Now I've Watched The Watchman Too!

And I have to say my friend Paul Dechene is, once again, being a big softy. Then again, he's a Battlestar Galactica fan so I can't say I'm surprised.

I liked Watchmen well enough. The effort the director, Zack Snyder, put into keeping the story faithful borders on superheroic (haha) given the complexity of the material. I have no idea how someone who hasn't read the comic would understand half of what's going on in this flick. And that's one of the movie's problems: in it's attempt to honour the source material it stiffens up. You can see this most in the acting but it also permeates scene design--for example, some moments feel overblown, phoney or contrived because they're too focused on slavish recreation to the comic.

Well, the movie isn't a comic. They're different art forms with different rules, and sucessful adaptations of comics neeed to recognize that and be brave enough to play things a little differently. Especially when you're dealing with a comic that has more to it than punching out Lex Luthor.

One big problem Snyder has is that he's trying to adapt this particular comic book--a near-legendary comic that's a deconstruction of comics themselves. Yes, on one level Watchmen is an examination/commentary on superheroes, power, vigilanteism, etc. But on the deeper level Watchmen the comic is about time and its nature, and metaphors about time fill the book.

For example: one character, Dr. Manhattan, is a disintegrated physicist who now exists outside linear "reality". For him, moments are experienced in a non-sequential order: First he's in 1985 having a fight with his girfriend, now he's a child learning about watchmaking (speaking of time and rich, layered meanings) from his father in the 1930s, now he's locked in a particle discombobulatron getting microwaved-up into an atomic superhero, now he's on Mars having another fight with his girlfriend.

Dr. Manhattan's experience of time parallels the comic reader's experience of this dense graphic novel: you can read it in order but you can also experience it in a different but equally meaningful way if you open it to a random page (which you'll end up doing because the freaking thing weighs three pounds and takes a couple of days to read so you'll have to double back through pages just to keep the plot straight in your head).

Comics, because of their structure as sequential self-contained panels depicting a series of frozen moments, are an ideal medium to talk about time, it's relation to space (i.e. the space on a page) and even the fetishism of/obsession over the meaning inherent to a so-called "frozen moment". Watchmen's creator Alan Moore (who has vehemently disowned this movie) knew all this as a very, very clever comic creator, and he dicked around with these themes in Watchmen, his most famous and best-selling work.

In Watchmen, Moore's nudging his readers to ponder the nature of time--which, from what little I understand, the physicists say is wildly different from what we think it is.

Put it all together (like a dissambled watch!) and it's called a thesis: something real art has and something this movie lacks.

So Is Watchmen the movie better than Watchmen the comic? No way. But I got a kick out of it. Rorshach, a deranged Batman-type, and Dr. Manhattan, a big, blue, naked Superman with a big (really big!) atomic shlong, are two great characters. And I liked the action, and the gore, and Ozymandius' genetically-modified lynx and all the pretty colours and how shiny everything was.

And the changed ending was fine although I'm not convinced it makes sense. (I think it could've worked but they didn't sell me on it).

Then again, I'm not Alan Moore. He'd hate this thing.

Final review: "A" for effort. "B" for entertainment. But "F" for thinking this was artistically do-able. (And also for the lame-o"Forrest Gump" classic rock soundtrack. That really, really sucked. Jimi Hendrix? Simon and Garfunkel? Oh, come on. Been there, seen that, knock it off.)