The Tease of Things I Don't Need

Watching the Watchmen

Nicely done. After so many years, it's finally here -- and turns out to be the first movie we've made a point of going out to see in 2009.

(Unless you're completely clueless about the movie I consider this piece to be safe with respect to any significant spoilers.)

Nick and I caught the 10 am showing today. I read the original 12-part Watchmen series as it came out in 1986 & '87, then in collected form multiple times over the years. Nick had never read it. Zack Snyder's film adaptation of it worked for both of us.

A sweep of story that looks at an alternate universe where a costumed hero and villain fad - rather than simply being the launch of an enduring comics genre as it was in our universe - became a real world one. This had an impact on the 20th century, but not as much as one that occurred in the late 1950s, when a young physicist was accidentally taken apart in an experiment gone awry and ultimately reassembled himself as a immortal with vast powers.

Ominously dubbed Dr. Manhattan by a U.S. administration he ultimately became the embodiment of U.S. nuclear hegemony. He was an atom-age advantage that couldn't simply be leaked to a foreign power to maintain any balance. Ultimately he was used to deliver a swift victory in Viet Nam and creating an increasingly dark reign in that world's United States as Richard Nixon found himself possibly the greatest beneficiary of all this as laws were changed to - by the 1985 which is the "now" of the film - allow Nixon to be at the start of a fifth term as president.

There was apparently some interest in altering the story to have Reagan be in the White House then, but that was shot down it seems because Nixon was safer to loosely demonize. No fan of Reagan's, I'm happy they left it as writ, leaving Reagan-as-candidate as no more than a throw-away joke reference in the film's final scene.

I was afraid the desire to keep it set as a period piece would work against the film -- I've had multiple experiences with loaning the graphic novel out to younger readers and found that one of the elements that didn't hold up for them was the mid-eighties context of seemingly imminent nuclear doom as the Cold War threatened to heat up -- but having seen the result I am so happy some of the interim scripts, which contemporized the story, weren't shot.

Even at nearly three hours the adaptation had to cut some elements, some of which were the Tales of the Black Freighter sequences -- a pirate comic that a minor character in the story was reading, which provided a parallel subtext to the main story's events. Re-done as a separate, animated piece that'll be released as a separate DVD released later this month. I suspect it'll suffer somewhat for being put in an animated form, but since Snyder's first impulse was to keep the sequences interspersed in the overall film, producing them as stylized live action reminiscent of 300 I'm not sure how much better that would have been.

That DVD will also include the faux documentary Under The Hood - chronicling the costumed vigilante phenomenon. Named for Hollis Mason (the first Nite Owl's) autobiography, which was itself essentially a behind-the-scenes story of the fad. Some elements of this popped up during the film, particularly during the opening sequence where much of the timeline is laid out.

Additional elements were cut, but I don't want to go into those as it's opening weekend and I don't want to spoil anything. This review is supposed to be a safe thumbs up from a fan. At this stage I'm simply happy to read (even just in the Versions section of the Wiki entry) that some of the missing elements were filmed, and so are likely to make it into a later director's cut.

No complaints about the performances or pacing, and it would be difficult to fault Hayter (screenwriter) and Snyder (director) as getting in the way of the adaptation. It would have been virtually impossible to deliver a more faithful transition to the film without having it be an HBO or Showtime miniseries.

In another week or two we may go catch the film in the Imax format.

I know I'll be writing up a fuller piece on this, unconcerned by spoilers, which I'll be running in the April issue of Legends -- by then, anyone who wanted to know about the film will have seen it -- and I'll likely run that expanded version here.