Just as many did today, I went out and saw Zack Snyder’s movie adaptation of the crazy popular cult classic graphic novel Watchmen. Prior to seeing the movie, I picked up the full graphic novel at Target and finished the tome an hour before Alli and I went to see it at the Fork & Screen over lunch.
I enjoyed the book. It’s heavy and dark, but it’s extremely well-written. Alan Moore’s words and Dave Gibbons illustrations create the alternate-history 1985 in which Richard Nixon is entering his 5th term as President and the Cold War is at the height of madness, enough for there to be a Doomsday Clock, which scientists use to count down the annihilation of the world via nuclear weapons.
The movie follows the same basic plot, but lacks much of the depth that makes the graphic novel a classic. Zack Snyder is a good filmmaker, but the source material that he was provided with does most of the work for him here. Snyder recreates some scenes frame-for-frame identically to Gibbons’ original drawings.
That’s not a bad thing, but there are parts of the movie that got cut over others that I felt shouldn’t have. Snyder manages to find five minutes for a 5-minute long softcore porn scene, but other more critical plot points are glazed over (I would have liked to have seen more development of the New Frontiersman vs. the Nova Express part of the story, which is absent entirely from the movie until the last 5 minutes when it doesn’t even make sense).
Unfortunately, our experience with the movie was not great. The movie started and stopped 5 times before it finally continuously began and even then, we still missed the first few minutes. That was unfortunate because I felt it would have set the stage of impending doom better than what we saw.
The other thing that bothered me was something that bothered another reviewer (that I can’t remember now) regarding the ending. I won’t reveal what happens, but here’s what I’ll say: the ending is really one of the only major plot changes the movie makes to the book. And if you’re going to make a shot-for-shot recreation of a graphic novel, you should go all the way. By changing the end, it alters the story enough that it is noticeable.
The casting hits about as much as it misses. Jackie Earl Haley is perfect as Rorschach but I thought that Matthew Goode was the wrong choice for Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias. I also was totally impressed by Patrick Wilson’s Nite Owl, especially after reading the book. Jeffrey Dean Morgan is a good Comedian, but I could take or leave Malin Ackerman’s Laurie/Silk Spectre.
Like I said before, the movie version really lacked the layers that make the graphic novel so good. I imagine that most fans of the book will nitpick the movie to death. Others will be turned off by the extreme violence, while others will say it’s not violent enough based on the source material. But there are a lot of people who will appreciate the movie a lot. I liked it. I probably would have liked it even more had I not read it. It has really interesting things to say about human nature and what it truly means to be heroic. Sure, those messages come straight from the source material, but at least they didn’t get muddled.
I’m not sure if I’d recommend this movie. If you’re interested, you might think about taking a look at the Wikipedia page for the comic just to get a plot overview.
