Jay Stringer

There’s no real point in a watchmen review at this point. The movies been out for a while, and reviews are easy to find.

It seems like the vast majority of people love it or like it. I’m old enough now that i don’t have to believe people are fools if they don’t agree with me, so fair enough. There are certainly things in the movie i liked. Rorschach was done very well, but also highlights problems i have with the film.

On the page, His dialogue is both very funny and an important narrative device, and to much of the best bits fell flat on screen or were lost among cgi and explosions. His. clipped. dry. wit. didn’t really translate, nor did the fact that his voice in the book is used to reflect his state of mind. In flashbacks his dialogue appears in normal text, whilst in the present it appears in a stylised font that showcases something has pushed him over the edge. The event that fractures his mind is shown in the film, but its a failing of the storytelling that we have to be told that this changed him, rather than shown.
There are also subtle character beats that get lost, things that show him beginning to re-find his humanity later on in the story, in a film that doesn’t manage to provide a satisfying character arc for anybody involved. There’s no progress, no emotional weight. Not even when millions of people die, and it gets coldly discussed by the wooden things on screen. At least in the comic book our characters had the good grace to show some instant human reactions, they fucked, they shouted, they cried. Anything to feel something.

There’s a scene in a toilet that exemplifies one of my other issues. There’s a very well done build up, the door swinging back and forth showing Rorschach closing in on an enemy. Then we don’t see what happens but cut to Rorschach walking away. Except that the scene doesn’t end there, where it should, but we have to have the camera panning down to focus on a big pool of dripping, and totally unnecessary, blood.

Contrast this to Chris Nolan in THE DARK KNIGHT who managed to get a theatre full of people to squirm as the Joker put a knife in a guys mouth and talked. The camera cuts away, and you’re never told what happens, but you feel it. There’s an emotional and visceral reaction to a trick of editing and storytelling in that one moment that i didn’t find in three hours of WATCHMEN, where we’re provided with lot of ‘cool’ knife wounds, broken bones and gushing blood. Thing is, you could avoid the gore by closing your eyes, if you were that way inclined, and happily ignore the moment without any consequences. Whereas the Nolan method meant that closing your eyes was no escape, because the scene was already playing out in your mind.

This is a film that mistakes ‘cool’ for ‘good’. If a guy is going to get slashed in this film, its going to be done in close up, in slow motion, with a cgi knife and loud music.

In the book there’s a gradual build-up. The violence and horror starts off implied and vague, before becoming more explicit as the story unfolds so that you’re shocked when the stakes get raised near the end. The film starts off with a dumb and unrealistic fight, then continues at full tilt with dumb and unrealistic fights, before actually wimping out at the moment when the story demands we are hit in the face with loss and death. There’s just no emotional connection in a film that wants to show you things because it can, rather than because it should.

It just seems to come from a view of film that i don’t connect with. Maybe it’s just me, maybe I’m out of touch. But i don’t see the need to make a film R rated simply because you can. I don’t see that showing acts of violence or sex or anything is inherently great unless you are able to put in the emotion and impact behind them. Making a film ADULT does not make it MATURE. I will never, ever, buy into the bullshit that video games are a bad influence on children. But they’ve been a terrible influence on hollywood.

And, I’m sorry, but i just don’t get the whole fetishist approach that certain directors are now taking to comic book movies. Look, i love both formats. Comics can do things that films can’t. Film’s can do things comics can’t. But why the sudden need to have films that slow down every seven seconds to force in an image lifted directly of a panel just so that the film can wink at the audience?
When we see a film based on a novel, do we want to see a film that pauses every time the novel has a paragraph break? That stops dead in slow motion to show a chapters beginning or end? It started with SIN CITY. Actually, no. It started with DAREDEVIL, which put in three or four images lifted directly from well loved panels. And, you know, a handful of references is nice. But then SIN CITY came along, and took things to a hole new level. Fine, that world has always been a stylised one, a million miles removes from any sense of reality. All things need to be tried at least once, and so it just about worked for SIN CITY. But Zack Snyder has made two films now that feel the need to not have an identity of their own, to not be films, or genuine adaptations. They need to pause a billion times, to wink at the fans and to cram in every panel from the source material.

I’m sorry, but no. Comic books are not storyboards for films. The key to telling a story in a comic book is giving the impression that movement is happening between panels, while focusing on key moments in the images you present. A film shouldn’t just be treading water as it goes along waiting to show another of those moments. I do seem to be alone in this, as everyone around us filing out of the cinema was raving about how much of it was “taken directly from moments in the graphic novel”. And don’t get me started on ‘graphic novel‘….

In making his last two films, Snyder has missed that comic books and films are two different languages. Things work on the page that do not work in film. In the book, Rorschach is narrating in his jilted style through a written journal. Works, fine, because the whole thing is being read, so the story needs to connect with a reader. In the film, the connection needs to be different. He needs to be narrating the story to the listeners/viewers. There are images and dialogue in the book that work because they are framed by, and playing with, the conventions of comic book storytelling. A film is framed by entirely different conventions, and a good adaptation is one that works with this.

And one other quick thing is that i keep being told that this version doesn’t count, that if i don’t like it i should wait for the directors cut, that’s the real version. I enjoy LORD OF THE RINGS as much as the next weirdo, but Peter Jackson has a lot to answer for. We seem to live in a world now where the cinema version of a film doesn’t have to be perfect. It’s okay to get bits wrong, or leave gaps in your storytelling because you can fix them later. I’m sure novelists would love the luxury of being able to have that approach.

For a film i wasn’t going to review, I’ve gone on a bit to long. Basically, last year sometime i was talking to someone about the upcoming movie. He was nervous, worried that the film might suck, hoping it might be great. I was fairly unmoved. I already had a WATCHMEN, it was on my book shelf. It already existed in my heart and head, and i didn’t feel the need to have a film of it. And watching the film hasn’t changed my mind.