style and writerly substance in comic history. There's a Kubrickian quality to the art in
Watchmen -- an attempt to describe its world dispassionately as a series of frozen moments, never really emphasizing any one detail over another, with every element in full focus. You can almost hear the quiet, if that makes any sense. Not to mention that it ties in thematically with Dr. Manhattan's ability to see all of time simultaneously -- the universe as a comic book whose pages can be flipped back and forth at will.
(One gets the sense that this is how Moore's mind works as well -- detail connecting to detail connecting to detail, a vast web of images and references that he can somehow see all at once.)
WMC inevitably messes with that strange feeling by adding movement, but a lot of it remains nonetheless. Sometimes adding motion and sound gives the story a bit more clarity -- I learned how "Juspeczyk" is pronounced, and as much as it pains me to admit, I never really got what Rorschach was doing with that coat hanger until I saw him push it into the closet. And I particularly like the scene in Hollis Mason's apartment, which uses a lingering pan over a series of owl statues and a final focus on his "In Gratitude" award to draw your eye and convey information in a way that's more direct than the book. Heretical as it may seem, I think the scene's actually better than the comic in that sense.
But what I like most of all is that it calls bullshit on Moore's claim that
Watchmen isn't cinematic. A great deal of the comic uses cinematic conventions -- check out the approximation of a slow track in on Rorschach in the final issue as he comes to his fateful, climactic decision. And even when it doesn't use them, the specificity of Gibbons' work lends itself to such a translation. Look at the military apparatchik at the bottom of page 23 in Chapter 3 -- the two panels have completely different angles, and the lack of action lines freezes everything, but the motion from taking the glasses off to the accusatory finger is so clear, it almost creates an imaginary ghost panel that bridges the two. I don't think
WMC will be able to capitalize on that particular moment, but in the first installment at least, page after page, it finds ways to bring out the inherent cinematic qualities of the comic.
WMC isn't perfect -- it has a stately pace that can grate, and the use of an actor to play the characters quickly reveals the distinct need-based differences between written comic book dialogue and spoken film dialogue. (Simply put, comics need more obvious exposition since we only get frozen moments, but talented writers like Moore make it read well anyway.) The biggest problem is the (budget-based?) decision to use only a single actor to play all the parts. I've never heard one of Stechschulte's audiobook performances, but I have no doubt that, when reading fiction, he's terrific. Here, though, it's almost entirely dialogue, and the vocal differences between the men begins to dissolve after twenty minutes. Contrary to popular opinion, though, his work as Silk Spectre (the only woman in the first episode) isn't bad at all -- it's one of the few times he's allowed to break out of the grim, noir-inflected man's-man voice and express some big emotions. Unfortunately, Stechschulte's doesn't have the vocal quality to disappear into a female character, and it comes across as audial drag. It doesn't deserve snickering, yet I can't really blame anyone who does. (It also highlights by negative example just how great Doc Hammer is as Dr. Girlfriend on
The Venture Brothers.)
We still have six months until the clock strikes midnight, when we'll see how well Zack Snyder pulled off adapting a comic that many said was unadaptable. Until then, we hopefully will have a bunch more
Watchmen Motion Comics to help us imagine what might be. It may not be the main course, but it's a satisfying appetizer, and should be enjoyed as such. And appreciated. After all, there's a chance, what with Fox trying to drink Warner's wine, that this'll be the only movie version of
Watchmen we'll get to see anyway.
The Watchmen is
available on iTunes.
Kent M. Beeson is a former contributor to ScreenGrab and is a long-time cinephile and comic book lover. He maintains a film-related blog called This Can't End Well.
The Watchman is © Kent M. Beeson, 2008
