by Daniel Erenberg and Joe Ireland

Joe: I think I should start out by saying that I’m no expert when it comes to comics, though I’ve read several series and enjoyed most of the ones that I’ve read, some of them quite a bit. Watchmen is hands-down my favorite comic, so I was super excited when I heard that an adaptation was going to be released, and only slightly less excited when I heard that said adaptation was going to be directed by Zack Snyder (director of 300). I have to say that I enjoyed the movie, though I recognize its flaws (of which there are many).

Daniel: I am an expert on comics, I guess. I’ve been reading them since I was a wee young lad in Brooklyn. My first was a Chris Claremont X-Men book, bought for me by my grandfather when I was 4. I read Watchmen for the first time when I was about 12, and starting to get a little jaded about superhero books. And Watchmen isn’t a superhero book. No, really. It isn’t. It’s a book about how writer Alan Moore sees the world, and what would make it “a stronger, loving world to die in,” as John Cale is quoted in the book. That’s the real problem with Zack Snyder’s bold, but woefully misguided film. He made a cool, flashy, superhero film and ended up with a heartless, if occasionally fun, early summer blockbuster that’s gonna be forgotten in less time than it took the comic to come out in serialized form. Fanboys used to argue on the internet about whether Watchmen should be a film or a TV miniseries, but that’s missing the point. Watchmen is as perfect as comic books get, and no filmed adaptation could replicate it. But I’m a fanboy too. I got excited when I heard about it. I was super-excited when Paul Greengrass (Bloody Sunday, the last two Bourne pictures) was set to direct. And I got choked up at the trailer in front of The Dark Knight last summer. But Watchmen is now a great comic and a very, very bad film. Bummer.

Joe: Something that interests me is that numerous critics have suggested that Watchmen actually suffers from its faithfulness to its source material. It seems to me that Watchmen is a film that was doomed to fail from the start. Other comic book adaptations—most notably The Dark Knight­—are much looser in their interpretations. I can’t imagine that, had Snyder taking a more interpretive approach, it would have been received much more warmly by fans of the comic.

Daniel: Snyder took an odd approach to the film. In some ways, it’s completely faithful. The characters, the plot, a lot of the dialogue and pretty much all of the set design are taken directly from the comic. But, I’ve rarely seen the director of an adaptation so misread a comic. The reason the faithfulness of the film is a hindrance is that the pacing is so bizarre and insane and wrong for a film. Snyder spends about forty minutes on the first issue of the comic, and twenty minutes on the second, and then must race through the rest of the book, giving the film that odd Cliff’s Notes quality that the weaker of the Harry Potter films seem to have. Snyder also gets the film completely wrong tonally. The film is dark, cool and choreographed. There’s something really awkward and real about the comic that is just not captured here at all. The film feels completely wrong. Maybe a more interpretive approach would have been shit on by fans of the comic (and Greengrass had planned on setting the film in present day with a major middle east conflict going on, so he may have been crucified), but Watchmen, a great comic book, which was so prescient when it was created, should be a great and, more importantly, significant film. But Zack Snyder’s Watchmen is a trifling and, worse, forgettable annoyance, destined to be a footnote in comic book history, the way Michael Steven Johnson’s Daredevil or Snyder’s own 300 have become. A lot of people are going to own Watchmen T-shirts now. That’s about the extent of the film’s significance. Whereas the comic is on Time Magazine’s list of the 100 best English-language novels since 1923, the film will be lucky to get a Best Visual Effects nomination at next year’s Oscars.

Joe: The pacing issue is a good point, but I wonder how much of that is attributable to the fact that so much material had to be cut in order to get the movie down to a manageable length for the big screen. It will be interesting to see how the director’s cut, set to come out on DVD sometime later this year, will look and feel, since so much crucial material was left out of the theatrical cut.

I guess I was just super happy to see that the film wasn’t drastically re-interpreted. It would be very easy to try to re-envision the film as, say, a 9/11 allegory, and I was almost sure that that was what was going to happen. I liked the care Snyder took to replicate the film’s look, something the participation of artist David Gibbons no doubt facilitated.

But I definitely agree that, tonally, the film was way off, at times. The fight scenes were particularly painful. One of the great things about the comic book is that the heroes and heroines—with the exception of Dr. Manhattan—are just people. In the movie, they’re all super heroes, or at the very least, possess superhuman powers. How ridiculous was that fight scene in the alleyway, in which Nite Owl and the Silk Spectre gleefully pulverize a gang of thugs?

Daniel: I think a lot of things built up to destroy the tone of the comic book. One of the major ones was the music. The score was melodramatic and silly. It’s most noticeable in the scene when Rorschach and Dan Dreiberg meet up for the first time. It kicks in like some strange relic from early ‘80’s TV, completely undercutting the emotional impact of the scene, which, in the comic, is stark and sad. The song choices aren’t any better, with the notable exception of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” which is used very effectively during the opening credits. “Hallelujah,” by Leonard Cohen is used during the Dan/Laurie sex scene really weirdly, making the scene a joke, as Dan is finally able to get it up after having been impotent in the film thus far. “Hallelujah,” get it? Genius. “All Along The Watchtower” is used to kick off the third act. It’s a song that was mentioned in the comic, so it’s an unsurprising choice for the film, but it feels tired and ridiculous here, narrating Rorschach and Nite Owl’s trip to Ozymandias’s “Watchtower.” The film ends with My Chemical Romance covering Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row,” which I think serves as a wonderful metaphor for the entire movie. It’s a silly, stupid bastardization of something thoughtful and classic.

Joe: Well played. Anyway, the soundtrack was just atrocious—I’ll give you that. And speaking of the sex scene, how horribly awkward and out of place was that?

Daniel: Yeah, but it was hot, dude. I mean, Malin Akerman was giving the second worst performance in the film (after Matthew Goode’s weirdly Dutch-sounding performance as Ozymandias), so I mean, I was cool with her just getting naked and moaning for a bit. I’ve now seen Akerman in four films and she showed her tits in three of them (this, Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle and The Heartbreak Kid). If only she would stay out of potentially good movies, I’d be cool.

Joe: OK, Matthew Goode was terrible. Actually, Snyder’s whole conception of the Ozymandias/Veidt character was just way, way off. He’s charming and likeable in the early scenes of the comic book, whereas from his first appearance in the movie, he’s smug, preachy and clearly villainous. And at the end of the comic book, you actually sense that he regrets having had to kill so many people in the name of peace and international unity, whereas in the movie, he doesn’t seem to regret what he’s done at all.

I intended to defend the film, but I’ve spent more time criticizing it. Look, it’s not a good movie and it’s definitely not a good adaptation, but despite its flaws, I was won over by the stunning visuals, the visceral fight sequences (as tonally inappropriate as they were), and the outstanding performances by Jackie Earle Haley and Patrick Wilson. The movie was uninspired, yes, but there was also something touching about how much Snyder clearly worships the comic book. And some of the sequences (the one in which Jon Osterman transforms into Dr. Manhattan comes to mind) were so brilliantly realized, I simply can’t imagine it being done better by a Paul Greengrass or Terry Gilliam.

Daniel: Zack Snyder seems to be a nice guy, and a big comic book fan. And he gave us a very good remake of Dawn of the Dead, which inspired one of the funniest scenes in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. But now there is a bad Watchmen movie in existence. A really bad one. But, when I saw the film in theaters, during the scene where Rorschach cries out, “I’m not locked up in here with you, you are locked up in here with me,” some stupid bastard behind me, said far too loud, “I need to buy this book!” So there’s that. Maybe shitty movies will give comic books a bit more respect. That’s something I can live with.

Tags: watchmen point/counterpoint zack snyder comic books
March 14, 2009 at 2:37pm ∞