Blue Man Sings The Whites

As mentioned in a previous life, Blue Man’s First Law Of Comic Adaptations is this: just get the big stuff right. Work out what makes a comic worth reading, find the foundations that it’s built upon and make sure that those essentials come across successfully on screen. The corollary to Blue Man’s First Law Of Comic Adaptations therefore is this: change as much small stuff as you need to.

The first two X-Men films keep the mutants-as-an-oppressed-minority and family vibes from the comics, along with the iconic powers of Cyclops, Wolverine, Magneto and Professor X but change the costumes (“What, you think we should be wearing spandex?”), turn the Xavier Institute For Gifted Youngsters into an actual school, and re-interpret both Magneto (as a Holocaust survivor) and Rogue (as a teenage runaway). Batman Begins shows us Bruce Wayne’s double life, keeps Batman’s ambiguous relationship with the law and portrays him as a figure of superstition and terror to the criminal classes. However, it also gives us an on-again off-again romantic dalliance, the Batmobile as a military vehicle and Batman being trained as an actual no-fooling ninja. My very favourite comic movie ever, The Crow, retains almost nothing from the comic - about one-and-a-half scenes (Eric visting Gideon’s pawnshop and his confrontation with Fun Boy), plus the basic look, origin and mission of the central character, a bunch of villain names and that’s your lot.

I reiterate this to make my attitude clear – I’m a huge fan of Watchmen, but I don’t regard the book as a sacred text from whose holy writ deviation is not to be tolerated. I understand that what works on the page doesn’t necessarily work on screen. In fact in the case of Watchmen this is doubly true, it being  a story that is structured specifically to take advantage of the strengths of the medium it was written for. Sin City may have basically treated the original comic like a storyboard with more-or-less successful results (mind-bendingly rampant misogyny aside), but in that case you’re talking about a very simple plot and books that were intended to be a film noir in comic form. Try the same thing with Watchmen and you’d just end up with a sprawling mess, albeit one with some great characters, nice set-pieces and interesting visuals.

Watchmen is a sprawling mess, albeit one with some great characters, nice set-pieces and interesting visuals. It’s not a very good film at all. I enjoyed it very much, look forward to seeing it again and would recommend it without hesitation to anyone who’s read and enjoyed the comic.

(Anyone who hasn’t read the comic I would recommend to, er, read the comic – it’s about the same price as a cinema ticket, can be read in about the time you’d invest in a visit to the flicks and is better than the film in every respect).

Let me attempt to explain.

The Phantom Menace is a terrible film by anybody’s standards. It’s got a rotten script, dodgy performances, it’s bloated, baggy and filled with characters I couldn’t give a flying hug about. But the first time that Qui-Gon O’Jinn The Oirish Jedi and Awful Alec Guinness Impression drew their lightsabres with that ssssccccchvooom! sound and began cutting loose with them I started grinning like I had a flip-top head. There are things that I’m just programmed to enjoy, that are hard-coded in my Nerd DNA to give me pleasure.

The sight of a giant Doctor Manhattan creating a glass palace of cogs and gears is one of these things. So’s the Comedian’s costume. So’s Archie the Owlship. So’s “You don’t get it! I’m not locked in here with you! You’re locked in here with me!”

Director Zack Snyder is obviously a fan of the comic, and he’s pretty good with cool images, with cool lines, with cool props, with cool fight scenes. He’s not so good with anything below the surface sheen. To coin the excellent phrase that m’good friend Lori used while we were comparing after-action reports last night, he’s respectful but not insightful. Almost without exception,every problem with Watchmen as a film can be traced back to one of those two traits – too much respect or not enough insight.

SPOILERS FOR BOTH FILM AND COMIC FROM HERE ON OUT. FAIR WARNING GIVEN.

The scene near the start of the film showing Dan Dreiberg visiting the first Nite Owl, Hollis Mason, is a decent example of showing too much respect for the source material. In the comic, Hollis plays a much bigger part, largely via the excerpts from his autobiography that make up the last few pages of the first three issues. We know him, we empathise with him, we’re upset when he gets killed, a shocking, saddening piece of collateral damage from Rorschach’s crusade. In the movie, Hollis gets that one short scene and is never heard from again. So if you’re not going to develop him as a character why include him at all? We don’t learn anything from the scene that couldn’t have just as easily been included in the (excellent) title montage that sums up the rise, fall and replacement of the Minutemen. The scene doesn’t serve any dramatic purpose so why does it exist? The answer: because it exists in the comic.

A smaller example is Bubastis. In the comic she’s a tiny bit of foreshadowing, an example of the genetic engineering that Ozymandias later uses to create the Space Squid Of Doom. In the film, she’s just a cool (and quite badly animated) pet. Why is she there? Because she was there in the comic.

Ozymandias was a major problem in general, in fact. In the comic he’s portrayed as a cross between John D. Rockerfeller, Bill Gates and Bono. He’s a media star, he’s a philanthropist. Yes, he’s a genius but he’s also approachable and down-to-earth. When the “assassination” attempt occurs, we hear a character saying “Who’d go after a guy like Veidt? He’s a real hero.” When it’s revealed that he’s behind the “mask killings” and then worse – much, much worse – it’s a kick in the gut that’s all the more savage for being totally unexpected.

In the film, he’s a stereotypically superior corporate kingpin. If he’s using his riches to do good works we never see it, beyond one rather nice little speech early on where he’s talking about infinite resources meaning an end to war driven by envy and hate with the twin towers of the World Trade Centre silhouetted behind him. We see him using people as human shields to avoid an attacker’s bullets. When it’s revealed that Veidt is behind the “mask killings” and worse our reaction is “yeah, he seemed the type”.

It feels almost as if the director’s started from the premise of Someone Capable Of Killing Millions To Save The World and worked backwards from there rather than appreciating the nuances of the character as written. In the book Ozymandias is a reflection of Rorschach – the latter is a character who we initially see as a despicable right-wing psychopath but gradually gain a measure of respect for. The former is a character who at first seems noble and sympathetic but who is revealed to be capable of unthinkable atrocity. That symmetry is lost in the film, as are plenty of other subtle parallels and juxtapositions and it’s the poorer experience for it. I don’t mean to sound like I’m complaining that too much has been taken out in the transition from stage to screen, that’s not the issue at all. Almost the opposite in fact – the problem isn’t that Stuff Has Been Taken Out, it’s that the director’s primary concern appears to have been getting as much Stuff into the film as possible, with the structure that that Stuff hangs on a secondary concern.

This is a film that seems to have been made by someone who loves the book too much and understands it too little.

The director’s big stampy bootprints are uncomfortably visible all over the place, making sure that any layers are properly smashed flat. There’s no room for subtext, nothing’s allowed to be hinted at or implied. I could nit-pick any number of examples but I think one sums up Snyder’s approach perfectly. He’s perfectly fine with allowing Rorschach to speak the iconic line;

“No. Not even in the face of Armageddon. Never compromise.”

So long as he then adds:

“That’s the difference between you and me, Daniel.”

For CRYING OUT LOUD. YES. We KNOW that’s the difference between them, you’ve just spent TWO AND A HALF HUGGING HOURS SHOWING US that that’s the difference between them, this line is coming at the end of a scene where they’ve practically specifically DISCUSSED that that’s the difference between them, you’d need to have a MAJOR CONCUSSION not to realise that that’s the difference between them so WHY ON EARTH do you feel the need to SPELL OUT THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THEM, you ENORMOUS HACK?

Honestly, it’s “from my point of view the Jedi are evil!” all over again.

For all that, there was plenty of stuff to like. The look of the film is almost perfect, a couple of dodgy costumes and some extremely dodgy makeup aside. Rorschach is utterly fantastic, and his incarceration is one of the few sequences that the film abridges almost completely successfully – a lot of the detail is gone, but the shape is still right, it’s tense but romps along at a good pace and is comfortably the best section of the movie. Dr. Manhattan comes across as properly unearthly, the Comedian as properly brutal, Nite Owl as properly diffident. The Silk Spectre is OK, but didn’t display anything like the hatred for the Comedian that she shows in the book which rather undermined the Luke I Am Your Father revelation on Mars. The change to the ending is perfectly acceptable. The action scenes are pretty good, albeit over-reliant on slow-mo and maybe erring on the side of “whoa, cool!” a bit too often. 155 minutes shot by amazingly quickly.

I just wish I could have seen a Watchmen movie made by someone who didn’t seem as scared of the source material and the fanbase. I wish I could have seen a Watchmen movie that was more interested in the book’s themes than its look, with its steak rather than its sizzle. I wish I could have seen a Watchmen movie that complimented the comic rather than just trying to duplicate it. I wish I could have seen a Watchmen movie made by Paul Greengrass, basically.

Until that happens, we could do an awful lot worse than the Watchmen movie we’ve already got.