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The cinematic question of the weekend: is Watchmen a good movie? The truth is I have absolutely no idea. Before I tell you why I can’t really tell you, though, a little history lesson is in order.
Watchmen started out as a 12-issue comic book series, first published in 1986. With a dense, layered narrative and psychologically fractured characters, it redefined how the comic book industry told stories about superheroes. It also became the holy grail of comic-to-film translation, equally yearned for and feared by fans.
Now, just over 20 years later, the response has been, well, mixed at best. Hardcore fans have split between guarded praise and outright loathing. Complaints have ranged from the film being too faithful to the original series to changing too much to being too caught up in its mid-‘80s setting to using too many contemporary film techniques. They say you can’t please everybody all the time, but Watchmen seems to have had a hard time pleasing anybody—except me.
Not once during the 2-hour, 35-minute runtime did I have the urge to check the time, despite the fact that I was almost certainly going to be late to my day job because of it. I simply didn’t want to miss anything on the screen. By now, I’ve read the original series countless times, watched the recently released motion-comics version, and seen the film. Each one tells the same story, and every time I’ve experienced that story, I’ve come away with something I didn’t see before.
There’s no way to adequately describe the plot, but here are a few of the important bits. It’s 1985. Costumed adventurers have been a reality since the ‘40s and have been outlawed since the mid-‘70s. There’s only one true superbeing. He has the power to do just about anything, and he’s been the U.S. government’s favorite weapon of mass destruction—a fact that has the Soviet Union seething. Amidst the threat of nuclear war, a former costumed hero/government agent is murdered, and the investigation conducted by one of his former costumed cohorts begins to unravel a plot with the future of the planet at stake.
While the plot moves things forward, what’s really important is its characters. Watchmen asks what kind of person would put on a costume and fight criminals and what that lifestyle would do to them. Their neuroses range from the hubris of Ozymandias (Matthew Goode), the so-called “smartest man in the world,” to the fetishism of Night Owl II (Patrick Wilson) and Silk Spectre II (Malin Ackerman), both heirs to costumed legacies that they’re not sure if they can live with or without, to the brutal psycopathologies of Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) and The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan)—one a take-no-prisoners vigilante, the other a self-aware, amoral bastard. Meanwhile, the lone superman, Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), finds that the unique perspective offered by his abilities has almost completely disconnected him from his former humanity.
In terms of plot, the film hews closely to the series through much of its runtime, necessarily trimming and conflating bits and pieces to achieve a reasonable cinematic length. As with the adaptation of Lord of the Rings, this means that some fans’ favorite bits will be left out or altered, causing them much anguish, while others may pass by unnoticed. The biggest change concerns the film’s climax, which adds a welcome new tension that complements the story rather than takes away from it.
The characters are well-realized as well. Haley and Morgan both turn in excellent performances, and each finds a tragic humanity in beings whose lives are terrible to behold and could easily devolve into caricature. Wilson’s Nite Owl II is the easiest to empathize with, an everyman who could be much more if he could just overcome his self-doubt and indecision. While Akerman and Goode are less successful, neither one took me out of the movie, as some have charged. Dr. Manhattan is mostly CGI, although Crudup’s disaffected voice work proves distinctly eerie.
The only thing I really objected to was the amount of blood and gore and the lengthening of some of the fight sequences. The original series was never squeamish about blood, but the film needed less 300-inspired carnage. On the other hand, Watchmen presents superheroics as a nasty, dangerous business, and to pretend that bones aren’t broken and blood isn’t spilled is the kind of dishonest representation that the story itself is a response to.
Director Zack Snyder has frequently stated in interviews that he’ll consider the film a success if it draws people toward the series, and, by that measure, it already is. I couldn’t tell you how it plays to someone who first watches the film and then reads the book. I’ve lived far too long with the story in memory and spent too much time already considering the wealth of thematic material involved. For those people, I’d suggest that this is heady stuff and a single viewing, or a viewing without reading the series at all, may not show it in its best light. For fans like myself, I can only suggest going in with as few preconceptions as possible. After all, this is only one interpretation of the story, one that may or may not work for you. You’re just going to have to see it to decide for yourself.
DVD Review (by Kristin Dreyer Kramer):
Originally clocking in at a whopping 162 minutes, director Zack Snyder’s Watchmen probably didn’t need to be released in an even longer director’s cut version—but it was anyway. The new, extended version is over three hours long—yet, for some reason, it’s still pretty baffling for Watchmen newbies like me. Though it’s stylistically striking, it still feels like it’s simply scratching the surface of the real story—so it’s a good thing that the two-disc special edition DVD release comes loaded with eye-opening special features.
Since the three-hour movie takes up all kinds of disc space, the features are included on the set’s second disc (along with a digital copy of the film). Here’s where you’ll get the real dirt on Watchmen. In the half-hour feature, The Phenomenon: The Comic That Changed Comics, you’ll learn more about the graphic novel—about its creation and (especially) its themes, as well as its transformation into Snyder’s film. Most importantly, though, this feature offers insights into the original story that don’t come through in the movie—and, after watching it, you might just feel compelled to pick up a copy of the book.
The features disc also includes a set of 11 “video journals”—short making-of featurettes that discuss everything from characters and training to costumes, colors, and effects. Each journal is only about three or four minutes long, so you can easily pick and choose and watch them as time permits.
Whether you’re a long-time Watchmen fan or a confused newbie like me, you’ll find plenty of interesting insights in the film’s features. For casual viewers, it’ll be a perfectly adequate peek into the Watchmen world. For hard-core fans, however, it’s merely an appetizer to hold you over until the December release of the massive five-disc Ultimate Collector’s Edition.
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