bugpowderdust

The weirdest thing about this was sitting down waiting for it to start, and thinking that I was finally going to see a Watchmen movie after all the false starts over the years. The great unfilmable graphic novel, on the screen at last.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of the background stuff is missing, the text pieces from the end of each issue that fill in so much detail (although a nifty credits sequence does a good job of dishing up the backstory). That aside, it really is surprisingly faithful to the book, down to the level of recreating particular panels throughout, with dialogue taken straight from the novel (Laurie’s mother is even watching the same episode of The Outer Limits at the end!). Indeed,  there were a number of odd little bits that I was skeptical about, thought weren’t quite right, but today I’ve gone back and checked and found them present in the original. It’s extremely well cast – Rorschach is superb, Dan Dreiberg and The Comedian just as good, and no one really lets the side down, not even the much maligned Malin Akerman playing Silk Spectre II, about whom I’d heard so much and so little good. Ozymandias is a bit thin and underdeveloped, but that’s a failing of the script, not the performance.

Of course the big divergence is in the ending. There’s no giant exploding mutant psychic space squid here, but a different route to the same conclusion. This new iteration makes sense, and the GEMPSS is fairly hard to swallow anyway, especially without all the clues to the missing artists that were scattered through the original but missing in the movie, so I’m not going to be crying foul over it.

Paradoxically, the film does so many things right that the things it does get wrong stand out more. I hated the art direction – why is everything so gloomy and grey all the time, even the offices of an international tycoon/ inventor / genius like Adrian Veidt? It’s like since the Tim Burton Batman movies this has become the default setting for all superhero movies, and it is frankly boring now, especially when, as here, the source material is rendered in such vivid primary colours. Compare the famous central spread in “Fearful Symmetry” with its movie counterpart and you’ll see what I mean.

The newstand was underplayed, and probably the one missing thing I’d like to see reinstated. Not seeing the kid and the vendor bitching at each other throughout massively lessens the impact of their final embrace and its acknowledgement of their mutual humanity, not to mention removing the theme of their relationship as a metaphor for world politics that was present throughout the novel. It’s also amusing that a movie so happy to show broken limbs and all kinds of physical nastiness skirts so gingerly around the sexual dysfunction of its heroes. I doubt if anyone coming to this without reading the book would have realised that Dan Dreiberg was supposed to be impotent until he donned the Nite Owl costume again, and while the story of Captain Carnage trying to get beaten up for kicks is kept in for laughs, the suggestion that Hooded Justice or any of the other heroes get an equal thrill from beating people up is quietly dropped.

We’re getting into nitpicking now but if you’re going to go to the trouble of using Hendrix’ All Along The Watchtower as Nite Owl & Rorschach approach Veidt’s Antarctic base to pick up on the original chapter title of “two riders were approaching”, why do you then change it so that they are walking and NOT RIDING? Still in the Antarctic, the book version of Ozymandias’s base features a large painting of Alexander and the Gordian knot, reflecting his somewhat, uh, unorthodox approach to creating world peace. In the movie it’s been replaced by an inscription of Shelley’s famous poem, concerned of course with the way history can undermine boastful pride – I wonder if this is supposed to be a hint that Veidt’s scheme will not work? If so, why would Ozymandias have it on display? It’s enough to do as Moore did and plant the seed in our minds without ramming it down our throats.

These are mostly just quibbles though. It’s a faithful adaptation, obviously done with a great deal of love and respect for the source material, and well worth seeing. Now I’m just waiting for the extended cut on DVD, or a six hour television version…