[img]7|left|||no_popup[/img] I have no objection, in principle, to adapting stories from one medium to another, and no particular prejudice towards source materials whether they’re comics, video games or amusement park rides. Although the empirical evidence is a bit on the rare side, good ideas are good ideas and different mediums can, in theory, offer different, equally valuable lenses through which story ideas can be explored. Yet Alan Moore is right to be skeptical as to whether or not any sort of translation can ever be successful or “true,” a skepticism based on the notion that content is intimately tied to form. “With a movie, you are being dragged through the scenario at a relentless 24 frames a second,” he told Wired magazine. “With a comic book you can dart your eyes back to a previous panel, or you can flip back a couple of pages to check whether there is some reference in the dialog to a scene that happened earlier.” The point is that books, even good comic books, require effort on the part of readers to fill in the gaps; reading is an interactive, imaginative effort. Movies, in which audiences sit still while images are blasted onto their retinas, are more often than not passive. One can hardly blame Moore for keeping his name off the film adaptations of his work, particularly when his books contain more material than the main story elements, all of which have, so far, proven far removed from his work.

So the question of whether or not “Watchmen,” the movie, is true to “Watchmen,” the seminal work that took the pulpy comic book and transformed it into the respectable graphic novel, is almost beside the point. As an intellectual exercise, we can catalog the similarities and differences between film and book, although the most jarring elements of the film are those arising from the clash between Snyder’s vision and the vision readers familiar with Moore’s book have formed for themselves. I never imagined, for example, Dr. Manhattan speaking like Elijah Wood’s Frodo, but there’s Billy Crudup giving the god-like being a soft, high-pitched voice that seems anything but substantial. Or how about Jamie Earle Haley’s Rorschach, rendered in the book with jagged speech balloons. This is taken as a cue for Haley to deliver a grating Christian Bale Batman-rasp, which only goes to show that this particular superhero voice needs to be locked into Nolan’s Batman films and never released again. The ever-shifting inkblot mask is cool, though, and it’s a highlight in a film whose costume design perfectly renders the motley mix of garbed “superheroes.” Most of the other characters are pitch-perfect, notably Patrick Wilson as Daniel Dreiberg, aka Nite Owl II, the all-too-human Batman-esque hero who gives the story an emotional grounding just as Rorschach’s absolutism, voice notwithstanding, gives us a moral baseline.

Faithful Adaptation

But director Zack Snyder does hew closely to that intangible measure of faithfulness – “spirit” – enough to agree that David Hayter and Alex Tse’s script is as good an adaptation as one could hope to get. The acid irony in Watchmen – the sexually impotent Batman clone, the ultra-violent reactionary sociopathic version of the film noir detective, the psychopathic Punisher-extreme vigilante, the well-intentioned super-villain – is preserved, as is the terror of global nuclear annihilation. Many scenes are lifted from the book and properly contextualized in the film – a fidelity that the film “V for Vendetta” could have used to avoid its sorry fate as a glib revolutionary tract instead of the Watchmen-beating treatise on anarchy vs. fascism Moore created. The result is a grim, bleak, often gruesomely violent film that is narratively and visually coherent, albeit weighed down by an absurd soundtrack that spans the cloying to the pompous. (Snyder not only uses Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are a’ Changin and Simon & Garfunkel’s The Sound of Silence like jackhammers, but Mozart’s Requiem.) The one glaring exception is the tweaked ending in which the core premise from the book is preserved, but dialog is moved around from one set of characters to another and a curious post-climactic shot creates counter-productive ambiguity in a key character’s motives. While necessary liberties are forgivable, including the addition of geopolitical tension-creating scenes with Nixon, there was no reason not to be literal in translating the last few vital scenes from the book into the movie. The result is a different interpretation than what the book offers.

Look-wise, “Watchmen” is crafted with as much loving attention to detail as Dave Gibbons showed in creating images to go with Moore’s text, but to equally disappointing utilitarian effect. The snappy opening credits offer a retro-stylized montage of scenes and images setting up the alternate-history “Watchmen” universe, a world set in 1985 in which the U.S. won the war in Vietnam, Nixon is serving a fifth Presidential term, and the Doomsday Clock is at four minutes to midnight. It’s about the closest to a distinctive style Snyder achieves, however; the rest of the film has rich cinematography and all the interesting camera angles you could want, but nothing to distinguish the film from any number of post-Matrix special-effects films. For the sake of a thought experiment, picture “Watchmen” as done by Timur Bekmambetov, whose visual style flirts with the bleeding edge to give even trash like “Wanted” a visionary polish.

Rather Pointless, Really

So what we have is a film that is, in many ways, an interesting, not entirely unsuccessful cinematic exercise that is nonetheless unnecessary when the book is there to be read. The film also suffers from the same critical flaw that hollows out the drama in Moore’s book: the moral dilemma of choosing the lesser of two evils in the name of the greater good rendered meaningless by determinism. As embodied in the character of Dr. Manhattan – who simultaneously sees past, present, and future – the problem is not one of destiny, fate, or divine intention, but of pure mechanics. While a clock is the most obvious analogy, a book would serve just as well to represent time in the Watchmen universe. Dr. Manhattan, a puppet who sees the strings, can skip to the book’s end or flip back to the beginning but can’t change the words on the page. This makes the characters mere automatons following a script, devoid of free will and, as result, incapable of making choices. And when choices have no meaning, it doesn’t matter what the characters do or don’t do, and the impetus for drama is lost. For a book filled with morality, humanity and survival, the topic of determinism vs. free will, as represented by so heavy a character as Dr. Manhattan, is thematic bloat that obscures the human experience and take the satisfaction out of storytelling.

Perhaps the ultimate irony is how “Watchmen” has come to define a 21st century outlook – the very outlook it aims, not entirely convincingly, to criticize. Moore laments how “the existence of Watchmen had pretty much doomed the mainstream comic industry to about 20 years of very grim and often pretentious stories that seemed to be unable to get around the massive psychological stumbling block that ‘Watchmen’ had turned out to be, although that had never been my intention with the work.” But there is some hope. After all, even the superior “The Dark Knight,” a grim and gritty film that falls squarely in the warped legacy of Moore’s superhero deconstruction, dares to offer a way out from the gloom.

Entertainment Value: * (out of two)
Technical Quality: ** (out of two)

Watchmen. Directed by Zack Snyder. Screenplay by David Hayter and AlexTse, from the graphic novel written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons. Starring Patrick Wilson, Jamie Earle Haley, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode, Carla Gugino, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and Malin Akerman. 163 minutes. Rated R for strong graphic violence, sexuality, nudity and language.

Frédérik invites you to discuss this film and more at his blog.