Movie Review: Watchmen

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I've decided to give this review a couple days to let myself think about the movie. I saw the film on Friday, but I needed to get my thoughts in order. And I have decided I am totally bipolar about this movie.

As a comic fan, how can I not be impressed by the faithfulness of the film? Yet, as a movie fan, I found it lacking. It's a movie that what it got right, it got so perfectly right, that I can never hate it. But it's flaws are so damning that I can't love it.

Let's start with the good. The movie is not 100% faithful to the book. There's stuff added, stuff left out, and things changed. But this is as close to an exact copy we are going to get outside of the motion comic. Lines of dialog are taken directly from Alan Moore script, and scenes look like they stepped out of Dave Gibbons artwork.

You can see love and care in these moments. They almost glorify the original work, and the film does well capturing the mood of the graphic novel at these times.

The acting, with one major exception, is amazing, especially Jackie Earle Haley. He does an excellent job acting, both inside and out of the mask. He captures Rorschach perfectly.

Also great are Billy Crudup and Patrick Wilson as Jon Osterman/Dr. Manhattan and Dan Dreiberg respectively. They have a tough job, as they are the most subdued roles in the film, but they bring humanity and consistency to the portrayals. They might not get as much attention as the showier parts, but the excelled in what they did.

It should come as a surprise to no one that the ending was changed. However, and I might be going out on a limb here, I think the film ending works better than the comic version. It's the same style of Deus Ex Machina, but it makes more sense from a plot perspective. It is more tied into the narrative and makes more sense. The only qualm I have in it is who they use as a scapegoat, but even that makes a certain amount of sense.

Of course, since the ending is changed,, there needed to be scenes added to set up this new ending. This is where my criticisms come in. While they took such great care in transferring Moore's words to the screen, they didn't take as much care in making sure the new scenes matched in style, tone or timbre. The result is a jarring break from the action, it's like someone putting product placement in Hamlet.

HAMLET: Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He...

HORATIO: Yo, Hamslice, you gonna be long? I gots me a hankerin to make a run for the border!

HAMLET: Yo quiero Taco Bell?

HORATIO: Yo definitely quiero Taco Bell. You up for it?

HAMLET: Mos def!

Cut to interior if the Elsinore Taco Bell.

HAMLET: These Cheesy Gorditas are off the hook!. Now, where was I? Oh, yeah, Yorick. He hath bore me on his back a thousand times...

The only way they could have made the fact it was added more glaringly obvious is if they used a siren and a red flashing light to alert us.

But the difference in tone isn't the only thing that is jarring. You can see the hands of studio executives. who, after reading the graphic novel, were disappointed in the minimal level of sex and violence. They got  a hold of Snyder and made him amp both up.

The result is what was a scuffle in the book became an all-out fight scene in the movie. And what was a fight scene became a festival of bloody, slow motion bone-breaking where even the non-powered cast members had the ability to atomize bricks by just punching them.

And the gore quotient is raised considerably. This is not a film for the squemish. Dr. Manhattan, who's comic book move was exploding people's heads, just wasn't gross enough, I guess. Now he explodes the entire body, leaving the people next to the victim, and the walls, and the ceiling, covered in blood and offal.

And then there's the sex scene, where the movie exchanges reels with its soft core porn ripoff, "Crotchmen". The scene goes on too long, and is an uncomfortably awkward break in the narrative. I'm no prude, but the scene just didn't work from a character perspective. And a note to Snyder, the scene in the comic when the couple accidentally hits the flame thrower is meant to be a metaphor for the orgasm. It becomes pointless when you show Malik Ackerman going through the throws of the orgasm right before it.

These breaks make the Watchmen, purely as a film, kind of bad. Add to that the only back story Ozymandias gets is a 20 minute monologue (which, we all know, if exposition or a character motivation is delivered in a 20 minute monologue, that's bad writing) and that Malin Ackerman is woefully miscast and completely one note throughout the movie (meaning her acting stays the same whether she is angry, sad, happy, flirtatious, or bored), and you have some seriously negative strikes against it as a movie.

But the good part were so good, it acted as a balance to the bad. It could have been much better, great even, but as it is, it is only good--and lucky to be considered that.