Movie Review: The Watchmen

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Movie adaptations rarely satisfy. This is true not just of written material (like Lord of the Rings) but also movie adaptations of TV shows. (Let's be honest: Serenity was not as satsfying as Firefly.) The same, naturally, applies to comic books as well. I think it's mostly due to the limits of the medium. A novel can be hundreds of pages, a TV show can go for years, and even a comic book is too long and complex to be compressed to a 90 minute film.

Maybe there's a metaphysical problem as well. Martin Buber said the artist's dillema is that the work never looks the same on paper as it does in the artist's mind. Likewise, every person develops their own mental image of characters and events, and even when you begin with a graphic novel, the film depiction will never match what you imagined, and will always feel a little... wrong.

To be fair, it's not Hollywood's fault. I've seen Italian and Russian adaptations that butchered the original.

More often, the problem is simply that mediocre directors and producers mess with great works. "Maybe LOTR will be better if Aragorn rides off a cliff." No, Mr. Jackson, it won't. If your storytelling ability was as good as Tolkein's, you would have written LOTR yourself instead of merely copying another man's work to a new medium.

Bitter much? Yeah. But I'm a purist. And it shows disrespect for great art when a filmmaker thinks he can improve on the original.

So I had low expectations for The Watchmen. The graphic novel was credited with reinventing comic books for a new generation. Masterpieces like The Dark Night or Sin City would never have existed. The Watchmen is one of Time Magazine's 100 Greatest Novels. This is a literary gem just waiting to be ruined by some jackass director who thinks he's going to leave his mark. But then I got a positive recommendation from a friend whose opinion I uniquely trust (shoutout to Jim Bunting), and heard that my stepfather Rick and sister Sarah were going to go see it. So I took the plunge.

The movie is fantastic.

Sure, they left out stuff like the wonderful pirate ship comic book-within-a-comic book subplot. It's little things like that which separate the good from the great, but I understood why it had to go. Likewise, they added some stuff, like all the 60's and 70's rock music, and the many allusions to 9/11. But they worked, and they fit, and they didn't detract from the central theme. Let's be honest, the giant squid thingy in the comic book was always goofy, and the real image of Ground Zero was much more powerful.

More importantly, the movie is great for what it managed to keep in. There were endless details that the director put in, like the painting of Miss Jupiter on the Comedian's wall. Details that only rabid fanboys would notice. And the slavish obedience to compisition and dialogue. Time and again, it simply felt like the comic book was coming to life.  Also, the director solved the "you can't fit it into 90 minutes" problem by making the movie unusually long (almost 3 hours).  This is exactly what I said they should have done with each LOTR movie.  Make it a little longer, add in more of the details that made the book great, no one will mind, and the fans will thank you.

Spoiler Alert

As we left the theater, Rick commented that it was strange to not see the villain die at the end.  Even if the heroes accepted that the villain had won, and even that he was right, they still should have killed him because that's what superheroes do.  But that, of course, is one of the things that made the book great: it took the expected comic book themes and threw them out.  What it offered instead was something original, and in its originality it felt a little uncomfortable, but it was also exciting because it opened the gate to a whole new type of comic book, and we've been enjoying the results for twenty years.  This is the exact same conversation you have when you've finished reading the book, and the fact that the same sentiments were evoked in the movie is one more testament to a faithful adaptation.

Also, it's got lots of big blue dick, and who doesn't like that?