I Watched the Watchmen

I wanted to call this post "I Watches the Watchmen," as a jokey kind of answer to the "Who Watches the Watchmen" graffiti tag featured prominently in the Watchmen comics and its movie adaptation, but I figured everyone would I assume I had just made a typo. Anyway...

I finally saw Watchmen last night, and I'm still processing it. But here are some quick thoughts on the subject, because I'm sure you've all been just dying to hear my opinion:

• Jackie Earle Haley makes a great Rorshach. I always thought he was a great actor - remember him in Breaking Away? - and it's nice to see him make a comeback.
• Also thought Patrick Wilson was good as Dan/Nite Owl II, Jeffrey Dean Morgan was good as the Comedian, and Billy Crudup was good as Dr. Manhattan. And while a lot of people thought Malin Akerman was bad as Laurie/Silk Spectre II, I thought she was perfectly fine. I could not stand the guy playing Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias, though - he had the weirdest accent and affectation, and every time he spoke, it pulled me right out of the movie.
  
• Seeing Malin Akerman naked is never a bad thing, but the sex scene aboard the owl ship was really laughable. Setting the scene, where Dan is finally able to get an erection thanks to finally putting on his Nite Owl costume and doing some good, to Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" is just too on the nose.
• SPOILER! I get the logic of not using the squid, and the new story device works. I just liked the overall absurdity of the squid. That was the real joke that finally broke the Comedian.
• Too gory. I re-read the comic last year, and while it has it's violent moments, I don't remember this much graphic blood-letting, some of which made me turn my head.
  
• If I start working out really hard right now, by the time Halloween comes around, I should be able to pull off a Dr. Manhattan "costume" pretty well. You can read into that whatever you like.
  

Overall, I don't think the movie was bad; it was certainly faithful to the source material in a lot of ways, particularly visually, but really missed the point of the book in other, really important ways. In the book, writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons did a really good job of taking the sexy out of the violence of superheroing - it wasn't sexy, and it wasn't heroic. Director Zack Snyder, however, makes it really sexy and cool-looking with all the slow-mo and super-thrilling fight scenes, and that just goes against the message of the book, in my opinion. It was like those subtleties - although, in the book, they're anything but - went over Snyder's head.

Also, and I know I'm not the first person to say this, but I think the whole story could have been better served with more time. Like about 12 hours worth of time. This just would have worked better, and could have captured some of the depth of the source material, if it had been a series on HBO, perhaps produced by Ron Howard and Tom Hanks, like From The Earth to the Moon and Band of Brothers (which was actually co-produced by Spielberg, but you get my point).

Finally, I don't know that it was really necessary to keep the original setting of the book, which is 1985, with a world on the brink of nuclear war. I get that retaining the setting was being faithful, but watching the movie, I couldn't help but wonder what a more nuanced director could have done to update the material and make it more relevant to the times we live in now. It would have been interesting to see an adaptation of Watchmen that honored the spirit and themes of the original, but that was not so slavishly devoted to it, so that it could stand on its own merits.

So, to distill all this down into a handy rating: it's not quite a thumbs up, and not quite a thumbs down - I give it a sideways thumb. Glad I saw it, not sure if I'll need to see the expanded "definitive" version when it comes out on DVD later in the year.


-EB

p.s. Hey, guess what? Thanks to writing this blog post, I'm no longer processing how I feel about the movie! Thanks, blog!