Watching Watchmen

Watchmen is a decent movie. It has an intriguing world, a great concept, interesting characters, and a good story. I saw it, and were I not impoverished would certainly see it again. I loved the Rorschach character, loved the opening credits, I even liked the sometimes out of place soundtrack (good music is good music). But my geek credentials are pretty thin in the comic book realm, and I have never read the graphic novel. Had I read it, I may have learned how the movie fails in every possible respect, as is apparently the case. What was for me an enjoyable movie about superheroes and the issues that would drive them in a gritty, real world setting, is actually an abomination of the greatest literary work since, well, ever, I guess.

A lot of this fan complaining is legitimate: There’s not a lot of emotion in the movie, the story seems rushed and some of the bigger moments don't land like they should, and it’s clear that the characters would all resonate much more in the denser setting of a graphic novel. What leads to such zealous fan reaction, though, is not the quality of the movie itself, but the level of deification that certain comic book writers like Alan Moore and Frank Miller have undergone in Hollywood in recent years. It has become a bit ridiculous. When Shakespeare is redone in the form of She’s the Man, nobody bats an eyebrow, but when one frame of one shot of one scene in Sin City diverges from the comic, a cinematic holocaust has been committed.

In response to this, a director like Zack Snyder (sorry bro) decides to stick as closely to the comic as possible. I will say again that I’ve not read Watchmen, but I have read and seen 300, and generally Snyder sticks to doing a shot for shot recreation of the comic. From all I’ve read, the same phenomenon is present in Watchmen, and the film certainly looks like it went to great lengths to recreate exact frames from the book. It’s like when you hear a cover of a song that’s just, well, the song again, but robbed of the creative spark that made the original something special.

It’s an endless cycle. Joe Moviegoer (in this case, me) likes the movie, but goes home without being hugely impacted by it. But Joe Moviegoer’s roommate, Jerry Fanboy (or Matilda Fangirl, as the case may be) sees the movie, finds it to be an aseptic approximation of what they love, and cover the internet with complaints. Hollywood, looking for a reason why the movie doesn’t do as well as say, The Dark Knight, sees the fanboy complaints, and in turn makes a movie that is more slavishly faithful to the original. And it goes back to Joe Moviegoer, and back down the line forever.

Watchmen, Sin City, 300—these are all great stories. Hell, if the Watchmen novel is 1/100th as good as I’ve been told, it would still earn a place among my favorite books. But a good movie can take that great source material and make a great, separate work of art from it. Look at The Godfather, for the love of Christmas! Satisfying a rabid fanbase like Watchmen’s will never be possible, so directors shouldn’t let that scare them into making inferior products. With all the mindless faithfulness to the Watchmen novel, fans are still furious that the production created a new climax, eschewing some sort of Lovecraftian monster in the finale. (Okay, honestly? That sounds fantastic.) You just can’t please everybody, no matter what you do.

Watchmen does a lot right. But you can tell just by watching that, not unlike the first Harry Potter movies, it shoots itself in the foot by being too faithful to the letter of the source material and rather ignorant to the spirit. In the hands of a director that wasn’t afraid to make the sacred cow of the novel their own (I would have loved a David Fincher take, for example), this had all the makings of a masterpiece. As it is, the movie fails in greatness, and fails in satisfying the passionate fanbase.

Hollywood has never been known for taking works of literature seriously. And, in this new trend of slavishly adapting the source material, they miss the point once again. Like I said, I enjoyed this movie for 99% of the time I was in the theater. I was blissfully unaware of the crimes that were being perpetrated to the holy tome, and so I had a good ride. If you like superheroes and enjoy the movie for what it is, you’ll have a good time at Watchmen, though you might leave feeling a bit like just drove past the Pyramids doing 90 and didn’t get out to take a picture.

Watchmen is a good movie on its own merits, but as an adaptation it comes up short. Unfortunately, this as is as much the fault of fanboy internet culture as anything else. These movies are monitored by fans during their entire production, and at the end of the day Zack Snyder did the best he could under those conditions. It’s not what it could have been, but given the circumstances, it’s a pretty decent movie, squid or no squid. It’s no Watchmen Babies, but I’ll take it.