Watchmen

When the film adaptation of one of your favourite books comes out, there are usually two reactions one regularly feels: excitement and caution. With the release of Watchmen I felt both as I lined up with hundreds of other nerds last Friday night. I bought my tickets in advance and organized a Facebook group, and arrived an hour early in order to get prime seats. However, I still had to temper my expectations. The film was being directed by Zack Snyder (300, Dawn of the Dead), whom I admire for his visual effects, action sequences and stunning cinematography, but acknowledge that he doesn't exactly evoke confidence when it comes to making movies with any depth or meaning. He's a popcorn filmmaker, which isn't bad in of itself, but when you're adapting a book that practically changed a medium, you kind of hope there's a Richard Linklater or P.T. Anderson standing close by.

Nevertheless, I wasn't going to miss the comic book-film event of the year, and it wasn't going to change my opinion of the book anyway no matter how good or shitty it was.

The film stays pretty close to the Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons masterpiece about a former group of costumed heroes. If you don't know the plot by now, you should get out from under that rock you've been hiding under. To briefly summarize, after one of their fellow Watchmen is murdered, Rorschach - the group's dark vigilante member - begins an investigation. As the truth slowly begins to reveal itself, a more startling conclusion is inevitably realized.

Of course that's a very tiny part of what Watchmen is about. There's so many layers to the book that it's impossible to name they all here. I guess what appealed to me about it was the level of depth these characters had. Watchmen really changed the medium in the sense that superheroes were no longer just people who put on costumes and fought crime. In the universe Alan Moore created, they could be sociopathic murderers, physicists disconnected from humanity, introverted geniuses, or the children of former superheroes trying to live up to their parents' expectations. It was totally unlike anything I'd read before.

While the Zack Snyder film attempts to stay true to this vision, it unfortunately falls short of bringing out these complexities on screen. This is really a problem of the medium. Film is no place to tell this kind of story. Scenes that work so well in the comic don't translate well on-screen. Take Rorschach's origin. This is one of the best parts of the book because we get to see what made Rorschach into such a violent sociopath, and while I give props to Jackie Earle Haley for his portrayal, the scene where Rorschach explains what drove him to become a murderer feels flat. This is partly due to what's missing - the Kitty Genovese murder is key - but since Snyder has to fit so much else into the story, there's no time to fit everything in.

I think the film did the best it could at adapting the book to screen, but there's just no way anyone could make a really good Watchmen film that's at two-and-a-half hours (I'm amazed they were able to do what they did in 163 minutes!). To their credit, the film is never boring and doesn't feel long either.

Where Watchmen the film trumps Watchmen the comic book is it's ending, which is vastly different than the comic book, and in my opinion much better. I won't spoil it for you, but it's a far more realistic finale and I'm kind of surprised Moore never thought of it himself.

There were some poor casting choices made too. Malin Ackerman is hot, but her acting could use a boost of energy. I also would have preferred a different choice for Ozymandias. Matthew Goode doesn't really look like he's in such great shape, at least not in the way he should be. And Billy Crudup's voice is far too soft to portray Dr. Manhattan, which I always pictured being more baritone.

I still recommend Watchmen, but with strong reservations. It's an enjoyable film, but it doesn't really give you the same level of appreciation of comic book superheroes that the Watchmen comic does.