Subject:WATCHMEN FILM: What did you think?
Before people jump on my back about nit-picking, I liked it. Overall. Ok? I LIKED it. So let me have my qualms and problems, because I still intend to watch it again, and buy the DVD, and think, in a friend's words (thank you Mr. Dean): 'It's about as bad as you feared, and as good as you hoped it could be, simultaneously.'
Very faithful in appearance. Having Dave Gibbons, the original artist, work alongside (/consult) with Zack Snyder, ensured that the film was as close as it could be in looks to the original comic. It had good background references, though not as many as the original, which considering how easy it is to do to enrich the film was a missed trick. I would have liked more of the street scenes, but as they were the most expensive (and also many cut out due to the eradicated story threads) I can understand why.
I don't understand some of the few changes in look - why the change in Ozymandias' outfit considering how utterly faithful he was to almost everybody else? Or casting someone who didn't really look like him, except they looked more like a villain (more on this shift later)?
SPOILER ALERT!
Do not read further if you wish to remain ignorant about the end of the graphic novel and film.
My quibbles with the film are few, though striking, even though they don't spoil the film for me ultimately.
Firstly, for a visual director, how did he miss one of the most important things about Rorschach? Rorschach, as (I seem to remember it being) Dan says 'is one button short of a trenchcoat'. Eg. mad, but also Literally. After he goes mad because of the death of the girl he fails to rescue and kills the murderer, he loses (and despite whichever trenchcoat he's wearing) the button on the shoulder epaulet. He has a physical sign of his madness. But he only has a loose epaulet, which still has the button. And more importantly, the button and correct epaulet are there in the flashbacks, when he's sane, but they have used the same trenchcoat in the film.
Petty? No. It's indicative of the desire to make a film visually perfect and failing to take into account the moral nature of the characters. It bugged me, but it made me notice the same trend at the end of the film...
(In these brackets, as an aside I'll mention that I understood the film's ending was going to be changed. And I understand the change from fake-extra-dimensional-alien to nuclear bomb, and I even understand the change to making Jon the apparent bad guy in the public's view.)
But I think the explosion/death of New York/cities around the world was poorly done for a few reasons - the graphic novel was VISCERAL, it was harsh, sickening, painful because you see known characters dying and want revenge for it, it was page after page, FULL pages of detailed death and gore. What we had instead was a distant blue bomb-like effect, and then a pretty, empty crater. No mass death, no horror, no desire for revenge for known characters. And the film, at all other points, INCREASED the violence levels - during
Vietnam
, during the Prison, during the alley-mugging. So it wasn't that the director was shying away from violence overall, it was that he didn't think the changes through properly, and how to show them effectively, and induce the same response as the comic.
The reason I suspect this is because of the quibbles I have over the end of the film. Firstly, lesser problems - Dan and Laurie don't stay in the Antarctic base and make love there, are given an understanding smile by Jon as he sees them asleep together; they don't seem to be on the run with dyed hair at the very end, or even talk about kids. The great scene between Jon and Veidt at the end, where the suggestion is that the 'saving' of the world will be shown as a fake is accomplished by two simultaneous things in the comic - Jon's line that nothing ever ends, as he disappears away to other planets, leaving a bomb-like puff of smoke in Veidt's orrery. Very telling. But cut out needlessly in an otherwise very faithful film. Clumsily covered up by Laurie repeating Jon's line for him.
The big problem, the major bone of contention - the director CLEARLY had sympathies, like most fanboys, with Rorschach.
The end of the graphic novel is morally dubious, deliberately. You have wanted revenge, as a reader, for the death of killed innocent characters, and are truly shocked by the simple logic of Veidt's accomplishment. All the main characters, including Rorschach, have succeeded in doing, is Failing to prevent the world being saved. Veidt saved the world from Armageddon, this is not in question. He killed millions to do it, yes. So did the Allies at
Dresden
, at
Hiroshima
and
Nagasaki
, in
Germany
at the end. The graphic novel portrayed a world close to the real one, where preventing Armageddon by killing millions is probably the only real, smart choice, and where we are left pulled between wanting him Veidt to be evil and beaten, but where we know he isn't and won't be.
However the film portrayed nothing of the sort. The Director's sympathies so clearly lay with Rorschach's fascism of all or nothing (Alan Moore allowed Rorschach to accidentally call himself a Nazi in the comic, deliberately! And he is also on record as disliking the hero-worship Rorschach received, because he thinks it means people have missed the point - that Rorschach’s attitude is as equally flawed as Veidt's.), that he allowed not only extra, crap lines, about 'having tainted the world by saving it thus' into the film to hammer his own opinion home, he also changed Rorschach’s death to being viewed by Dan.
The last scene of the graphic novel is tension filled and rips us apart, because on the one hand we want the journal to be discovered, truth to out, and our heroes to win, but we also simultaneously don't want it to be discovered, because it will cause Armageddon.
The last scene of the film is another matter - there is no moral ambiguity about it, because we have been made to want an easy reversal.
The button that shouldn't be there most of the time and IS there when it shouldn't be, the lack of a bloodstain on Rorschach’s last replacement trenchcoat, the inclusion of morally orientating lines, the 'witnessing' of Rorschach’s death making him into a victim, the removal of ending scenes that played with the moral ambiguity all add up to a film that is visually beautiful, but misses the point of why it was written. Real world, real superheroes, how do they make moral choices?
And if you still think I'm wrong - I bet you didn't notice this - Hollis Mason's death was removed. There he is at the beginning, nice intro scene for the past. What of his awful, tragic, poignant death later? Cut, gone. By a director more concerned with the look of a film than the heart of it. Or a director not quite aware enough. It results in the same thing. A decent film that can be enjoyed, but that missed being the most intelligent, dark, cool superhero film ever. It has left that to the Dark Knight.
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