I think it was in July or August of 1987 that I first encountered Watchmen. 
I can't claim - unlike some of my 'cooler' friends- to have been there since issue one of the comic was published. (Sod all of this 'I read the graphic novel' nonsense, that's a term used solely by middle class tossers who are too embarrassed to say they read comics.) But I did get with the programme somewhere around issue six or seven and quickly caught up. I say that at the outset of this review to try and convey the fact that, in my head at least, I've had a Watchmen movie (MY own Watchmen movie, which isn't, necessarily Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore's Watchmen movie or anybody elses come to that) running for over twenty years. I would have quite liked to see Terry Gilliam's Watchmen movie in the late 1980s but that never happened for a variety of reasons. 'Unfilmable' Terry eventually considered. 'It would make the greatest twelve-part TV series in the history of the medium ... but you'd need a budget bigger than Gone With the Wind for every episode.' 
Neither did several other brave-but-futile attempts to take a massively over-complex (and, already visual) text and traslate it into a film. Like many fans, I thought that I'd never see the day when any movie adaptation of Watchmen would appear ... Or that, even if one did, it was always likely to be a savage and cruel disappointment. Because, these things - by and large - always are. Which brings us, twenty two years on, to Zack Snyder's Watchmen movie which I've just seen. (I needed two pee-breaks during it, incidentally - my bladder is, quite clearly, trying to tell me something very pointed about the ageing process.)
Well, I didn't hate it, let's put it that way. Various friends who had seen the movie gave me previews which ranged from 'it was more-or-less the film that I had in my head' to 'what a very odd film but it was quite rewarding if you stuck with it' to 'that was a turgid near three hour mess during which my bum fell asleep. Twice.' A colleague at work, as familiar with the source text as I, noted that he felt 'it was all the best bits of the comic strung together without any plot.' Having watched the thing, I do kind-of see what he's getting at. I would hate to have watched that if I hadn't known the story backwards already.
But, the fact that I did made the experience of watching it a very curious one indeed. I think a part of me actually wanted to hate it. It started off as a simple intellectual exercise - watching the thing chiefly to see which bits of such an outrageously convoluted plot were they going to leave out. All of the 1940s/Minutemen stuff, surely? When Sam Hamm wrote the initial movie script based on Watchmen in the late eighties, by all accounts that was the first thing to go. 
But no, that was present and correct. Not, perhaps, as front-and-centre as in the early chapters of the comic (a lot - and I mean a hell of a lot - of information is dumped into the audience's lap in the form of a beautifully constructed title-sequence montage using Dylan's 'The Times They Are A-Changing' as its soundtrack). But the Eddie Blake/Sally Jupiter back-story was all there, as was Hollis and his relationship with Daniel (my own favourite character). Would it look like the comic? Yes, amazingly, it did. All primal colours and scepia tones. The darkness - particularly in the opening sequence as The Comedian gets his just deserts - is effective and not overpowering as it often is in big-budget movies.
In terms of other plot elements to go, the Tales From the Black Freighter was always likely to be jettisoned (s'cuse the nautical pun) since it was, chiefly, a narrative device that kept the comic grounded in its own sense of medium (a comic book within a comic book).
And, that also seemed to have had a knock-on effect which required a change to the much-celebrated 'fake alien invasion' denouement - meaning that another method of destroying New York needed to be found so that Ozymandias could 'save the world.' What we got in its place, actually, made a lot of sense; it was a less high concept idea than Alan Moore's original but, in some ways, it was far more fitting to the Cold War logic at the movie's core. Giving the whole world a nuclear bogeyman to be scared of in the shape of Dr Manhatten to replace Nixon and his Soviet counterpart. The murder of Hollis Mason also didn't make the final movie (although I understand it was shot as, indeed, was all the pirate stuff). They, along with other deleted plot-strands, are likely to be found in the Director's Cut, scheduled for July release, and which is supposed to be over three hours long. (The finished movie as it stands is two hours, forty eight.) This suggests it will be, to all intents and purposes, a different movie to the one we actually got. Not, necessarily, a better one, though.
But, anyway, let's stick to the released version for the moment. For all of Alan Moore's reservations it was nice to see that the majority of his, now famous, dialogue survived in tact. Most of the classic lines are there - 'The world's smartest man poses no more threat to me than does its smartest termite.' 'Never compromise. Not even in the face of Armageddon.' 'What sort of cancer?' 'You know the sort that you get better from? Well, not that sort.' 'It doesn't take a genius to see the world has problems.' 'No, but it takes a room full of morons to think they're small enough for them to handle.' And, of course, everybody's favourite Ozymandias line 'Do it? Do you think I'm some comic book villain, Daniel? That I would tell you my plan if there was the remotest chance you could stop me. I did it thirty five minutes ago!'
Yer a right grumpy sod, Alan, but at least they're all saying your words just the way you wrote 'em! The performances themselves range from the 'looks dead right, sort-of sounds right, but...' (Malin Akerman as a spunky but rather vulnerable Laurie Jupiter), to an 'almost, but not quite there' Ozymandias (Matthew Goode's dry, caustic but curiously cold Adrian Veidt), to the 'My God, I never thought in a million years they'd manage to pull THAT off' (Billy Crudup's serene Dr Manhatten and, especially, Jackie Earle Haley's grave and world-weary Rorschach) to the performance that, for me anyway, runs away with the movie, Patrick Wilson as a crushed and beautifully nuanced Night Owl.
There was lots of stuff that made me smile; the Apocalypse Now pastiche, the gorgeous design for Archie, the cunning use of much of the comic's iconography (particularly at the Comedian's funeral), the entire Big Feature subplot (albeit, minus the amusing dialogue from the comic between Laurie and Daniel about the problems of going to the lavatory in your latex costume!), the use of 'All Along The Watchtower' on the soundtrack towards the climax (which sent a little fanboy buzz right down my spin as soon as it started).
There were some elements that didn't, quite, work as well as one would have liked, of course. This is a movie, after all. The Martian interlude always left me a bit 'meh' even in the comic - although it's a key to understanding Dr Manhatten's psychology. Here, it felt like pure padding. Beautiful, but empty, rather like the hollow mini-world that Jon creates for Laurie. Similarly, there was something about the climax (despite it being an almost shot-for-shot reworking of Dave Gibbons' artwork) that felt rushed. I think it was Adrian's sudden appearance at the top of the stairs in a flashcut after he has, apparently, atomised Dr Manhatten that jarred mostly. But, those were mere stylistic fragments of a much more important whole. 
I come, dear blog readers, to report something of a miracle has taken place (you know, those things that Jon tells Laurie never happen but then he is force to re-assess this conclusion later on). They've pulled it off. I'm not quite sure how but they took a text that was - most informed opinions felt - unfilmable and made something that was not only watchable but, actually, pretty good. Less 'drinking a toast to absent friends, instead of these comedians' more 'Oh, how the ghost of you clings.'Def Con 1. Smiles all round, I think.
I can't claim - unlike some of my 'cooler' friends- to have been there since issue one of the comic was published. (Sod all of this 'I read the graphic novel' nonsense, that's a term used solely by middle class tossers who are too embarrassed to say they read comics.) But I did get with the programme somewhere around issue six or seven and quickly caught up. I say that at the outset of this review to try and convey the fact that, in my head at least, I've had a Watchmen movie (MY own Watchmen movie, which isn't, necessarily Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore's Watchmen movie or anybody elses come to that) running for over twenty years. I would have quite liked to see Terry Gilliam's Watchmen movie in the late 1980s but that never happened for a variety of reasons. 'Unfilmable' Terry eventually considered. 'It would make the greatest twelve-part TV series in the history of the medium ... but you'd need a budget bigger than Gone With the Wind for every episode.' 
Neither did several other brave-but-futile attempts to take a massively over-complex (and, already visual) text and traslate it into a film. Like many fans, I thought that I'd never see the day when any movie adaptation of Watchmen would appear ... Or that, even if one did, it was always likely to be a savage and cruel disappointment. Because, these things - by and large - always are. Which brings us, twenty two years on, to Zack Snyder's Watchmen movie which I've just seen. (I needed two pee-breaks during it, incidentally - my bladder is, quite clearly, trying to tell me something very pointed about the ageing process.)Well, I didn't hate it, let's put it that way. Various friends who had seen the movie gave me previews which ranged from 'it was more-or-less the film that I had in my head' to 'what a very odd film but it was quite rewarding if you stuck with it' to 'that was a turgid near three hour mess during which my bum fell asleep. Twice.' A colleague at work, as familiar with the source text as I, noted that he felt 'it was all the best bits of the comic strung together without any plot.' Having watched the thing, I do kind-of see what he's getting at. I would hate to have watched that if I hadn't known the story backwards already.
But, the fact that I did made the experience of watching it a very curious one indeed. I think a part of me actually wanted to hate it. It started off as a simple intellectual exercise - watching the thing chiefly to see which bits of such an outrageously convoluted plot were they going to leave out. All of the 1940s/Minutemen stuff, surely? When Sam Hamm wrote the initial movie script based on Watchmen in the late eighties, by all accounts that was the first thing to go. 
But no, that was present and correct. Not, perhaps, as front-and-centre as in the early chapters of the comic (a lot - and I mean a hell of a lot - of information is dumped into the audience's lap in the form of a beautifully constructed title-sequence montage using Dylan's 'The Times They Are A-Changing' as its soundtrack). But the Eddie Blake/Sally Jupiter back-story was all there, as was Hollis and his relationship with Daniel (my own favourite character). Would it look like the comic? Yes, amazingly, it did. All primal colours and scepia tones. The darkness - particularly in the opening sequence as The Comedian gets his just deserts - is effective and not overpowering as it often is in big-budget movies.In terms of other plot elements to go, the Tales From the Black Freighter was always likely to be jettisoned (s'cuse the nautical pun) since it was, chiefly, a narrative device that kept the comic grounded in its own sense of medium (a comic book within a comic book).
And, that also seemed to have had a knock-on effect which required a change to the much-celebrated 'fake alien invasion' denouement - meaning that another method of destroying New York needed to be found so that Ozymandias could 'save the world.' What we got in its place, actually, made a lot of sense; it was a less high concept idea than Alan Moore's original but, in some ways, it was far more fitting to the Cold War logic at the movie's core. Giving the whole world a nuclear bogeyman to be scared of in the shape of Dr Manhatten to replace Nixon and his Soviet counterpart. The murder of Hollis Mason also didn't make the final movie (although I understand it was shot as, indeed, was all the pirate stuff). They, along with other deleted plot-strands, are likely to be found in the Director's Cut, scheduled for July release, and which is supposed to be over three hours long. (The finished movie as it stands is two hours, forty eight.) This suggests it will be, to all intents and purposes, a different movie to the one we actually got. Not, necessarily, a better one, though.But, anyway, let's stick to the released version for the moment. For all of Alan Moore's reservations it was nice to see that the majority of his, now famous, dialogue survived in tact. Most of the classic lines are there - 'The world's smartest man poses no more threat to me than does its smartest termite.' 'Never compromise. Not even in the face of Armageddon.' 'What sort of cancer?' 'You know the sort that you get better from? Well, not that sort.' 'It doesn't take a genius to see the world has problems.' 'No, but it takes a room full of morons to think they're small enough for them to handle.' And, of course, everybody's favourite Ozymandias line 'Do it? Do you think I'm some comic book villain, Daniel? That I would tell you my plan if there was the remotest chance you could stop me. I did it thirty five minutes ago!'
Yer a right grumpy sod, Alan, but at least they're all saying your words just the way you wrote 'em! The performances themselves range from the 'looks dead right, sort-of sounds right, but...' (Malin Akerman as a spunky but rather vulnerable Laurie Jupiter), to an 'almost, but not quite there' Ozymandias (Matthew Goode's dry, caustic but curiously cold Adrian Veidt), to the 'My God, I never thought in a million years they'd manage to pull THAT off' (Billy Crudup's serene Dr Manhatten and, especially, Jackie Earle Haley's grave and world-weary Rorschach) to the performance that, for me anyway, runs away with the movie, Patrick Wilson as a crushed and beautifully nuanced Night Owl.There was lots of stuff that made me smile; the Apocalypse Now pastiche, the gorgeous design for Archie, the cunning use of much of the comic's iconography (particularly at the Comedian's funeral), the entire Big Feature subplot (albeit, minus the amusing dialogue from the comic between Laurie and Daniel about the problems of going to the lavatory in your latex costume!), the use of 'All Along The Watchtower' on the soundtrack towards the climax (which sent a little fanboy buzz right down my spin as soon as it started).
There were some elements that didn't, quite, work as well as one would have liked, of course. This is a movie, after all. The Martian interlude always left me a bit 'meh' even in the comic - although it's a key to understanding Dr Manhatten's psychology. Here, it felt like pure padding. Beautiful, but empty, rather like the hollow mini-world that Jon creates for Laurie. Similarly, there was something about the climax (despite it being an almost shot-for-shot reworking of Dave Gibbons' artwork) that felt rushed. I think it was Adrian's sudden appearance at the top of the stairs in a flashcut after he has, apparently, atomised Dr Manhatten that jarred mostly. But, those were mere stylistic fragments of a much more important whole. 
I come, dear blog readers, to report something of a miracle has taken place (you know, those things that Jon tells Laurie never happen but then he is force to re-assess this conclusion later on). They've pulled it off. I'm not quite sure how but they took a text that was - most informed opinions felt - unfilmable and made something that was not only watchable but, actually, pretty good. Less 'drinking a toast to absent friends, instead of these comedians' more 'Oh, how the ghost of you clings.'Def Con 1. Smiles all round, I think.
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