My verdict: An adaptation worthy of the novel and of your time. Try to see it in the theater. Join me in pressuring Peter & Teresa to get it on Blu-Ray so we can watch the Director's Cut in their basement.
While on balance I find the faithful adaptations to win out over the false notes, I agree with many criticisms of the movie. The actors in the roles of Laurie and Adrian are weak (and young). Blake's character has the most on-screen aging, and they weren't quite successful in making it believable.
Warner Brothers was probably correct in concluding that Snyder's success with adapting 300 was at least partially due to the stylized violence he slathered on, and they might have been correct in deciding that Watchmen's commercial prospects would be aided by a similar touch. For better or worse, Snyder's savage ballet is much more appropriate to Frank Miller's work than it is to Alan Moore's, and what I found exhilirating in 300 I found jarring and tedious in Watchmen. Dropping the slow-motion alone could have probably trimmed the running time by 15 minutes.
I find it hilarious that the Standards people at WB had no problem with multiple lingering views of "Lower Manhattan" but absolutely vetoed any references (visual or verbal) to Laurie's cigarette habit.
Excising the "Tales of the Black Freighter" was a no-brainer, but while other condensations made sense, some changes were ham-handed: a post-chemo Janey Slater confronting Dr. Manhattan Jenny-Jones-style fell flat, and an extended cameo with Lee Iacocca had little effect other than to accelerate -- rather than obscure -- suspicion of Veidt. Losing the perspective of the "normals" (e.g., the detectives, newsstand guy, comic kid, cabbie, psychiatrist) diminishes Moore's point but was inevitable in any adaptation under 360 minutes.
Snyder took the prison riot to be his big canvas, and the really absurd violence occurs here. It's also where Rorschach loses his cool a bit too much, and one of my favorite lines from the novel is inexplicably changed.
The best element came first: the opening credits montage was entirely original and both did a lot of expositive heavy lifting and reassured me (for about 140 minutes) that the filmmakers understood what Moore was trying to do. The standout performance was Jeffrey Dean Morgan who nailed Eddie Blake, and I have nothing to complain about Dreiberg, Manhattan, or Rorschach (Tom Spurgeon was more disappointed in the film than I, but he put a name to what I couldn't: Haley's Rorschach marches like the sneering 18-year-old I was when I first read the graphic novel).
Others more attuned to pop music sensibilities had problems with the soundtrack; I couldn't decide whether the klunkiness was genuine or ironic. The lifts from Koyaanisqatsi for the Manhattan sequence worked very well for me.
About the squid. Immediately after walking out of the theater, I thought the changed ending was better than the original. I have no doubt that it was an easier sell to the producers, and the comic-phobic film critics already exhausted by Snyder's acrobatics and Rorschach's neo-Objectivism would have taken one look at the squid and dropped out. Fabricating "Dr. Manhattan-style" explosions in 15 world capitals is simply more plausible than dropping a giant psionic squid on New York, but plausibility is precisely what Ozymandias's plot was trying to subvert. The world of Watchmen had 20 years to get used to Dr. Manhattan and finely calibrate its geopolitics around him. The kind of paradigm shift Veidt was aiming for required (according to Veidt/Moore) a shock to the system that moved the players "out of the box." From Moore's perspective (as opposed to the film's producers'), the squid's implausibility was a feature, not a bug.
I have more to say about the expectations and apprehensiveness I had going to Snyder's Watchmen and how they compared and contrasted with those I had for Jackson's Lord of the Rings, but that's it for now.
My verdict: An adaptation worthy of the novel and of your time. Try to see it in the theater. Join me in pressuring Peter & Teresa to get it on Blu-Ray so we can watch the Director's Cut in their basement.
ReplyDeleteWhile on balance I find the faithful adaptations to win out over the false notes, I agree with many criticisms of the movie. The actors in the roles of Laurie and Adrian are weak (and young). Blake's character has the most on-screen aging, and they weren't quite successful in making it believable.
Warner Brothers was probably correct in concluding that Snyder's success with adapting 300 was at least partially due to the stylized violence he slathered on, and they might have been correct in deciding that Watchmen's commercial prospects would be aided by a similar touch. For better or worse, Snyder's savage ballet is much more appropriate to Frank Miller's work than it is to Alan Moore's, and what I found exhilirating in 300 I found jarring and tedious in Watchmen. Dropping the slow-motion alone could have probably trimmed the running time by 15 minutes.
I find it hilarious that the Standards people at WB had no problem with multiple lingering views of "Lower Manhattan" but absolutely vetoed any references (visual or verbal) to Laurie's cigarette habit.
Excising the "Tales of the Black Freighter" was a no-brainer, but while other condensations made sense, some changes were ham-handed: a post-chemo Janey Slater confronting Dr. Manhattan Jenny-Jones-style fell flat, and an extended cameo with Lee Iacocca had little effect other than to accelerate -- rather than obscure -- suspicion of Veidt. Losing the perspective of the "normals" (e.g., the detectives, newsstand guy, comic kid, cabbie, psychiatrist) diminishes Moore's point but was inevitable in any adaptation under 360 minutes.
Snyder took the prison riot to be his big canvas, and the really absurd violence occurs here. It's also where Rorschach loses his cool a bit too much, and one of my favorite lines from the novel is inexplicably changed.
The best element came first: the opening credits montage was entirely original and both did a lot of expositive heavy lifting and reassured me (for about 140 minutes) that the filmmakers understood what Moore was trying to do. The standout performance was Jeffrey Dean Morgan who nailed Eddie Blake, and I have nothing to complain about Dreiberg, Manhattan, or Rorschach (Tom Spurgeon was more disappointed in the film than I, but he put a name to what I couldn't: Haley's Rorschach marches like the sneering 18-year-old I was when I first read the graphic novel).
Others more attuned to pop music sensibilities had problems with the soundtrack; I couldn't decide whether the klunkiness was genuine or ironic. The lifts from Koyaanisqatsi for the Manhattan sequence worked very well for me.
About the squid. Immediately after walking out of the theater, I thought the changed ending was better than the original. I have no doubt that it was an easier sell to the producers, and the comic-phobic film critics already exhausted by Snyder's acrobatics and Rorschach's neo-Objectivism would have taken one look at the squid and dropped out. Fabricating "Dr. Manhattan-style" explosions in 15 world capitals is simply more plausible than dropping a giant psionic squid on New York, but plausibility is precisely what Ozymandias's plot was trying to subvert. The world of Watchmen had 20 years to get used to Dr. Manhattan and finely calibrate its geopolitics around him. The kind of paradigm shift Veidt was aiming for required (according to Veidt/Moore) a shock to the system that moved the players "out of the box." From Moore's perspective (as opposed to the film's producers'), the squid's implausibility was a feature, not a bug.
I have more to say about the expectations and apprehensiveness I had going to Snyder's Watchmen and how they compared and contrasted with those I had for Jackson's Lord of the Rings, but that's it for now.