Watchmen

That most American of directors, John Huston, once took it upon himself to create a film version of the Bible. It was the heady sixties, when movie studios were dying and had no read whatsoever on the zeitgeist, and thus were willing to fund anything with old-time movie stars. Richard Harris, Peter O'Toole, George C. Scott and Huston himself eat and drink the scenery (along with, one suspects, much "spirit"), and the film itself lumbers across the screen, alternately serene and frenetic, finally running out of energy and collapsing after the great flood.

To adapt the Bible, even if it was only first few books, was a monumental undertaking that was bound to please nobody. After all, this is the one book that many of us were raised to have a personal relationship with, and probably the one book most people have read, so this multitude of imaginations works against the film's efforts to establish some individual identity from the start. (I'm deliberately ignoring the religious implications.) Moreover, the book itself is the very definition of "unfilmable". The necessary special effects alone are only just now within the reach of the film industry, never mind the narrative problems.

Given all that, many people still want a film version of the Bible, and there are those would seek to make it. The film industry, after all, is nothing if not pragmatic. If there's audience ready to see a property, the industry will find a way to give it them.

What does all this have to do with Watchmen?

Watchmen, the original graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, sits on my bookshelf nestled between my copy of the Complete Works of Shakespeare and the Bible. I consider it (and I'm in good company, here), the definitive masterpiece of superhero comic books. Here was one of the first, if not the first, comic book to take the genre seriously and present its mythology to a literate, adult audience. Like all masterpieces, it succeeds on the most basic level (it's a gripping, entertaining mystery adventure) and it has a multitude of other meanings, signs, symbols and complex imagery. Like Citizen Kane, its cinematic equivalent, it's a book that rewards repeat reading and always seems fresh.

It's also completely unfilmable, for the same reasons as the Bible. Its new film adaptation, directed by Zack Snyder, fails for the same reason Huston's film failed. Huston was a great filmmaker (I'm not sure Snyder is), but the material defeated him. So, that Snyder's Watchmen doesn't completely work is understandable, and this shouldn't be blamed entirely on him and his creative team.

Watchmen is nothing if not visually faithful to the original book. It begins, as do many a good mystery, with a murder. The victim is The Comedian (Jeffery Dean Morgan), who was once part of a masked crime-fighting team known as the Minutemen. After they disbanded in the late 1940s, The Comedian worked mainly for the US government, but was courted in the 1960s by one Ozymandias (played here by Matthew Goode) and other heroes, including Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson) and Rorschack (Jackie Earl Haley) to form a new group of masked heroes. In the film, they are named "Watchmen", although this is a serious deviation from the original book, which never uses that word (in its entirety), let alone that name. In the 1970s, so goes the internal alternate history of the book, The Comedian was assigned to Vietnam with the one true superhero, Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), where they quickly bring that war to a victorious end. With Nixon re-elected to a third term in the mid-seventies as a result of this victory, America takes a decidedly different course through the 20th century. After The Comedian fires on an unarmed crowd of protesters in the late 1970s, the Keene Act is passed that outlaws masked vigilantes. The Comedian retired, and that's where we find him as the film opens in a very different 1985.

Snyder makes liberal use of period music to evoke the time, and one does get a certain thrill hearing "99 Red Balloons" used in a serious film, and much of the characters' back-story he compresses into taut, effective montages. Still, with the sheer number of characters and relationships to account for (the summary above leaves out major players such as the Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman)), we can excuse the montage-o-rama in the films' first 45 minutes, even if it causes the second half to seem to drag to a halt, the audience having been primed to expect an action film.

Certainly the film looks great, with astonishing special effects realizing Gibbons' classic four-colour panels. Particular kudos must go to the team behind Dr. Manhattan, who appears as a translucent naked man (ample "equipment" included), rendered in graceful CG achieved through motion capture on Crudup, who brings an enormous amount of heart to the role, even if he seems to be some sort of tranquilizer...

Of the rest of the actors, all hold their own, but special mention has to go to Morgan for bringing a visceral, animal menace to The Comedian, Haley for making Rorschack's more outrageous acts of violence seem entirely believable and Wilson, whose stage work is often under appreciated, for bringing Nite Owl just the right amount of pathos and humanity.

The main supporting characters, Sally Jupiter (Carla Gugino) and Hollis Mason (Stephen McHattie) that feature so prominently in the book are among the casualties of the transition from page to screen. Mason in particular, such a crucial character in the book in rooting the story in its past and building its mythology, is reduced to a glorified cameo. Sally Jupiter, the original Silk Spectre, is badly miscast, as Gugino would much better than Akerman at bringing the younger Spectre to life. Gugino's age makeup, by the way, is a hideous mask about as convincing as the makeup in Planet of the Apes. While her part is larger, the role is badly underwritten, only hinting at her importance.

As a film, Watchmen is decidedly uneven in its pacing and somewhat hemmed-in by its own rigid adherence to the visual style of the book. Of course, had they gone another way, and re-imagined the look and settings, there would have been a hue and cry, so perhaps we can understand this. Still, the individual scenes lack life and energy. Ozymandias prances about making speeches, but Goode's accent slips and slides around the Atlantic as he proclaims each speech as if he was a wormy corporate executive rather than the chisled muscle-man of the comic. Manhattan's Mars adventure in the context of a big-screen tentpole film seems middlebrow and pretentious, robbing the film of much-needed narrative momentum. The ending, changed from the orignal, is that deadly combination of unconvincing, unbeliveable and inconsistent.

Many of these problems were encountered at the script stage by the great filmmakers who attempted, then abandoned Watchmen over the years, including Terry Gilliam and Darren Aronofsky. Snyder and his team pushed through and should be congratulated for getting the movie made, even if its evident narrative and conceptual problems remain a blemish with which any director and screewriter would have had to contend.

My hope is that the film will lead audiences back to the source material, however rare that might be. Certainly, it would be wrong to see the film without reading the book and claim to have any understanding of its importance. I seriously doubt anyone seeing this film without having experienced the book will come to the conclusion that this is a masterpiece. It seems that Alan Moore was right all along in calling the book completely unfilmable.

In other words, Watchmen was never going to make a great movie. We should be grateful that it has at least produced a good one.