Well, it’s the morning after the midnight showing of Watchmen, and I just finished reading the graphic novel right before the showing. I thought I’d share some comments, seeing as adapting a comic into a film raises some questions about the change from one medium to another.
Also of note is Alan Moore’s total distancing from the project. Only Dave Gibbons is credited in the film as the artist of the source material.
BEWARE: Spoilers ahead.
Let me say first that it was a very enjoyable movie. The cinematography was great; Gibbon’s art was clearly used as storyboard references for the vast majority of coverage. Which was awesome. The camera moves mimicked the reveal shots of the panels, too.
My main problem is the whole thing feels really truncated. As some other review said, in my skimming of Metacritic, it’s like a Cliffs’ Notes version of Watchmen. A really dense Cliffs’ Notes version, and one that expresses the themes of the movie on the whole – but still misses lots of the nuances of the comic.
For instance, the investigator in the Comedian’s apartment is in the beginning of the film. The scene plays straight from the comic. But we never see him again. He reoccurs several times in Moore’s storyline, and an entire sequence with him being suspicious of Nite Owl and eventually raiding his workshop is totally missing. In my opinion, a great scene that raises the stakes and would have complemented the pacing of the film nicely.
Laurie isn’t a smoker. There’s no interpretation of the very neat looking cigarettes smoked throughout Moore’s novel. It would have motivated Laurie pressing the “Fire” button on Archie. (In the movie, she presses it just for shits.) It would have been a good background item on the streets of NYC.
And speaking of the people of NYC … we hardly see them. Granted, this was obviously done for the sake of the film’s runtime, and something that the mainstream audience probably appreciates. Still, the news vendor bits always hooked me, as well as the black psychiatrist’s growing desire to “really” help people. (That chapter of the novel was really told largely from his perspective. That’s 1lost too.)
What about Seymour and Mr. Godfrey? We don’t get a glimpse of their “office” until Rorshach drops his journal in their drop box. In the film, we don’t even have any idea where it’s arrived. In the comic, it’s very clear that they recieve the journal and ignore it, implying that Rorshach’s words might reveal some truth about the situation if only it were published in time. In the film, we only get the tail end of this.
It’s almost a little insulting to get brief glimpses of side characters and nothing more. ESPECIALLY when we get to see them just before NYC explodes – like the news vendor. Like, “Hey, that guy!!! – oh, he’s dead.”
I was also disappointed that there’s hardly a mention of Hollis Mason, let alone how he and Nite Owl regularly share nostalgic conversations over some beer, and certainly not his death – one of the most shocking and brutal moments of the comic, in my opinion. We get Laurie’s mom, but not Hollis.
Bubastis should be red. Right? Looked cool though.
This is a real nitpick, but when Nite Owl is guessing passwords to Veidt’s computer, he originally types “Rameses,” which is incorrect, and then types “Rameses II” – which is correct. In the film, he doesn’t guess “Rameses” without the II at all. I thought that was a memorable touch in the comic.
And, of course, there’s no alien at all. Granted, it seems a bit strange in the comic, but it makes perfect sense: the Earth would unite to fight off an alien invasion. I was looking forward to seeing all of the destruction caused by the thing, massacred bodies strewn about New York City.
Instead, we get a weird bomb, blamed on Doctor Manhattan. It still unites the Earth, but it’s kind of weird. It doesn’t really change anything; the people still unite (as addressed by Nixon), Rorshach still flees to reveal the truth to the population at large and is killed by Manhattan (except this time, Nite Owl watches), and then he still leaves the planet. There’s an interesting part where Veidt stands still while Nite Owl punches him, and it is intense to see the Owl’s reaction to Rorshach’s body exploding.
The movie did a LOT of things right, though. It adheres to the comic strictly for the most part, and focused on making it work as a film. The parallel action works just as well as it did on paper. The voiceovers are well integrated. Most of the characters are given good screentime, including the Comedian. Billy Crudup is great as Dr. Manhattan; in fact, all of the actors are excellent. I have no qualms with the casting choices (though Adrian seemed very young).
Check out What's On Watchmen's Cutting Room Floor? for some insight on what was actually filmed and not included. Apparently, the DVD version is going to be a little over 3 hours longer and will include Hollis Mason’s death. Cool. Hopefully the DVD contains the film that should have premiered last night.
It’s a great exercise in translating a comic to a film and succeeds in many ways. Still, you don’t get the whole picture that you would in reading the comic; the sometimes poignant ends of the chapters are lost in a blend, the missing side characters detract from the overall atmosphere, and the ending change seems unecessary, if not altogether bad. It’s a film worth seeing, and gets across many major themes of the book, and will introduce it to a lot of new people. For those who dearly love the comic, I feel it will be little more than a companion piece, exhibiting how many of its scenes work fantastically on film, but the larger structure seems somewhat strangled.
