Watchmen (2009)

I've already wrote and published my Book vs. Film, so I don't want to repeat too much of what I said there. I saw the movie before I had finished the novel, I wrote and published the article, and then I saw it again. The other night a friend said to me that she thought my criticism of the interpretation was too harsh. Perhaps.

It's not that I didn't like the movie. If I hadn't read the novel beforehand, I'm sure I would have quite liked it. The opening montage, which catches us up on the first generation of masked adventures, set to Bob Dylan's "The Times, They Are A-Changin'", is quite possibly the best part of the movie. Even if you aren't familiar with the source material, it captures the sort of nostalgic feeling (the classic, pain from an old wound kind) that permeates the novel.

When Ozymandias says that he made himself feel every death, the first time around I whispered, "How?" Ozymandias in the book surely could have found a way. The second time I simply frowned. I like Matthew Goode, but he's too small and young for this role. He seems too much like he's playing at being a grown up, unable to live up to the body building genius that Moore created.

Two friends who had never picked up the novel saw the movie. One called it boring; the other complained that there are too many flashbacks. I don't agree with either criticism, nor did I find the movie Edelstein's "an awe-inspiring corpse." Something does get lost in the interpretation, though I think I hit it right when I said that it's the psychology that's missing. The thing that made Rorschach (the perfectly cast Jackie Earl Haley) Rorschach wasn't burying a meat cleaver into a murderer's head. It was the moment he realized that he could use the indifference of good people in his favour. It's a startling notion in the book that never materializes in the movie.

Still, the movie's not anywhere near as bad as I am no doubt making it sound. It's nothing short of a tremendous visual feat, and there are plenty of sly references for all the fanboys (the screens at the TV studio from the beginning of the movie read S.Q.U.I.D. at the end, the song references at the end of the chapters are woven into the bitchin' soundtrack). I think, in the end, that Zach Synder's heart's in the right place. The novel's world - its paranoia, its fears, its teetering on the brink of destruction from seemingly every angle - remains preserved. Some of the contents may have shifted during flight, so fanboys and girls will just have to remember to open carefully. But there's a lot to uncover if you do open up. B

P.S. Dr. Manhattan's huge, swinging dick really is distracting, though.