"
I always feel that to adapt a comic book story into a live-action picture is a mistake. The two look similar only on the surface, but at heart, they are truly different…. Film is movement. Comics are immobility. Comics create movement from immobility."
- Alejandro Jodorowsky, film director and comic book writer
***
Watchmen! The movie! It's here! It's real! And there are reviews too! Twenty billion of them, by my exact count!
Such is the dilemma of the Monday afternoon reviewer. What's the old Anthony Lane quip? Movies are best reviewed the night they open or fifty years later? Surely the semi-official big kid critic canon of Watchmen the Motion Picture discussion points is already well-established: the visual designs are very shiny; the gore is juicy & the hitting bone-crackin'; Malin Akerman is awful as Silk Spectre II and Jackie Earle Haley is very good as Rorschach, and everyone else falls somewhere in between; the opening credits are awesome; the (revised) ending is kinda dumb; the soundtrack choices are sort of fun but really obvious; and, loss of subplots aside, the adapted story is exceedingly faithful to its source material, perhaps to its detriment as a self-sufficient artistic work.
That last one's maybe the ‘big' qualm among movie critics, and the lynchpin of many of the really negative reviews I've come across. "Oh Zack Snyder," go such complaints, hyperbolically, in my head, "your fealty has been your undoing. If only you had defied the die-hards, broken free of fannish adoration of the page and created an organic approximation that captured the work's soul without the use of conventional pesticides, or something, then you'd well and truly have a flicker to crow about, twenty-three skidoo."
There is something to that; I've never been enthusiastic about the idea of ‘perfect' adaptations of comics, as in Sin City-style near-reproductions of the artwork moving across the screen, mainly in that the temporal-spatial manipulations of comics storytelling operate on a different experiential plane than cinema. A comics work might employ ‘cinematic' techniques (dramatic ‘lighting,' movie-familiar blocking or skewed angles, big ol' wide panels, etc.) but the eye is manipulated on the page through elements that consider the immobile nature of pictures sitting in sequence and, indeed, the positioning of pages themselves as vessels.
Movies don't have any of that - they proceed down a single thoroughfare, for a rigid span of time, commanding aural sensations that inevitably affect the visual aspect, which itself is altered from comics by the relative passivity of the viewer, left to grasp at fleeting images. Granted, some comics will obviously support some close analogy to cinema -- a straightforward action comic, say -- but the tremendous, at heart differences between the art forms leave the pursuit of medium-to-medium perfection as a doomed dream, one I can't imagine doing much other than binding otherwise possibly interesting filmmakers to labor over a malformed simulacrum, a fundamentally different movie-of-a-comic that might as well be something more creative in its adaptation.
All that's a bit academic in this situation, however, since director Zack Snyder has actually produced a considerably transformative adaptation with his Watchmen. I'm really kind of in disbelief that so many critics are citing some suffocating adherence to the holy writ of Moore & Gibbons as the movie's big failing; I can only presume these declarations are corollary to an (unfortunate!) tendency on the part of Big media critics to discount the affect of
art on the experience of reading a comic. In fact, how many reviews even
mentioned Gibbons beyond reciting his capacity as co-creator of the book and advisor on the film? Hey, no big deal - what's art got to do with a visual medium anyway?
I mean, sure - a lot of the production design and the costumes look sort of like Dave Gibbons' drawings, a little. But that's not all Gibbons brought to the table; crucial to the comic's operation is his use of the nine-panel grid, the ‘base' layout that appears on most of the book's pages. This very subdued, very dense style affords the comic both a steady, deliberate pace (so much to get through before you turn the page!) and plenty of room for worldbuilding, while also forcing all deviations from that layout to carry a special impact; long, horizontal panels better convey the sweep of history or the impact of an action scene by their differences from how the pages usually look. The cumulative effect is one of intense
control, which contributes just as much to the richness of the work's themes and allusions (and, I'd say, its vaunted novelistic qualities) as Alan Moore's writing.
Snyder, in contrast, does not direct movies known for control, or much richness beyond surface visual qualities; it's no wonder his Watchmen behaves like a version of the comic drawn by Dale Keown, or some other Image artist I thought would have made for a much more interesting comic when I was 12. Everything is busy, pulsing and prone to aplomb, whenever possible. I like loud things, so sometimes I enjoyed it, but god if it doesn't treat the audience like
dunces compared to Moore & Gibbons - why hide that famous drip of blood onto the smiley button when you can zoom in and underline it and make us watch it drip in slooooooow moooooootion, so we can all be sure it's A Very Important Image in a Serious Work of Meaning and Impact.
Of course, this also happens in the middle of an extended, fists-flying martial arts-ish fight scene, complete with holes getting punched through walls and heads smashing into furniture, which is additionally a crucial deviation from Moore & Gibbons. For all its grim 'n gritty reputation, there's actually not
that much violence in the comic, and what violence there is gets invariably framed so as to sap its impact. So, if you look at the Comedian's death in the comic, while we're
told he put up a fight, we only
see him getting pummeled from the perspective of his attacker. This and other visual narrative tricks are crucial to the comic's critique of the genre, both grounding the violence of superhero fights and denying us their pleasure.
The movie, on the other hand, absolutely wallows in sensational violence and overactive sensation. Truly, this is a Watchmen for the Geoff Johns era. If, as artist Frank Santoro
recently remarked, the original comics were "a Lutheran reformation text knocking on the door of the Catholic establishment by a devout believer," then the movie kicks down the castle church's door, leaps onto the altar and pounds all the wine in sight ‘cause it
just don't care and then it flexes its muscles and slips on its shades before saying "the treasures of the indulgences are nets with which they now fish for the riches of men." Then it pulls out a skateboard and grinds down a pew out a window. Also, this happens after the Enlightenment.
There's no exchange of fists from the comics that can't be expanded into full-blown blocks ‘n throws combat. The Comedian doesn't just gas protesters from the eyes of the Owl Ship, he leaps into the fray and punches out the whole first line of protestors. If Gibbons draws lil' Rorschach biting a bully's cheek in one panel with speckles of blood on his face in the next, Snyder makes sure to close in on the flesh tugging and stretching and lavishly giving way to spilling grue. Even the generous splash of blood of that one guy getting his throat cut at the door to Rorschach's prison cell, one of the bigger bloody bits of the comics, is replaced by a major gore scene marked with a delighted close up of a buzz saw closing in on the man's arms, rending his skin and muscle to gristle.
Beholden to the comic? Come on! Snyder's problem isn't that's he's stuffily reproducing funnybook pages on the screen, it's that he's
picking and choosing elements from the comic to employ on the screen,
poorly. Even the gore seems bizarrely conflicted at times, as constant as violence is.
Let's go back to that hard-rockin' fight scene with the Comedian. He takes what has to be a dozen or so direct hits to the face, flies through all sorts of objects, and we're specifically told he's not a superhuman - surely his face ought to be a lump of hamburger! But no, there's only a few trickles of blood, presumably because Gibbons only
drew a few trickles of blood, which of course was because he and Moore were downplaying the entertainment value of the murder scene, i.e. exactly the opposite of what Snyder is doing, yet he keeps the trickle. That isn't the destruction of superheroes, that's Neal Adams' Batman in the ‘70s!
The funny thing is, I really do think Snyder was
trying to create a new and unique experience, just for the movie. Several scenes adopt a specifically satirical tone -- anything with that ridiculously long-nosed Nixon, or Ozymandias taking the opportunity of his attempted assassination to eliminate oil company executives -- while blending interestingly with the film‘s candied art direction; it doesn‘t really look much at all like John Workman's coloring on the comic -- which has the benefit of acting as ‘reality' in the comic while such tricks in the realism-constrained live-action cinema can only ever be some fantasy -- but they do look campy and odd in that post-Tim Burton's Batman manner. Plastic nipples, anyone?
Snyder's effort, therefore, is to mesh that sweet, slightly awkward big screen superhero style with untoward amounts of violence and politics and sex and things; it's an approach that compliments his style of cinema nicely. Sometimes it works fairly well: the Silk Spectre's sex scene with Dr. Manhattan is good and creepy specifically because it goes on for a bit too long and goes farther into overt imagery than Gibbons. But more often it's simply ridiculous, like the Silk Spectre's butt-thrusting Cinemax sex scene with Nite Owl (Emanuelle and the Black Freighter!), taking an already rather obvious bit in the comic and making as dumb and blunt as possible.
Worse yet, there's little escaping the fact that Snyder's approach eerily replicates the attitudes of
post-Watchmen superhero comics, deeming it sufficient to jazz up those wacky superheroes with explicit content and politics to arrive at something resonant. Oh, there's clever parts; I like how the movie ‘gets' that superheroes (even the nice ones) are fundamentally sociopaths, peppering encounters with muggers with necks getting snapped like it's nothing, or having Silk Spectre kick the hell out of prisoners at the Rorschach breakout in kickin' rad style, then having her bust out the same style while beating the shit out a police officer. That was kind of funny.
But, you know, then there's Rorschach in the comic, gathering his costume to go get that villain Ozymandias, and he runs into his prostitute neighbor and he calls her a whore and she says not to do that in front of her children, and there's a silent panel where his face falls slightly, because inside of him he knows his unwavering pursuit of A=A justice is recreating the environment that ruined his life as a child he knows.
None of that's in there, the silent, cutting criticism of superheroism of certain sorts. Nor
can there be the elegance of Moore's use of individual chapters and containers of certain themes, or anything like the issue-long flight of that perfume bottle across the Martian landscape, striking Dr. Manhattan's fortress and causing its collapse to demonstrate the revelation he and the Silk Spectre are undergoing, anticipating his speech on the improbability of life, like that small object toppling that large structure.
Snyder has the woman yell and beat the fortress with her hands until it breaks. Then the dot on the Martian smiley face is accompanied by
hard-rockin' Hendrix licks, which carry over to Nite Owl and Rorschach flying to Ozymandias' headquarters. The song is All Along the Watchtower, so we're shown the
watchtowers on the headquarters! Ha ha, because that's the song! Hey, Moore used those lyrics as a post-chapter quotation, so it's ok. Right?
Like, Snyder totally changed the ending,
that's the part I should be annoyed with, right? Alan Moore, ruined again, right? Right?
But swapping out the giant squid for a fake Dr. Manhattan attack doesn't really bug me, save for the clumsy attempt to graft 2009's energy concerns onto a Cold War plot that could not possibly be more 1986.
No, it's the fact that the cataclysmic squid strike causes Gibbons' layouts to suddenly explode into full-page splashes, something anathema to the prior eleven chapters. And that we're finally shown
lots of blood,
lots of graphic violence,
there. That's when it happens, because superheroic utopianism caused
so many people to
die, it flies in the face of Ozymandias' rationale, though it daren't address what the various superheroes should do afterward. It just shows the horror, but it
is horror, by all the mechanics of the page,
it is the horror.
The film offers a startlingly clean apocalypse (if made characteristically bigger, to cover many cities!), all computer slickness, like something straight out of Roland Emmerich. Such booming disaster is the same as the film has always been. Not a drop of blood stains those streets, though, be it concern for an NC-17 or a puzzling decision that enough was enough. It was awful, but everything was awful, in mostly the same way.
This utopia is futile, but there's no especial tragedy. Nothing ever changes, but it's all in good fun, I guess.
Joe McCulloch is the fist behind Jog - The Blog. He posts to The Savage Critics, and prints with The Comics Journal, Comics Comics and Bookforum. Via fists.
The Watchman is ©2008 Joe McCulloch.
