With Alan Moore’s Watchmen hailed as the Dr. Manhattan of all graphic novels, director Zack Snyder had many obstacles to overcome while bringing his film adaptation to the big screen. And three weeks after opening day, after building months of buzz, anticipation and fanboy and girl giddy, the result is silence. After audiences swamped to the theater Friday night, the film slammed to a halt and not even X-men’s Juggernaut could give it more momentum.With the camps fallen into a few opinions – loved it, hated it and WTF was that? – where did Snyder, if at all, go wrong? He remained strikingly loyal to the graphic novel. As a fan of Moore’s book, I can’t say I felt any one panel was conspicuously missing. In fact, thanks to Snyder’s hyper-stylized and slow motion trademark, the film captured and highlighted some remarkably familiar images as if they were photographed right from illustrator Dave Gibbon’s pen.
But something, Giant Squid and Black Freighter aside, was missing. Moore’s graphic novel carries heavy implications about morality, American politics and the boundaries of human nature. And despite the classic “God exists and he is American” line, those implications fell to the wayside. When Matthew Goode’s Ozymandius announced he’d already carried out his master plan, I didn’t feel much shock or intrigue as I did while reading Moore’s version. Maybe it was because I knew it was coming, or maybe it was because I was too busy criticizing Goode’s delivery.
Casting choices seemed a bit mixed; Jackie Earle Haley and Jeffrey Dean Morgan nailed their respective performances, Rorschach and the Comedian. Billy Crudup's soft-spoken Manhattan grew on me throughout the film and solidified when reminiscing about his accident on Mars.
So maybe it’s fair to say Snyder’s vision was too faithful. After all, the too-long but crammed-for-time film suffered under the span of flashback-heavy, character-driven and layered storylines, something better suited to television a la LOST. But sometimes, adaptations need to be looser with their plot material – I’m in the minority that believes the better Harry Potter films (Azkaban and Phoenix) are the ones where the directors created the most distance from J. K. Rowling’s novels. And I’m a rabid fan of those books, but a good book does not a good movie always make.
Things I like about Snyder’s vision, however, include the slow-motion image captures, the way the Comedian’s rubber suit strained and groaned when he moved – an understated slap to the ridiculousness of real-life heroes, and reminiscent of Spiderman’s “kinda itchy” statement about his own suit in the Michael Chabon-penned franchise sequel – and the musical choices that reflect the song lyrics Moore himself included in the opening chapters of the comic. A song Moore didn’t include, but is perhaps by favorite on the Watchmen soundtrack, is Simon & Garfunkel’s Sound of Silence, which played during Edward Blake’s funeral and warns of man-made neon gods.
So, ultimately, what does Watchmen’s poor box office ranking do for the future of theme-heavy rated-R flicks? Did Watchmen’s less-than-stellar performance (second time is a charm, Dreiberg) do anything to take away from the future of great comic book movies that The Dark Knight just enhanced? Or, on the heels of the Spider-man 4 announcement, will we continue to get our film form heroes as Comic Book Light?
