GDNet at the Movies: So, just how bad was Watchmen?

I have no problem with spoilers. Some people really get agitated about spoilers, throwing little hissy fits and saying ridiculous things like, "Gee, asshole, thanks for ruining it for me!" I can really only name two films that would be lessened by knowing the outcome before you see them: Hitchcock's Psycho and The Usual Suspects. Thing is, even after you've seen them, they're still worth seeing again. To validate spoiler anxiety is to suggest that a story, once heard, is not worth hearing again. It's a hopelessly ridiculous notion simply on the face of it, given that oral histories, children's bedtime stories, folk tales and legends are all established, fixed in our memories and elevated to immense cultural relevance through their retelling and re-hearing. Repeating stories is what we do as a species, a fact which also makes the frequent charge that "Hollywood is out of ideas" and "only does remakes" ludicrous. For one thing, Hollywood has done remakes from day one. Many of the very earliest films made in Hollywood were adaptations of literature or theater, translations from the printed page or the stage to the silver screen. For another, make a list of the 100 greatest Hollywood movies you've ever seen and then see how many of them weren't adapted from books, short stories or other original sources. (You'd actually be shocked by the results. And look it up, don't just go by titles; lots of movies are based on elements taken from "unrelated" short stories or even articles in popular publications.) It costs a lot of money to make a movie; it always has. Even in this era of cheap and pervasive digital technology, making a multiplex-level feature, visually, is still an expensive proposition. Yes, there are creative end runs around that (The Blair Witch Project made its grainy camera a plot element), but the fact that the movies are still Serious Business explains why so few complete risks are taken with them. Find something proven in the marketplace or with a "core audience," then repackage it for the public at large. Which brings us to Watchmen. Despite my screed on the pointlessness of agitating over spoilers, I won't ruin the film for you. Yet. I'll first talk about the film on its own, and then talk about the graphic novel and its relation to the film. It is in the second section that plot points galore come tumbling out, so if you're a "spoiler screamer," stop reading where you see the sepia-toned picture of the Minutemen. Let's begin. Watchmen sucked. The film is set in an alternate version of 1985 in which US presidential term limits have been repealed and Richard Nixon has been elected to serve a third (or fourth, or possibly even fifth; the film is unclear) term, the Cold War is still in full effect and superheroes are real - except they don't have super powers. None of them. Well, except one, but we'll get to that in a minute. They're also illegal, having been outlawed a few years prior by a "Keene Act." Two "masked adventurers" are still being permitted to operate - though only one actually wears a mask - both of them agents of the US government. The others have either died, retired or simply disappeared, and are all no longer operating... except one. And then one of them is killed. This sets in motion a series of events that culminate in a premise you've seen before, and seen better executed. Along the way some origins are covered, in more senses than one, lots of people die, and there are some pretty brutal fights. Remember how we pointed out that none of these people has super powers, though? It makes you wonder, then, what's so special about them that they can perform all these incredible physical feats where others can't - not even hardened criminals in a high security prison who do nothing but work out all day. I mean, some 160-pound girl can kick a guy into mid-air, but the 300-lb thug can't? Watchmen is structured as a number of parallel stories that overlap and then converge, and while the majority of them are tonally identical, one is very different: Rorschach's, the dude with the mask that looks like a Rorschach test. His narrative takes on the classic conventions of film noir: the voiceover representing an unalterable past, the darkness and chiaroscuro with frequent projections to connote incarceration, the fatalism of the character. In the end, though, it's all just appliquée. The problem with Watchmen is that there's no "there" there, no steak after all the sizzle. It's core motivating problem is uninteresting to us in this era, living after the end of the Cold War, and so discussions of the implications of Mutually Assured Destruction and the need to save mankind from itself seem laughably quaint in the era when the nation-state is being challenged by the armed, radically ideological militia (aka terrorists, or "freedom fighters" depending on your perspective). For what it is, it's too long and it ends on far too pedestrian a note. Even the climactic moment is a let down, because the build up to it occurs over a few brief minutes of exposition. The film is too muddled, such that neither the motivations of the participants nor the imminent threat are cast into clear enough relief until the final moment, and the whole shebang is over before you know what's going on. Watchmen, the movie, really requires one to have read Watchmen, the graphic novel, to grasp all the subtleties at play, but then the film breaks from the book in ways that generally don't change the overall plot but substantially alter localized emotional referents. To really get into that, though, we must shed our friends who are concerned about not having seen the one or read the other yet, so we break for intermission while they leave... The movie largely plays like a literal translation, in some cases seeming to borrow exact panels and sequences from the book to compose a storyboard, but then it breaks rank in key ways. The most significant is this: in the graphic novel, Ozymandias has secretly used a bunch of scientists, artists and film makers to create a "special effect" in a seeming movie production, but then kills them and uses the effect to create the impression that an alien teleported to earth and killed millions of New Yorkers in the death throes of its arrival. This is supposed to cause mankind to realize that their similarities outweigh their differences in the face of a larger, other threat. In the film, the whole subplot of the missing writer and the rest of the film crew is junked, as is the space alien effect, and Dr. Manhattan is instead made into the culprit for a series of detonations across the globe that bear his energy signature. This change I have no structural problem with, for while it vilifies Dr. Manhattan, it accomplishes the same ends - for all intends and purposes he is an alien and a greater threat than our differences, and he's not planning to stick around our solar system anyway. It's just that the premise of mutually assured destruction seems so antiquated in 2009, living as we are in the aftermath of the tearing down of the Berlin wall and cessation of open hostilities between the US and USSR. Or, hell, in the aftermath of the USSR itself! That said, it's an unsustainable peace, not the "lasting peace" Ozymandias seems to think he's created - and all agree with him on. How long before someone realizes that you can't kill Dr. Manhattan, so you might as well go on with your own fighting since that's the only one you can hurt - a fellow human? Plus, Dr. Manhattan's actions were cast as supposed retribution for his (self-imposed, I might add) exile to Mars, not as any sort of commentary on our proximity to total destruction. In the book the alien is biological, so humanity is provided with a common enemy that can be defeated given the right weapons. That provides a motivation for continued cooperation between the nations. Another change is the elimination of parallel narratives that had nothing to do with the core cast - the newspaper vendor and the kid reading The Curse of the Black Freighter, or Dr. Malcolm Long. By the way, I considered The Curse of the Black Freighter a piece of superfluous reinforcement. I get it, already - in trying to "save" that which he loved, the straggler was so blinded by rage at his imagined impending evil that he perpetrated a horror against his own, "The Parable of Ozymandias." Yawn. I liked this change. Bubastis is not explained. Veidt's assistants at Karnak are replaced with scientists, though still killed. Hollis Mason's murder is dropped. At Karnak, Veidt watches the huge wall of televisions but they're showing old movies and music videos and stuff? In the book he went to it because he "needed information," and it's showing news feed from around the world. Tsk tsk. A key problem with the entire Watchmen mythology is that it's supposed to be a look at the superheroes themselves, at their motivations and behavioral/pyschological hang-ups. It posits that the second Silk Spectre only did it because her mom made her, the second Night Owl did it because he was a nerd caught up in a fantasy neverland (and suffers erectile dysfunction as a result of being forced out of the cowl), Rorschach did it because he's crazy (but the book seems to validate his perspective and methods - something I noticed in V for Vendetta, and also in several of Frank Miller's books)... Pessimistic, negative motivations in keeping with the dourness of this book, but saying little to nothing about why, say, The Flash is The Flash. In fact, I find the book to be given far too much credit overall. The "innovative storytelling methods" it employs are par for the course in the (non-graphic) novel. See Tritram Shandy. Nothing about it is particularly remarkable, except for the fact that it was being done with sequential art mostly aimed at adolescents and teens. My admittedly snide suspicion is that its present-day champions read it in their own tween years and were over-impressed by it due to their underdeveloped perspective at the time. But now I'm just being mean. :-P I had a problem with the casting of Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias, which only amplifies my remarks regarding the physical abilities of these non-super-heroes. He simply looked too slightly built to pull off the kinds of things he was doing. In the comics, Veidt is a world-class athlete with a muscular build, so you can believe it when he beats Rorschach and Night Owl with ease or catches the bullet. I certainly didn't believe that the movie's Veidt could beat The Comedian and throw him through a plate glass window. Minor nit-pick, I guess. The special effects were inconsistent. Dr. Manhattan was a little bit clever and a little bit technically impressive, but artificial human technology and performance capture continues the Uncanny Valley nightmare - the lips were very noticeably off in any close-up scene. The faces of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger were the worst, though, looking like Halloween masks - like the masks worn by the bank robbers in Point Break! And the aging work done on Carla Gugino simply wasn't believable. Watchmen, the graphic novel, is incredibly dense, but all that detail doesn't add up to a compelling picture, in my opinion. Watchmen, the movie, makes a concerted effort to streamline without lobotomizing, which is admirable, but the outcome remains the same: meh.