March 6, 2009
Mask Killer
Well, it could have been worse.
Watchmen is too long by a good hour and suffocated by its slavish recreation of panel after panel from the comics, but is at least watchable. It's hard to say whether the movie is helped or hindered by its obsessive faithfulness, since those occasions where the makers do summon up the courage to deviate from the source -- very few in the early stages, more as the thing lumbers on and on and on -- are generally the weakest. This is strangely noticeable in the dialogue, for instance. Much is reproduced verbatim or at least patched together from the page and sounds mannered coming out of actual mouths; but all the new material is so uniformly rubbish, such a complete porridge of vapid Hollywood clichés, that it makes Moore's comicbook stylings sound exactly right.
Zack Snyder does his best, he really does -- who would have thought he had it in him? -- but the poor clodhopper can't quite get past the whole thing as an opportunity for lots of flashy, stylised ultraviolence. Preferably in slow motion, accompanied by glistening arcs of crimson blood and some crass rock music. He knows this stuff is supposed to be ugly, but, you know, it's just so fucking cool.
And given how much of the comic is transcribed to the screen with fetishistic exactness, it's telling that the things that aren't are those things that go right to the soul of the piece, to its essential humanity. To me, the most egregious example comes at the end of Jon and Laurie's Martian excursion. Much of their dialogue is retained; it's clunky and unconvincing as speech but still sort of beautiful. But the lines that tie it up and give the whole sequence -- and in a way the whole book -- its value, are casually dropped. In case you don't remember -- or never knew -- they go like this:
Laurie: But... if me, my birth, if that's a thermodynamic miracle... I mean, you could say that about anybody in the world!
Jon: Yes. Anybody in the world.
There's some more, but that's the really important bit. It sums up exactly what it is about the book that the movie fails to grasp. Why all the peripheral characters are almost entirely absent, and the central ones are all hollow ciphers. Why Watchmen remains, despite this dense but shallow attempt, unfilmable. Because, for all its outlandishness and fantasy, Watchmen is about the ordinary. And blockbusting Hollywood cannot cope with that at all.
Posted by matt at March 6, 2009 7:54 AM