Now, adapting Watchmen (the graphic novel) is an ambitious task. It's one of the most widely revered graphic novels (comic books? Sequential novels? Oh, that's right, nobody actually cares) of all time, to say nothing of the fact that original writer Alan Moore is vocally and vehemently opposed to any film adaptations of his work. Yet director Zack Snyder and screenwriters David Hayter and Alex Tse set themselves that very task. Ballsy?! Yes. Foolhardy?! Perhaps. Really nerdy?! Most definitely.
Sidenote: I am beyond sick and tired of Watchmen being referred to as the Citizen Kane of comic books. I can't pinpoint exactly why, outside of it just seeming like a lazy way to heap praise onto something. "This is delicious! It truly is the Citizen Kane of nectarines!" "Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal is surely the Citizen Kane of platform video games!"
I saw the film on Sunday night (two for one tickets! The benefits of being a Village Movie Club member! Shit yeah.). For the record, I liked it.
Ultimately, though, I think that the movie's fidelity to the comic is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. A strength, because staying true to the comic gives the movie so much of what makes it a worthwhile endeavour; the depth of character, the moral ambiguity and the intellectual approach to what is, at its heart, a murder mystery with superheroes (I can imagine that's how Snyder pitched it to a studio. "It's a murder mystery... WITH SUPERHEROES! Give me money now," without mentioning the attempted rape or the glowing blue penis).
The weakness in sticking so close to the book is one of pacing. The movie plays out exactly as the book does. There are significantly fewer sequences, of course (those familiar with the book might miss the pirate story, "Tales of the Black Freighter", or the scenes involving characters standing around at a newsstand), but what events are shown unfold exactly the same way as they do in the book. Which leads us to an extended stretch of the film where nothing happens to further the main story, but characters stand around at a funeral remembering their most character-defining moments shared with the dead man. In the comic, this worked fine- comics are a medium built on short 20-to-30 page instalments, and so stories naturally unfold in chunks (This is the issue where the characters have flashbacks about The Comedian. This is the issue where Dr Manhattan stands around on Mars and remembers shit. And so on). In a movie, though, this storytelling style just leaves us feeling like we're taking a long time to get anywhere at all.
The difficulty is that any alternatives would present all new issues. To tell the story in a more chronological fashion- that is, to take the flashbacks and put them at the start, presenting in the same order in which they happened- would lead to a front-loaded film where LOTS happens in the first half hour followed by an Act 2 that slows right down. Learning about all the horrible things the Comedian did in order, right at the start of the film, would also (I suspect) make his character far less interesting.
So, yes, Watchmen is an imperfect adaptation. It was always going to be; the very things that make it such a great comic book (or graphic novel or story-pictures-book or some shit) make it an awkward film. Does this mean it wasn't worth adapting at all? I'd say no. We're still left with a film that is entertaining, if flawed; a film which stands as a response to the recent wave of superhero films the way the original work did to superhero comics.
Presenting superheroes as flawed, mentally unbalanced and ultimately ineffectual was, at the time of the book's publication, a brand new angle. In comics, it no longer is. In films, though, the time seems right for just such an approach. So I applaud Snyder, Hayter and Tse for taking on the task, and doing as good a job as anyone could have expected.
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