The Case for Spectators

I have been waiting for Watchmen to come out for a while. I read the comic a while ago, loved it, bought it myself fairly recently, and waited for the movie with a combination of hopeful anticipation and mild dread. Some, like the Moosetastic, have already viewed and digested this film. But will I let that stop me from adding my two cents? NE-VAH!

Visually, the film is an absolute feast. It looks sumptuous, in a dark, wet and depressing way, full of fire and water and not many bright sunny days. People explode in bloody ways, non-super powered individuals show remarkable strength, and there is a lot of voiceovers.

Okay, I am now going to say things I thought I wouldn't. The film is (for the most part) very close to the book, the individual characters uttering many lines that I am sure come directly from the source material, and some scenes play out in a motion picture fashion in exactly the same way the static pictures of the graphic novel are laid out.

And... for me, that was a bit of a problem. For me, the pacing of the film was hindered by its slavish sticking to its comic book origins, mixed with a desire to ground the film squarely in the 80s with the use of lots of period songs to drive and carry scenes. The opening credit sequence, putting the heroes of this made up world in their context, takes an awfully long time when it could have been covered much more quickly and perhaps a bit more illuminatingly. And throughout the film, the past of the Watchmen themselves is revealed through voice-overed flashbacks, much like how they appear in the novel, but this again keeps things moving fairly glacially, and also does not really allow the characters to develop much of a rapport amongst themselves as they are not having conversations but rather monologues for most of the film.

The character of Rorschach is the best of the bunch as the flawed yet driven sociopath (the scenes in jail are rivetting); the two Silk Spectres are not given a huge amount to do and their final scenes together are fairly painful. The characters are not really the thing though - the story is, and there is not much to fault considering how complex and entangled it is with all the different characters and both their back stories and the stories of the world in which they reside. I don't recall Richard Nixon appearing quite as often as in the comic, but they obviously thought they were on to a winner with the actor, so they ran with it. And as for Dr Manhatten's nudity - I am sure the scenes they showed on the telly were different from the ones we saw on the big screen

Overall, I did enjoy the 3-hour long film, though I was perhaps a bit jaded by my familiarity with the material and so none of the complicated twists and turns were much of a surprise to me. The crew I was with were mostly impressed by the film, unfamiliar as they were with the source, so perhaps it was the expectations I brought with me that let me down.

Verdict: Definitely a good film, deep and complex, dark and violent, but told (to me) in a fairly cold and distant way, when the opportunity was to bring some life to the two dimensional images from the ground breaking graphic novel. Watchmen deserves to be watched, preferably on the big screen. 9 hours out of 12.