Watchmen (out of the archives)
(N.B.: I wrote this whenever ‘a recent post’ was recent. The film itself is no longer even remotely relevant, but Alec told me [probably a year ago, christ] that the review was worth posting. So: here.)
After I saw Zack Snyder’s Watchmen, I spent some time trying to concentrate my thoughts on the film enough for a post here. I was never able to do so to my satisfaction, and eventually the film stopped being timely. Luckily, a recent post at Alicublog brought up Anthony Lane’s review of the film. Instead of making an overlong and off-topic comment there, I’ll make you all suffer. (Here be spoilers for both film and comic.) Lane pans the film as an inhumane celebration of thuggery, and he repeatedly states that the comic and the movie are philosophically similar. I mostly agree with Lane’s assessment of Watchmen the film, but couldn’t agree less with his association of Snyder’s love of thuggery with Alan Moore himself. The film is an eviscerated parody of the comic I read. On its own, the superhero story is not particularly notable –it’s the kind of “dark” inverted hero story that Frank Miller might have written. What I find appealing about Watchmen that both Snyder and Lane missed are simple human stories, cut short by Veidt’s scheme.
The emotional peak of the comic is the execution of Veidt’s plan. A half-dozen small plots with decidedly non-superheroic characters – a cabbie’s fight with her girlfriend, a newspaper vendor talking to an uninterested youth reading a pirate comic, the paranoia- and drug-fueled murder of Hollis Mason, the eventual disgrace of the cop who captures Rorschach, and Rorschach’s psychiatrist spiralling into despair and alienating his wife — begin to be drawn together. At that moment, Veidt’s plan to murder half of New York takes effect, and all of these lives are obliterated in a series of panels which still makes me tear up even after dozens of readings.
Watchmen does briefly reference the iconic scene with the newspaper vendor and youth in silhouette before everything goes white. You’d just about miss it. And it symbolized exactly what was wrong with the film — I had no emotional response, because I had no reason to care about these characters.
Quite a lot of the film is spent slavishly recreating the hero arc of the comic, to the expense of just about everything else. The resulting plot arc, with the characters as written, would have been pretty strongly biased in favor of Veidt. Moore’s Adrian Veidt is a fascinating character, one of the best villains ever written — because he is strong, and handsome, and charming, and makes a fairly convincing argument that he had to murder millions of people to save the world. Furthermore, Moore never explicitly rebukes Veidt’s actions. The comic’s protagonists come around at the end, agree to stay quiet, and return to their lives — except one, the psychotic (and ultimately suicidal) serial killer Rorschach. Beyond that, the only person really questioning Veidt at the end is Veidt himself.
Snyder realized this, although he didn’t seem to recognize the value of the excised plots (the part he’s restoring in his director’s cut, apparently, is the well-done but marginal Black Freighter story). So he turns Veidt into a weaselly, snivelling Eurofag (with a directory labelled BOYS on his computer, natch), makes Dan and Laurie stronger and more appealing, and does everything he can to make a psycho killer like Rorschach an antihero.
This is what Lane saw in the film. I agree with him on that. The dehumanized script of the film had to increase the severity of Veidt’s crime by a tremendous magnitude, replacing “half of New York” with the complete obliteration of a handful of the world’s biggest cities. The comic’s Dan Dreiberg is shocked and appalled at Veidt’s murders at first, but ultimately agrees to go along with Veidt’s plan. In the movie, the same scene ends with an absurd sequence where Dreiberg beats the shit out of Veidt and accuses him of “deforming humanity.” It’s fitting that a film directed by the guy who did 300 replaced half the plot with a burly man repeatedly punching a homosexual in the face.
(An aside — I’m aware Snyder didn’t write the script, and I’m being lazy in attributing all of these decisions to him. I apologize. However, I suspect that Snyder was satisfied with the script he filmed, and his previous work on 300 as well as his obvious love of filming scenes of merciless violence reinforce this. Oh, and before I forget: the comic depicts the pre-Keene Act rioters as middle-aged, pudgy working people. The film depicts them as bomb-throwing hippies. It all adds up.)
In general, the film’s script slashes out any scene that doesn’t feature a superhero but dedicates minutes on end to loving expansions of sex and fight scenes (Dan & Laurie on the airship, the Comedian’s death, the thugs in the alley) which were dispensed with fairly quickly in the comic. I know the entire book comic would have been impossible to film, but when you expand a scene just so you can show more of Malin Akerman getting a deep dicking you open yourself up to questions about priorities.
