I Watch Watchmen. And Try To Write Coherently About it

Watchmen was one of the more challenging books I read last year. It is a demanding novel with many divergent plots, characters, and themes, and I had mixed reactions to it when I had finished it. Seeing the movie Watchmen today was like re-experiencing the graphic novel because it is particularly faithful to the source material. Revisiting the characters and plot of Watchmen actually made me enjoy the story more than I did immediately after reading the book. I already knew how the whole thing was going to end, and by now I've read plenty of other reviews and had time to actually digest the book. (My reaction to the ending at first was WTH??, and this time around was much more admiration of the brilliance).

Watchmen begins with a sequence I can only describe as "visually stunning" introducing us to the the history of costumed adventurers in the U.S., set to Bob Dylan's "The Times They are a-changin' ". We see the rise and fall of superheros, from the original Minutemen who fought crime in the 1940's who evolved the new group of Watchmen. Most of them are now living out their lives mostly in obscurity. Set in an alternate 1980's where Richard Nixon is still president, the Cold War is at its climax, and costumed adventuring has been outlawed for a few years now.

Watchmen is framed as a type of murder mystery, but in truth it is more of a character study than anything else. The novel gave us close up looks at not only the main Watchmen but also histories of most of the original MinuteMen. The movie wisely sticks to a manageable number of characters. We first meet the Comedian, who is tossed out of his high rise apartment window at the beginning of the movie. Rorschach (played with a particular intensity by Jackie Earle Haley), who has kept to his vigilante ways, investigates the murder.

The only character in Watchmen with any traditional super powers is Dr. Manhattan. He was once an ordinary person, but in a laboratory accident he was endowed with god-like abilities and glowing blue skin. Able to manipulate matter and see the future and the present, he has grown increasingly distant from his girlfriend, Laurie, AKA the Silk Spectre. After she catches him making love to her and working at the same time, she leaves him for the geeky and awkward Nite Owl. He's always held a candle for her, but who can compete with a being who single-handedly won the Vietnam War by exploding the Vietcong?

Watchmen has long been considered unfilmable because of the sheer amount of characters and the nonlinear plot. Based on some of the reviews out there (and Alan Moore's own opinion), there are plenty who think that this movie didn't get it right. I went to the movie uncertain what to expect.

But I went away absolutely amazed. I asked my husband (who has not read the book) if there had been any parts that were hard to follow along, and he said absolutely not. The movie is unusually faithful to the graphic novel, and all the familiar scenes are there. Dr. Manhattan's palace-thing on Mars. Each of the characters at the funeral, remembering who the Comedian was and reflecting on what he had actually stood for. The bizarre antarctic fortress where the ultimate plan is set into motion. Speaking of, although there was a minor change to how the ultimate plan is executed, in the end it doesn't really matter and it kind of works better than the graphic novel anyhow.

And those same questions and themes from the novel are translated well onscreen. What makes a hero? Are any of the Watchmen truly heroes? What motivates a person to dress up in a costume and patrol the streets at night?

Certain things translated even better on screen. Rorschach's mask, which we know in the novel to be a series of changing inkblots, is really cool onscreen. And the action scenes look cool in a way they can't in a novel. However, my one and only gripe with the movie lies in the action scenes. My personal preference is to not watch gratutitous violence, and parts of the movie were not only far more violent than the novel but also much more than they needed to be, period. Do I really need five minutes of Silk Spectre and Nite Owl chopping a group of gang bangers into pieces, when in any type of world approaching reality, the gang would have run off when they first realized that they were outclassed? One of the more effective scenes is when Rorschach dispatches a crime lord who was threatening him earlier. We don't see the actual act, just the blood seeping down the floor. Some other scenes with Rorschach could have shown similar restraint.

My approach was to just look away when there were scenes I knew were going to bother me. If you feel similarly to me, you are now forewarned.

Despite this, I found so much to like about the movie, I still highly recommend it. It clocked in at close to three hours, and it didn't seem to drag at all, unlike say, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, another recent movie I really liked. It is a movie that will satisfy fans of the graphic novel and entertain those who haven't read it yet. (Want some evidence? Here's my husband's review)

Have you seen Watchmen? What did you think?