Watching Watchmen

"Okay, see, basically none of the people in this picture are in the movie, but they're all really important to the alternate history of the storyline because... Hey, where are you going?"

How big of a geek am I? Well, the newspaper I work for (so, geeky thing #1 right there) went on strike this week, garnering national news coverage and missing publication for the first time in over a century, and in my blog I’m opting to talk about a movie I saw which features the world’s most awkward sex scene and a lifetime supply of glowing blue dick (and trust me, that’s a lot of glowing blue dick).

If you aren’t familiar with the Watchmen graphic novel, probably the only thing more perplexing to you than the trailers (which featured a guy with an inkblot test for a face, a flying glass machine on Mars, and people making out in front of a nuclear explosion) was the reactions of the people in the audience who were familiar with the graphic novel (sweating, grabbing inhalers, more sweating). I can’t blame you; people have tried to ask me what Watchmen is about, and despite an all-encompassing love of basically every element of the story, I really can’t explain it. I feel like the first major stumbling block is when I say “alternate history,” because a lot of people don’t get what that is, and those who do get it tend to roll their eyes when they hear it (take it from me, the one writing an alternate-history novel). Because of this, I had always felt that even if a Watchmen movie were to be made in a manner that did not suck, it would be a huge financial flop because most people in the country haven’t read the graphic novel, and would thus assume that it was some sort of softcore porn movie about Blue Man Group or something.

However, if there was anyone who could take one of the most densely layered and complex stories in the past 25 years and turn it into a feature length film, it would be Watchmen’s director, Zack Snyder. Zack Snyder has only made three movies counting this one, but thanks to his directorial prowess every one of his films has been literally overflowing with raw, unrefined kickass. Furthermore, each film is defined by a crowning moment of pure insanity. In Dawn of the Dead it’s a zombie woman giving birth to a zombie baby, in 300 it’s King Leonidus and his men building a wall of dead Persians and then tipping that wall of Persians over so that it crushes a bunch of other Persians, and in Watchmen it’s Lee Iacocca getting shot in the fucking face. For those of you not up to date on your famous entrepreneurs of the 1980s, Lee Iacocca was the CEO of Chrysler from 1978 to 1992, and is credited with saving what had once been a fledgling auto company from bankruptcy. Furthermore, Lee Iacocca is nowhere to be found in the original graphic novel. What this means is that Zack Snyder looked at the script for Watchmen and said, “Yeah, that’s good – but I think we should blow Iacocca’s brains out.” And by golly, he did. Iacocca, apparently, is not amused.

It’s these little departures from the source content – and I’m referring here to spontaneously murdering a captain of industry – that really made Watchmen shine for me. I was surprised at how closely the film stuck to the graphic novel, right on down to dialogue and order of events. However, as great as it is to see all the stuff I’d read more times than probably is healthy on the big screen, it was even better to see the places where Snyder had decided that his vision was cooler than that of the original author’s. In the graphic novel, there is not a scene wherein two spandex clad heroes beat the crap out of about 30 rioting prisoners with their bare hands; however, in the movie it is both perfect and totally awesome.* Also, fifth-term President Nixon and his cabinet gather to discuss mutually assured destruction in a war room that looks exactly like the one from Dr. Strangelove, which actually made me yelp with pseudo-orgasmic, cult film and cult graphic novel synthesis glee.

*This could also be because I’ve wasted entire days of my life this term doing research on the best rehabilitative methods for prisoners as part of my Info Hell project, and it was nice to just see some of those bastards get the beat down for wasting so much of my time.

The adherence to the source content is also one of Watchmen’s biggest flaws, for two reasons. The first is that some scenes do not need to be replicated in the same, shot-for-frame detail as in the graphic novel. To be honest, Zack Snyder really only made about half of a movie – for the rest of it he just referred to the graphic novel for all of his framing and dialogue, moved his actors around accordingly, and turned on the camera. While it’s admirable to try and please the fanboys, Zack Snyder was sticking so close to the source that I feel like he thought they were going to burn down his house if he left too many of his own fingerprints on the material.

The second reason is that Snyder clearly shot several hours of footage, perhaps intending to release all of it on the DVD, but the movie is only (yes, only) two hours and 45 minutes long. A whole lot of footage had to be cut, and in a few places the choppiness is evident. Where, for example, did Silk Spectre II get the gun she uses at the end of the movie? Who are the reporters who receive the journal? I feel certain that the answers to these questions are on film somewhere, but most audiences won’t see them until they buy the extended edition DVD in a few months. Had Snyder taken one or two liberties with the original story, he could’ve made a more cohesive movie that was capable of standing on its own two feet, rather than creating a pseudo-fantasy world in which women can produce guns out of thin air and overweight men spill ketchup on their shirts.*

*This probably doesn’t make any sense at all if you haven’t seen the movie, but then again, I don’t suppose this post does either.

Overall, though, I was pleased with Watchmen. It did the story justice and serves as an awesome experience for readers of the graphic novel – everyone else, however, would do well to read a copy before buying a ticket. There isn’t much in the movie that I’d change, save for an overly long and remarkably graphic superhero sex scene, the awkwardness of which doubles if you see it with your girlfriend. And doubles again if she hasn’t read the graphic novel.

And doubles again if she’s been listening to you rave about how great the naked blue guy superhero porn movie is for the past six weeks.

Truman Capps also applauds the use of 99 Luftballoons in a big budget superhero blockbuster – if there was anything that could’ve saved Spider Man 3, it would’ve been that.