The Greatest Trick

A colleague of mine recently told me he was considering going to see Watchmen, but having read the comic, said he would first overdose on “happy” films like Singin’ in the Rain in order to counterbalance the negativity and darkness.

Watchmen is certainly a dark film, in every sense of the word. Those expecting Batman or Superman type heroics are in for a massive disappointment. Like the comic, this is a bleak, blood-soaked tale packed with sex and violence, where the “heroes” are not so much flawed but often downright reprehensible, capable of corruption, rape, murder and even playing God. By contrast, even the most repugnant of the “villains” are vested with redeeming qualities.

Set in a parallel 1985 where Vietnam was won and Nixon was elected five times, the story kicks off when the Comedian, a retired superhero, is murdered. His former colleague Rorschach (think Travis Bickle with a morphing ink-blot mask) is paranoid someone is picking off the group of superheroes he belonged to, the eponymous Watchmen.

Of the various former Watchmen, only one actually has superpowers. The enigmatic Dr Manhatten, a blue naked giant (no, really), was created Captain America style in a laboratory experiment gone wrong. Although he has served America over the years, even he does not think he can stop the impending nuclear war that everyone seems to think is inevitable. This impending threat is the backdrop to Rorschach’s investigations and as the story progresses, each of the other Watchmen – Nite Owl, Silk Spectre, Ozymandias (named after the Shelley poem) – have their elaborate stories explored in flashback.

Based on the celebrated graphic novel by Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore, this is an ambitious, complex and eagerly awaited work. The adaptation had been mooted several times over the years, and was even considered by such cinematic luminaries as Terry Gilliam and Paul Greengrass, but had always ended up in back in development hell. Eventually it was picked up by 300 director Zack Synder, but by this point Alan Moore wanted nothing more to do with Hollywood, and had his name removed from the film. He had always considered (as I had) that Watchmen was inherently unfilmable.

There are really three ways to approach adaptation. The first and obviously worst approach is to try to make it as commercially viable as possible, if necessary ignoring anything dark and difficult in the original text. Cinema history is littered with countless examples of such films, but comic fans will need only one film cited: Judge Dredd.

The second is to be slavishly faithful to the text, which is the approach Synder has taken despite inevitably losing chunks of the story, including the comic-within-a-comic Tales of the Black Freighter and the squid (fans will know what I’m talking about). However, this reverential (and in this case fanboyish) approach can lead to surprisingly timid and bloodless films – the first two Harry Potter pictures spring immediately to mind. Watchmen isn’t exactly bloodless or timid, but it is emotionally flat and probably incomprehensible to non-fans. Admittedly, the comic was radical in its epic approach, but the film just feels long and tedious. To be fair, there are some decent performances from the mostly unknown cast, including Billy Crudup, Malin Akerman, Matthew Goode, Jackie Earle Haley. Furthermore, Synder’s direction is often clever, framing shots so they appear like cells of the comic. However, it all feels like much ado about nothing. Even the soundtrack is badly judged. When I heard Simon and Garfunkel’s The Sound of Silence, I started to wish I was watching The Graduate. When I heard Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries, I started to wish I Was watching Apocalypse Now.

There is a third, and to my mind preferable, approach to adaptation: keep what is cinematic and reinvent the rest whilst remaining faithful to the spirit of the original. This is an extremely difficult trick to pull off, but it can be done. It involves subtracting what doesn’t work and adding something better. For instance Dangerous Liasons featured many changes from the text, but was so brilliant critics and audiences didn’t mind. The same is true of Hitchcock’s version of The 39 Steps, David Lean’s slimmed down Great Expectations, Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans and even Peter Jackson’s take on The Lord of the Rings. Re-read the books and you’ll be surprised how much was changed or removed, but you’ll also admit that what was added made the films better. This is what ought to have happened with Watchmen. Divorced of the comic’s undeniably bold and innovative formatting, without reinvention what is left simply doesn’t hold together as a film.

On a moral note, the tone is relentlessly bleak and nihilistic in a way that appealed to me as a teenager, but not anymore. However, my main issue is with the film (and comics) attempts to grapple with difficult moral dilemmas in a frankly infantile way. For instance, the hoary old “do you kill millions to save billions” quandary rears its ugly head, but it is tackled in a banal and juvenile manner without bringing anything new to the argument. Spiritually this has a pointlessly pessimistic worldview where God is entirely absent. Add to that the presence of extremely graphic and bloody violence, sex, nudity and bad language this is something most Christian audiences will want to avoid. For all Watchmen’s supposed kudos as an “adult” comic, there is far more truth, honesty and intelligent grappling with difficult moral issues in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight (to give two recent examples).

Like my colleague, I can only suggest avoiding such negativity and watching Singin’ in the Rain instead.

Simon Dillon, March 2009.