WATCHMEN (2009)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

So when Terry Gilliam said the WATCHMEN graphic novel was "unfilmable"-- more or less echoing the opinion of the novel's co-creator Alan Moore-- he was obviously proven wrong when the Zach Snyder adaptation appeared in 2009. Now, Gilliam, like Moore, may have meant that one could not do a GOOD film based on the multi-layered work by Moore and Dave Gibbons. But though Snyder's version has its problems, its shortcomings don't prove total impossibility of good adaptation.

It's fair to say that the time generally allotted to commercial feature films-- usually not over three hours, as WATCHMEN is-- does not allow all the details of an intricately layered prose novel like MOBY DICK or WAR AND PEACE, or a comics-novel of similar complexity. Indeed, in my own review of WATCHMEN, I forewent analyzing the entire scope of the graphic work, instead concentrating upon a major visual trope that played into the narrative's principal themes.

For similar reasons of space, I'm not going to break down the entire plot of the 2009 adaptation. I find it more interesting to explore how Snyder tries to compress the dense storylines of Moore and Gibbons' five principal characters--six, if you count the one who dies at the movie's beginning.

The graphic novel displays skillful syncopation between the main plotline-- the five heroes investigating the murder of their former comrade-- with flashbacks to their past experiences. Snyder is not able to shuttle forth between present and past nearly as well; his transitions range from adequate to clunky. Most modern film-audiences have a limited tolerance for flashbacks, since they interfere with the perceived need for forward momentum in a commercial movie. Snyder includes many of the same minutiae that play into the resolution of the main plot. but he's not able to make the characters play off one another well enough to sell the emotional significance of their past experiences. I tend to connect Snyder's failing in this quarter with his well-known penchant for visual bombast.

The character who gets the best exposure is Doctor Manhattan (Billy Crudup), a formerly ordinary scientist transformed into a godlike atomic superman. In fact, the script by David Hayter and Alex Tse builds up Manhattan's role with respect to the story's climax, and some viewers have preferred the way the Snyder version reworks Moore's resolution. Certainly I think the altered climax works better for a movie, since it cuts down on the number of extraneous details. However, the script also elides most of the human support-characters, which muddies the main theme: the way ordinary humans are bringing their entire existence to the brink of a nuclear doom.

The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is seen only in other character's flashbacks since he's dead from the outset. Still, his significance in illustrating Moore's dark view of America is crystal clear. The same is true of retired superhero Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson), who is the most balanced of the five. Ozymandias (Matthew Goode) proves a much weaker link, for though it's clear early on that he's something of a "Doc Savage" type of superman, not until late in the film does Snyder give the viewers a window into his nature. Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman) has several good scenes as a costumed heroine seeking to find some normalcy after having been the live-in girlfriend of the aforementioned atomic superman. However, the script utterly blows her major revelation-subplot-- her discovery of her parentage-- by not foregrounding that part of her psyche early on. Finally, Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) is the character the script utterly fails to capture, despite a vivid performance by Haley. Alan Moore's original story is partly at fault-- he wasn't able to make up his mind if Rorschach was a super-conservative or a Nietzschean superman. Ironically, many WATCHMEN readers embraced Rorschach as their favorite character, much to the consternation of Alan Moore. But clearly Snyder and his writers played down this character because they didn't quite follow what Moore and Gibbons wanted to communicate with this vigilante personality.

There are some scattered improvements. I was no fan of Moore's Brechtian asides in which he paralleled ongoing plot events to snippets from a gruesome story about piratical savagery. Happily, all those snippets were put aside and adapted into an animated motion-capture project. Moore and Gibbons, preoccupied with satirizing the superhero idiom, skimped on the depiction of the sort of spectacular violence of the genre. Not all of Snyder's violent scenarios work, but I thought he improved on the prison scene, in which Nite Owl and Silk Specter must punch and kick their way through a prison riot in order to liberate a captive Rorschach. Some scenes might have worked better if Snyder and his people had not lumbered them with a plethora of "golden oldies" tunes, all so overly familiar that they often distract rather than enhancing.

I'll wrap up by stating that though I judge the original graphic novel to sustain a high mythic concrescence, I ended up downgrading the "secondary concrescence" of the Snyder film to "fair." Snyder reproduced many of the symbols used by Moore and Gibbons, but he was unable to bring them together to make a strong discourse. If anything, Snyder overdoes the political elements, as if he thinks that's all his audience can understand. This is rather amusing, given that Moore is legendary in many of his comics-works for an political attitude of maximum acidity.