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shadowkatThe WATCHMEN - the comic book and its road to become a film
In 1986, a 12 issue serial hit the area comic book stores with a vengeance, selling out as fast as it was ordered. I remember, at the time, the comic book store owner telling me that I really needed to try this thing - even though it was almost impossible to get a copy. I was fairly new to the medium (comics and graphic novels) - discovered it in the fall of 1985 in a college dorm room, as a friend pulled out her treasured comics and related to me the stories of each and every character - from Kitty Pryde, Logan, Scott Summers, Jean Grey, to Peter Parker. A sucker for stories, any story, particularly stories that took place in fantastical realms and had an element of science to them - plus a lover of art, I fell in love at first sight.
Comics back then aren't what they are today, the information revolution has changed how we percieve comic books along with a whole host of other information - as it has changed the distribution of that information. Back in the 1980s, sci-films, fantasy films, and well films based on comics - weren't as advanced as they are now, we simply did not have the technology back then to recreate the worlds depicted inside them. Also, when Watchmen first hit the stores it was different than anything out there. Watchmen came out before Persepolis was ever published, Maus (1992), The Dark Night Returns (Summer 1986, around the same time as Watchmen), or Sin City (1991). Sandman wasn't written until (1989). Sure V for Vendetta came out before it, but V was drawn mostly in Black and White and was not nearly as ambitious as Watchmen. And the Japanese Magna? Was hard to come by. It didn't populate the book shelves of libraries, book stores, and comic establishments in towns such as Colorado Springs, Kansas City or to my knowledge New York City, until the late 90s. I didn't see a magna comic book until 1998, after I'd lived in NYC for about two years. Nor were comic books for that matter treated as books and placed on the shelves of a book store until the turn of century.
Watchmen took an almost Citizen Kane perspective on story-telling. It told the story from multiple perspectives, jumping into backstories, doing a comic within a comic, providing extras at the back like an interview with one of the lead characters, and a psych profile on another one. Reading the comic was a bit like reading War & Peace by Tolstoy. It wasn't something you raced through, and if you took the time, or read it more than once, you picked up another layer each round. Also, unlike most of the super-hero action comics out there - it was directed at a male adult audience, as opposed to an adolescent male audience or pre-adolescent. I state male, because like or not, that was who the industry catered to back then. Women, like myself, who read comics, were few and far between. Oh, we were there, but weren't the big buyers and we didn't spend hours talking about it in a little huddle with the comic store owner arguing plot mechanics. So, the industry tended for the most part to ignore our existence, or assume we didn't read them. I have lost count of the number of men who told me that their wives/girlfriends got impatient with their comic habit.
The story itself, much like V for Vendetta, published just two years prior, and written by Alan Moore - was and is for the most part a political allegory.
Allegory is a form of extended metaphor, in which objects, persons, and actions in a narrative, are equated with the meanings that lie outside the narrative itself. The underlying meaning has moral, social, religious, or political significance, and characters are often personifications of abstract ideas as charity, greed, or envy.
Thus an allegory is a story with two meanings, a literal meaning and a symbolic meaning.
defined here: http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/lit_terms/allegory.html
Watchmen is not a story about survival or one told to comfort or make you feel safe. It is a horror tale told within the boundaries of the film noir/hardboiled crime fiction genre, that is meant to promote a specific theme.
And if you weren't cognizant or older than 13 during the 1980s, the political allegory may to an extent be completely lost on you. Not to mention some of the jokes. To an extent, not a great one, but to an extent, Watchmen is a product of its time period and as a result somewhat dated. I'm not sure people under the age of 31 can fully appreciate the jokes regarding Richard Nixon, the allusions to Regan (who Moore clearly thought wasn't that much of an improvement and they might as well be one and the same, can't say I completely disagree on that one), the whole Cold War era, the annoyance the rest of world had with "superpowers" who with a flip of a button could blow us all up (an annoyance that if anything has just gotten worse over time), and the constant threat of nuclear war - back then we were as terrified of nuclear war as we currently are of terrorists. The 1980s were filled with Nuclear War/Radiation Horror movies, both on TV and in the theaters. We were convinced in the 1980s that the end of the world was just around the corner and we would not live to see 1999.
The allegorical aspect is one of the reasons why I had problems reading the Watchmen way back in 1980s, because allegory can be a bit tough to stomach and a tad on the preachy side. It's not for everyone. I tend to like character driven stories, and allegorical stories aren't character driven they are thematically driven, the characters pawns to drive the theme. They also have be pretty tightly written to make any sense. Watchmen is considered brillant by a lot of people because not only is it tightly written, but the characters actually aren't just pawns, they have back stories and do to an extent live outside of their metaphors. Also, reading the series is a bit like playing with a puzzle box, you have to pay attention to a lot of things at once.
I'd have been fine with the puzzle box bit, but since Watchmen takes place in the bleak and violent world of hardboiled noir fiction, it's not necessarily the most pleasant place to be especially if you happen to be a 20-something woman, struggling to find her place in a predominately male world. I wish I could say it was worse or harder back then, but it wasn't, just different.
That said, I admittedly don't remember the comic that well. I haven't looked at it since 1989, possibly for those reasons. Or even really discussed it since that time. I do know, being a bit of comics/film nerd, that Hollywood has been attempting to make a movie out of it for the past 20 years. For a while they thought the movie was impossible to make. The comic is almost too convoluted and busy for a two-three hour movie. Also, the best part of the comic was the visuals. David Gibbons art changed how people did art. Up until The Watchmen - most comics kept within the constrained boxes. But Gibbons allowed characters to jump outside of those lines. Also it was graphic in its depictions of sex and violence. Most comics shyed away from such depictions due to guidelines regarding decency - set years ago. But, times have changed. In past six years, films based on graphic novels have done amazingly well - dark films, gritty hard-boiled action films. Most of Moore's work has made it to the screen as has, Frank Millers. V for Vendetta, Sin City, The Dark Knight, and The Spirit are just a few of them - and with possibly exception of The Spirit (which was not written by Moore or Miller, even though Miller did the film version) - all have done very well. So it was just a matter of time before the grand-daddy of novels, Watchmen got made.
I wasn't even sure it would make to movie theaters. Warner Brothers had bought, or so they thought, the property from Paramount, who in turn thought they'd gotten it free and clear from 20th Century Fox. But, apparently Fox never gave up its rights to the property. Fox got the court to issue an injunction until the case was eventually settled in February and the film got released as scheduled in March.
FILM REVIEW - WHO WATCHES THE WATCHMEN
I saw the film last night with a friend, who had not read the comic, but was a fan of that type of genre and about my age, so remembered the 80s as I did. We didn't talk much about it, afterwards. She appeared to like it well enough for what it was. Most of our conversation regarding the film was on the score - or music. Which we agreed was excellent. It may be the best use of music in a film of this sort that I've seen in quite some time. Not only were the songs perfectly chosen to reflect the plot, character, and themes the director wanted to get across, but they fit the time period (these were the songs I was listening to back then), and with their use provided us with another look at the meanings of the lyrics and song itself. For example - this is the first time I think I've seen Leonard Cohen's song Hallejuha, as sung by Cohen, used as the background music for a pivotal, graphic, and somewhat angsty (depending on how you interpret it) sex scene. The music added to the scene and the scene added something to the music. If you listen closely to Cohen's lyrics to that song - the Hallejuha is well, about sexual connection/disconnection.
My first comment to my friend, after the film was over, was: Well, it's like the comic.
I have the same problems with it that I had with the comic, and I like it for the same reasons I liked the comic. Granted it doesn't have everything that the comic had, but like I stated before - this is sort of impossible. Snyder, as with 300, is very good at bringing violent hard-boiled graphic novels to life.
The film is directed by 300's Zack Snyder, and stars Jackie Earl Haley (Rorschache), Jeffrey Dean Morgan (The Comedian), Billy Crudup (Dr. Manhattan), Patrick Wilson (Nite Owl), Matthew Goode (Ozymandias), Malin Ackerman (Silk Spectra) and Carla Gugino (as the original Silk Spectra - Spectra's mother).
The story is fairly simple - it's a detective story - Roscharch, performed brilliantly by Jackie Earl Haley, is hunting down the killer of his colleague, The Comedian. To find him, he follows and researchs each of his colleagues - the members of a superhero group called The Watchmen, whose predecessors, we are told were The Minutemen - who'd been set up by the police to catch masked villians. The only member from the Minutmen that is with The Watchmen is The Comedian. The superheros, much like other weapons including Homeland Security, were initially created to oppose and resolve a threat.
Each character in the film is an allegory of a superhero/fictional trope, while at the same time representative of nuclear fear/political tropes. Dr. Manhattan - is both Superman/Clark Kent as well as David Banner/Incredible Hulk, while at the same time he is representative of Oppenheimer and the others who worked on the infamous Manhattan Project and built the atomic bomb, which was tested in Nevada, and resulted in so many deaths here and abroad. At the center of his storyline - is the tale of how all those around him got cancer and died. In the comic - Dr. Manhattan is the US's superweapon against the world, but at what cost? The weapon that could end up destroying us or bring us peace by deterrance? Then there's Arnold Veidt or Ozymandias - the mighty king of Pharoes, who lies in the dust. He's also an allegory - The Flash/the world's fastest man, Arnold Schwezzernegger, and to a degree representative of the Captialist, who builds the corporations, and runs the world through them - a modern day Oz or Alexandre the Great. Making a profit with his alleged heroism. And The Comedian - a sort of psuedo Captain America, with his stars and stripes, and funny yellow smiley face button, but no loyalty to anything but violence. The cover of the Watchmen graphic novel is the Comedian's smiley face button up close with a drop, be it blood or ketchup, on one side.
Watchmen like Citizen Kane and Sunset Boulevard starts with a death, in this case a murder. Then we move about with the hard-boiled sociopathic detective, Rorshache, who shares a history with Humphrey Bogart's Philip Marlow and Paul Newman's Harper, and an endless line of equally nihilistic, angry detectives, to determine why the murder happened. It's not a how story - we know the how, already, we are shown it in graphic detail, but we do not know the why and the who. Like Citizen Kane - the tale appears at first glance to be about the murder suspect, focusing in on his smiley face button or "rosebud", but in truth it's not, it is about everyone around him, including the viewer who is watching, the lense shifts around to us.
Allegories often work as cautionary tales - telling us how not to behave, that if we choose to go down this path in the forest, the witch will capture us and eat us. The Comedian, we are shown treats life with disdain. As do many of the characters in this world. They are endowed with super abilities, Manhattan can deconstruct and vaporize matter with but a touch of his finger. Veidt can outrun anyone, he can see everything in precise detail, yet feels nothing himself or so it seems. This is a world that permitted superheroes, where the masked avengers leaped off the pages of the dime store comics and saved the world. But the question both the film and Moore in his book pose is - a big What if? What if such a thing was possible, what if there were people who existed who had that amount of power? It's not completely fantastical - here's where the allegory comes into play, in the 1980s, heck even today, we have people in power who with a touch of a button can kill us all. The President of US has the ability to declare nuclear war on another country. The idea itself, is terrifying. Here, Moore asks, what if it actually happened again? Dr. Manhattan - Hiroshima, Nagaski - the ability to destroy to win.
But all is not bleak in The Watchmen, even if the protagonist, Rorschach's view is. A counter-point is provided in the somewhat nebbish Nite-Owl, and optimistic Silk Spectra, also known as Miss Jupiter or rather the inheritor of her mother, the original Miss Jupitor's title. Nite Owl with his gadgets reminds us of Batman and Iron Man, except without the wicked intelligence, the drinking problem, the violence, and is to a degree an impotent coward. Silk Spectra like most women in these tales is in a supporting role, she's barely there, the girl-friend, the daughter, the side-kick. She's pretty, she's supportive, and she speaks about life and hope. The male ideal giftwrapped. For this is not woman's tale, it is a man's tale, and man's point of view. Which I think, much to the filmmaker's chagrin, may to an extent limit its universal appeal? Then again maybe not. It is yet another issue I had with both the comic and the film. I liked it, don't get me wrong, but I wish...words fail. At any rate, Nite Owl and Silk Spectra provide the almost cartoony hope in the center. But it is cartoony and therefore not quite real. They are liars, we are told, to us and to themselves, living a false reality, too cowardly to face the harsh truth that Rorshach, the protagonist and through whose eyes the story is told, is deseperate to relate.
If the film is meant to be a faithful adaptation of the comics, it works as one, neither illuminating nor commenting on the prior work. And that may be it's one weakness. Deritive works or works adapted from the original work best when they comment on the original, illuminate it, critique it, or expand upon it in some way. I think the director shyed around from doing this for understandable reasons - The Watchmen has a violently obsessive fan base, who would not have been tolerant of anything less than a faithful or close to faithful adaptation. But, the resistence to expand on the original or comment on it, does make the film less interesting than The Dark Knight and in some regards less memorable. As I watched the film The Watchmen, I found myself remembering the graphic novel, both its flaws and bits of brilliance - the language, while pretentious at times, also is lyrical and resonates. As did some of the art. It is not a comic one forgets easily. And the film is not forgettable either for the same reasons.
But it doesn't say anything more than what its original creators did. You might as well, just read the original, and skip the adpatation. I'm not sure the adaptation adds anything, nor do I think you can watch it instead of.
Snyder's film, to me, felt like an abridged two dimensional version of the graphic novel, complete with sound and music. And the music was quite good, I want the soundtrack. It highlighted the central points - such as the whole "Watch" bit - the inner workings of a "watch" and the idea of watching others behavior, tracking it, acting as judge and jury, while at the same time, wondering who watches you. Some of the political commentary was lost, but not much, and I'm not sure today's audience would have appreciated it anyhow.
Overall? I enjoyed the film in much the same way I enjoyed the comic, with reservations.
It made me think and it capped a lovely and productive day, the best day I've had in about a month and a half. Had a great time watching it, was completely absorbed, except for a bit towards the end. And it is definitely a film that you have to see on a big screen and in a movie theater.
In 1986, a 12 issue serial hit the area comic book stores with a vengeance, selling out as fast as it was ordered. I remember, at the time, the comic book store owner telling me that I really needed to try this thing - even though it was almost impossible to get a copy. I was fairly new to the medium (comics and graphic novels) - discovered it in the fall of 1985 in a college dorm room, as a friend pulled out her treasured comics and related to me the stories of each and every character - from Kitty Pryde, Logan, Scott Summers, Jean Grey, to Peter Parker. A sucker for stories, any story, particularly stories that took place in fantastical realms and had an element of science to them - plus a lover of art, I fell in love at first sight.
Comics back then aren't what they are today, the information revolution has changed how we percieve comic books along with a whole host of other information - as it has changed the distribution of that information. Back in the 1980s, sci-films, fantasy films, and well films based on comics - weren't as advanced as they are now, we simply did not have the technology back then to recreate the worlds depicted inside them. Also, when Watchmen first hit the stores it was different than anything out there. Watchmen came out before Persepolis was ever published, Maus (1992), The Dark Night Returns (Summer 1986, around the same time as Watchmen), or Sin City (1991). Sandman wasn't written until (1989). Sure V for Vendetta came out before it, but V was drawn mostly in Black and White and was not nearly as ambitious as Watchmen. And the Japanese Magna? Was hard to come by. It didn't populate the book shelves of libraries, book stores, and comic establishments in towns such as Colorado Springs, Kansas City or to my knowledge New York City, until the late 90s. I didn't see a magna comic book until 1998, after I'd lived in NYC for about two years. Nor were comic books for that matter treated as books and placed on the shelves of a book store until the turn of century.
Watchmen took an almost Citizen Kane perspective on story-telling. It told the story from multiple perspectives, jumping into backstories, doing a comic within a comic, providing extras at the back like an interview with one of the lead characters, and a psych profile on another one. Reading the comic was a bit like reading War & Peace by Tolstoy. It wasn't something you raced through, and if you took the time, or read it more than once, you picked up another layer each round. Also, unlike most of the super-hero action comics out there - it was directed at a male adult audience, as opposed to an adolescent male audience or pre-adolescent. I state male, because like or not, that was who the industry catered to back then. Women, like myself, who read comics, were few and far between. Oh, we were there, but weren't the big buyers and we didn't spend hours talking about it in a little huddle with the comic store owner arguing plot mechanics. So, the industry tended for the most part to ignore our existence, or assume we didn't read them. I have lost count of the number of men who told me that their wives/girlfriends got impatient with their comic habit.
The story itself, much like V for Vendetta, published just two years prior, and written by Alan Moore - was and is for the most part a political allegory.
Allegory is a form of extended metaphor, in which objects, persons, and actions in a narrative, are equated with the meanings that lie outside the narrative itself. The underlying meaning has moral, social, religious, or political significance, and characters are often personifications of abstract ideas as charity, greed, or envy.
Thus an allegory is a story with two meanings, a literal meaning and a symbolic meaning.
defined here: http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/lit_terms/allegory.html
Watchmen is not a story about survival or one told to comfort or make you feel safe. It is a horror tale told within the boundaries of the film noir/hardboiled crime fiction genre, that is meant to promote a specific theme.
And if you weren't cognizant or older than 13 during the 1980s, the political allegory may to an extent be completely lost on you. Not to mention some of the jokes. To an extent, not a great one, but to an extent, Watchmen is a product of its time period and as a result somewhat dated. I'm not sure people under the age of 31 can fully appreciate the jokes regarding Richard Nixon, the allusions to Regan (who Moore clearly thought wasn't that much of an improvement and they might as well be one and the same, can't say I completely disagree on that one), the whole Cold War era, the annoyance the rest of world had with "superpowers" who with a flip of a button could blow us all up (an annoyance that if anything has just gotten worse over time), and the constant threat of nuclear war - back then we were as terrified of nuclear war as we currently are of terrorists. The 1980s were filled with Nuclear War/Radiation Horror movies, both on TV and in the theaters. We were convinced in the 1980s that the end of the world was just around the corner and we would not live to see 1999.
The allegorical aspect is one of the reasons why I had problems reading the Watchmen way back in 1980s, because allegory can be a bit tough to stomach and a tad on the preachy side. It's not for everyone. I tend to like character driven stories, and allegorical stories aren't character driven they are thematically driven, the characters pawns to drive the theme. They also have be pretty tightly written to make any sense. Watchmen is considered brillant by a lot of people because not only is it tightly written, but the characters actually aren't just pawns, they have back stories and do to an extent live outside of their metaphors. Also, reading the series is a bit like playing with a puzzle box, you have to pay attention to a lot of things at once.
I'd have been fine with the puzzle box bit, but since Watchmen takes place in the bleak and violent world of hardboiled noir fiction, it's not necessarily the most pleasant place to be especially if you happen to be a 20-something woman, struggling to find her place in a predominately male world. I wish I could say it was worse or harder back then, but it wasn't, just different.
That said, I admittedly don't remember the comic that well. I haven't looked at it since 1989, possibly for those reasons. Or even really discussed it since that time. I do know, being a bit of comics/film nerd, that Hollywood has been attempting to make a movie out of it for the past 20 years. For a while they thought the movie was impossible to make. The comic is almost too convoluted and busy for a two-three hour movie. Also, the best part of the comic was the visuals. David Gibbons art changed how people did art. Up until The Watchmen - most comics kept within the constrained boxes. But Gibbons allowed characters to jump outside of those lines. Also it was graphic in its depictions of sex and violence. Most comics shyed away from such depictions due to guidelines regarding decency - set years ago. But, times have changed. In past six years, films based on graphic novels have done amazingly well - dark films, gritty hard-boiled action films. Most of Moore's work has made it to the screen as has, Frank Millers. V for Vendetta, Sin City, The Dark Knight, and The Spirit are just a few of them - and with possibly exception of The Spirit (which was not written by Moore or Miller, even though Miller did the film version) - all have done very well. So it was just a matter of time before the grand-daddy of novels, Watchmen got made.
I wasn't even sure it would make to movie theaters. Warner Brothers had bought, or so they thought, the property from Paramount, who in turn thought they'd gotten it free and clear from 20th Century Fox. But, apparently Fox never gave up its rights to the property. Fox got the court to issue an injunction until the case was eventually settled in February and the film got released as scheduled in March.
FILM REVIEW - WHO WATCHES THE WATCHMEN
I saw the film last night with a friend, who had not read the comic, but was a fan of that type of genre and about my age, so remembered the 80s as I did. We didn't talk much about it, afterwards. She appeared to like it well enough for what it was. Most of our conversation regarding the film was on the score - or music. Which we agreed was excellent. It may be the best use of music in a film of this sort that I've seen in quite some time. Not only were the songs perfectly chosen to reflect the plot, character, and themes the director wanted to get across, but they fit the time period (these were the songs I was listening to back then), and with their use provided us with another look at the meanings of the lyrics and song itself. For example - this is the first time I think I've seen Leonard Cohen's song Hallejuha, as sung by Cohen, used as the background music for a pivotal, graphic, and somewhat angsty (depending on how you interpret it) sex scene. The music added to the scene and the scene added something to the music. If you listen closely to Cohen's lyrics to that song - the Hallejuha is well, about sexual connection/disconnection.
My first comment to my friend, after the film was over, was: Well, it's like the comic.
I have the same problems with it that I had with the comic, and I like it for the same reasons I liked the comic. Granted it doesn't have everything that the comic had, but like I stated before - this is sort of impossible. Snyder, as with 300, is very good at bringing violent hard-boiled graphic novels to life.
The film is directed by 300's Zack Snyder, and stars Jackie Earl Haley (Rorschache), Jeffrey Dean Morgan (The Comedian), Billy Crudup (Dr. Manhattan), Patrick Wilson (Nite Owl), Matthew Goode (Ozymandias), Malin Ackerman (Silk Spectra) and Carla Gugino (as the original Silk Spectra - Spectra's mother).
The story is fairly simple - it's a detective story - Roscharch, performed brilliantly by Jackie Earl Haley, is hunting down the killer of his colleague, The Comedian. To find him, he follows and researchs each of his colleagues - the members of a superhero group called The Watchmen, whose predecessors, we are told were The Minutemen - who'd been set up by the police to catch masked villians. The only member from the Minutmen that is with The Watchmen is The Comedian. The superheros, much like other weapons including Homeland Security, were initially created to oppose and resolve a threat.
Each character in the film is an allegory of a superhero/fictional trope, while at the same time representative of nuclear fear/political tropes. Dr. Manhattan - is both Superman/Clark Kent as well as David Banner/Incredible Hulk, while at the same time he is representative of Oppenheimer and the others who worked on the infamous Manhattan Project and built the atomic bomb, which was tested in Nevada, and resulted in so many deaths here and abroad. At the center of his storyline - is the tale of how all those around him got cancer and died. In the comic - Dr. Manhattan is the US's superweapon against the world, but at what cost? The weapon that could end up destroying us or bring us peace by deterrance? Then there's Arnold Veidt or Ozymandias - the mighty king of Pharoes, who lies in the dust. He's also an allegory - The Flash/the world's fastest man, Arnold Schwezzernegger, and to a degree representative of the Captialist, who builds the corporations, and runs the world through them - a modern day Oz or Alexandre the Great. Making a profit with his alleged heroism. And The Comedian - a sort of psuedo Captain America, with his stars and stripes, and funny yellow smiley face button, but no loyalty to anything but violence. The cover of the Watchmen graphic novel is the Comedian's smiley face button up close with a drop, be it blood or ketchup, on one side.
Watchmen like Citizen Kane and Sunset Boulevard starts with a death, in this case a murder. Then we move about with the hard-boiled sociopathic detective, Rorshache, who shares a history with Humphrey Bogart's Philip Marlow and Paul Newman's Harper, and an endless line of equally nihilistic, angry detectives, to determine why the murder happened. It's not a how story - we know the how, already, we are shown it in graphic detail, but we do not know the why and the who. Like Citizen Kane - the tale appears at first glance to be about the murder suspect, focusing in on his smiley face button or "rosebud", but in truth it's not, it is about everyone around him, including the viewer who is watching, the lense shifts around to us.
Allegories often work as cautionary tales - telling us how not to behave, that if we choose to go down this path in the forest, the witch will capture us and eat us. The Comedian, we are shown treats life with disdain. As do many of the characters in this world. They are endowed with super abilities, Manhattan can deconstruct and vaporize matter with but a touch of his finger. Veidt can outrun anyone, he can see everything in precise detail, yet feels nothing himself or so it seems. This is a world that permitted superheroes, where the masked avengers leaped off the pages of the dime store comics and saved the world. But the question both the film and Moore in his book pose is - a big What if? What if such a thing was possible, what if there were people who existed who had that amount of power? It's not completely fantastical - here's where the allegory comes into play, in the 1980s, heck even today, we have people in power who with a touch of a button can kill us all. The President of US has the ability to declare nuclear war on another country. The idea itself, is terrifying. Here, Moore asks, what if it actually happened again? Dr. Manhattan - Hiroshima, Nagaski - the ability to destroy to win.
But all is not bleak in The Watchmen, even if the protagonist, Rorschach's view is. A counter-point is provided in the somewhat nebbish Nite-Owl, and optimistic Silk Spectra, also known as Miss Jupiter or rather the inheritor of her mother, the original Miss Jupitor's title. Nite Owl with his gadgets reminds us of Batman and Iron Man, except without the wicked intelligence, the drinking problem, the violence, and is to a degree an impotent coward. Silk Spectra like most women in these tales is in a supporting role, she's barely there, the girl-friend, the daughter, the side-kick. She's pretty, she's supportive, and she speaks about life and hope. The male ideal giftwrapped. For this is not woman's tale, it is a man's tale, and man's point of view. Which I think, much to the filmmaker's chagrin, may to an extent limit its universal appeal? Then again maybe not. It is yet another issue I had with both the comic and the film. I liked it, don't get me wrong, but I wish...words fail. At any rate, Nite Owl and Silk Spectra provide the almost cartoony hope in the center. But it is cartoony and therefore not quite real. They are liars, we are told, to us and to themselves, living a false reality, too cowardly to face the harsh truth that Rorshach, the protagonist and through whose eyes the story is told, is deseperate to relate.
If the film is meant to be a faithful adaptation of the comics, it works as one, neither illuminating nor commenting on the prior work. And that may be it's one weakness. Deritive works or works adapted from the original work best when they comment on the original, illuminate it, critique it, or expand upon it in some way. I think the director shyed around from doing this for understandable reasons - The Watchmen has a violently obsessive fan base, who would not have been tolerant of anything less than a faithful or close to faithful adaptation. But, the resistence to expand on the original or comment on it, does make the film less interesting than The Dark Knight and in some regards less memorable. As I watched the film The Watchmen, I found myself remembering the graphic novel, both its flaws and bits of brilliance - the language, while pretentious at times, also is lyrical and resonates. As did some of the art. It is not a comic one forgets easily. And the film is not forgettable either for the same reasons.
But it doesn't say anything more than what its original creators did. You might as well, just read the original, and skip the adpatation. I'm not sure the adaptation adds anything, nor do I think you can watch it instead of.
Snyder's film, to me, felt like an abridged two dimensional version of the graphic novel, complete with sound and music. And the music was quite good, I want the soundtrack. It highlighted the central points - such as the whole "Watch" bit - the inner workings of a "watch" and the idea of watching others behavior, tracking it, acting as judge and jury, while at the same time, wondering who watches you. Some of the political commentary was lost, but not much, and I'm not sure today's audience would have appreciated it anyhow.
Overall? I enjoyed the film in much the same way I enjoyed the comic, with reservations.
It made me think and it capped a lovely and productive day, the best day I've had in about a month and a half. Had a great time watching it, was completely absorbed, except for a bit towards the end. And it is definitely a film that you have to see on a big screen and in a movie theater.