Saturday, March 7, 2009

Watchmen

by Bob Clark

When it comes to a film adaptation of a work like Watchmen, you’re always going to deal with the problems of transitioning all the necessary plot, character and aesthetic elements to the screen from their starting points in the novel in question, graphic or otherwise. Every lost sequence, scene or even fragment of dialogue that finds itself sacrificed to the screenwriter’s trash-bin or cutting-room floor is bound to be lamented, questioned and almost as fiercely debated as the philosophical quandaries the story itself tries to raise. At the end of the day, however, it becomes necessary to appraise the work in question on the grounds of how it works for all audiences, both those already familiar with the book it’s based on and those being introduced to the narrative for the first time.

Judged on those qualifications, Zack Snyder’s just-released film of the revolutionary, medium defining comic-book miniseries by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons performs a minor miracle in its own right, successfully adapting nearly the entirety of the landmark 1988 graphic novel’s content, themes and spirit, even while risking the expense of making that adaptation palatable to all but the most devoted followers of the original.

Of course, considering the sheer length and complexity of the original work, it’s commendable that Snyder was able to remain as faithful as he was while fashioning the film as entertainingly and coherently as he managed to do. Unlike his previous efforts in 300, where he hewed as closely as possible to Frank Miller’s politically warped view of the Battle of Thermopylae, or Dawn of the Dead, where he loosely borrowed George Romero’s basic “zombies in a mall” concept and invented a new, almost antithetical imagining of it from wholecloth, the magnum-opus source material of Watchmen forces Snyder to find a careful, quiet balance between slavish recreation and mercenary reinvention.

Wherever possible, he and a production crew that includes the likes of designer Alex McDowell and cinematographer Larry Fong strive as hard as possible to portray events from the book with an obsessive attention to detail ordinarily found only at comic-book conventions and Civil War reenactments. Wherever necessary, screenwriters David Hayter and Alex Tse jettison whatever loose narrative threads they can spare and find new ways to stage similar scenes to make up for them, both to satisfy the needs of cinema, rather than comics, and to keep the hefty running time as brisk as possible.

And indeed, it’s thanks to the film’s quick pace and fetishistic reverence for its source that Snyder manages to captivate audiences as much as he does in his nearly 3-hour long journey through an alternate history where superheroes exist and leave an indelible mark on the shape of the world’s history, from its fascinating past to its cloudy future. Following an investigation by a pair of outlawed heroes, the retired Nite-Owl (Patrick Wilson) and vigilante Rorschach (Jackie Earl Haley), the film centers around the death of a fellow crimefighter, the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), and an elaborate conspiracy involving the flamboyant Ozymandias (Matthew Goode) and Dr. Manhattan, a walking set of god and military-industrial complexes (Billy Crudup).

Along the way there’s a love-triangle with a second-generation superheroine (Malin Ackerman), a trip to Mars and plenty of facetime with a Richard Nixon, just like there was in the book. And while not all of the events repeat themselves exactly as written, Snyder & Co. do a fine job of converting Moore & Co.’s audacious and difficult material, finding streamlined substitutions for the more longwinded plot-strands and keeping an eagle-eye focus on the big picture. However, no matter how devoted and creative the adaptation stands in its own right, I can’t help but feel that much, if not most of the original’s heart and soul couldn’t survive the transition without being maimed and deformed, it not exactly butchered. Like Shakespeare performed in another language, no matter how poetic the new script may be, something is definitely lost in the translation.

Sadly, the biggest flaws the film suffers not in spite of its abundant fidelity, but because of it. Long stretches of dialogue, narration and action are taken directly from the comic-book, word-for-word and shot-for-shot, but the effect they produce on the screen often turns out markedly weaker than what was conjured on the page. Alan Moore’s writing, while hyperbolically grand in his graphic novels, remains ill-suited for the medium of film—what reads as smart, provocative and thoughtful in the comics often sounds hoarse, declarative and self-conscious when spoken by actors, some of whom don’t seem to know quite what to do besides recite their dialogue as though they’ve had to learn the lines phonetically.

Ackerman, Goode and Crudup are easily the worst offenders of the film, each of them unable to do anything but listlessly mumble through forced emotionalism, truncated accents and alien detachedness respectively, which sabotages the dramatic underpinnings of the film at the key moments they need to live by. Even the tragically distant Dr. Manhattan ought to sound like more of a human being than the limpingly restrained performance Crudup offers, and while he emotes more naturally than a phoned-in “voice of God” approach which many readers might’ve assumed, one can’t help but wish that he had found a way to convey his character’s detachment from humanity with as much panache as the special-effects crew put into visualizing his otherworldly nudity.

Thankfully, actors like Wilson, Morgan and a standout Haley deliver performances that more than support the bloated histrionics that Watchmen threatens to become when projected 24 frames per second. Each of them occupying the film’s meatiest roles, they find a way to play well into the larger-than-life identities of their characters without wearing base personality faults on their sleeves, genuinely filling out and occupying the colorful scenery around them without chewing it.

As such, it is they who redeem Snyder’s sometimes antiseptic mimicry and make the film shine as a living, breathing reality. In the end, the result is one that doesn’t quite match the pedigree of the work which precedes it, but comes awfully close, and captures as much of the essentials as it can carry. Watchmen might not fit as comfortably in the context of film as it did in comics, but at least it conveys the story’s subtext in a way that does honor to the original text.

As a devoted fan of the graphic novel who’s watched the tentative production pass from one team to another over the years, it’s gratifying to finally see a finished product on the screen, and one that holds up proudly to the skepticism. After watching the film, I don’t find myself spending too much time wondering what it would’ve been like if Terry Gilliam, Darren Aronofsky or Paul Greengrass had been the ones calling the shots—Snyder’s vision, or at least Snyder’s perspective of Moore and Gibbons’ vision, holds up that well on its own.