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A Very Special Geek Beat: Watchmen

by Elisabeth Rappe Mar 8th 2009 // 8:03PM

Filed under: New Releases, Fandom, The Geek Beat



There are reading experiences that stay with you for your entire life. I don't want to sound overblown and fanatical, but one of these was Watchmen. I was in college, reading a borrowed copy, and was racing to finish it because the lender wanted it back by the end of spring break. (He owned multiple copies, and the Absolute edition, but wanted every copy in his possession at all times. This is the devotion Watchmen inspires.) I knew very little about the story. I knew it was set in the 80s, I knew it was dark and depressing, and I knew there was a sequence on Mars.

I found myself racing through the book not just because I had a deadline, but because of the countdown of the doomsday clock. Every chapter tightened the screw, and I knew something bad was coming ... but this was a comic book. Nothing bad truly happens in a comic book. I remember very distinctly that the giant squid landed as I was sitting in the optometrist's office, and that Rorschach was a smear on the snow when I left. It haunted me for the rest of the day. I felt like I shouldn't be shopping in sunny Boulder while New York was covered in blood and corpses.

I give you all of this background because when the film started ... I was right back in that optometrist's office. I experienced the same sense of claustrophobia and dread, feeling like I needed a shower after walking the grimy New York street, all mingled with the geek's thrill of seeing the panels come to life. It was the book. People were eating in the Gunga Diner. There was the newspaper vendor, breathing and talking. The spaces between the panels were colored in with living people. Dr. Manhattan finally had a voice. (He was the one character I could never really hear as I read it. But there's no doubt he should sound like a distant, hollow Billy Crudup.)




It wasn't perfect. Malin Akerman and Matthew Goode's performances left much to be desired. Some of the dialogue is stilted, although that's has much to do with Moore's purple prose, which reads well, but speaks poorly. The slow-motion, which I defended in 300, was extremely distracting and overdone. (One of my friends said "If he had just played those at normal speed, he could have saved some running time." Indeed. We might have had time for a little more of Rorschach's background.) Some of the edits feel like a giant Insert More Footage Here sign, which is just to be expected in a post-LOTR era. In that respect it's more of a tour through the book, taking you to rest on the biggest points of the story, stopping to rest at Dan's atomic nightmare or the dinner between him and Laurie. Where it lingers, it's especially wonderful, but at times it feels like a checklist to please the fans and the running time. I wish there had been more chances to linger, explore, get to know everyone, and see the pieces of the end come together. The credits sequence achieved that brilliantly though, and possibly makes the film feel a little more breathless than it actually is.

It's the ending that suffers the most. It's a sucker punch with no trail of breadcrumbs to go back and find, but instead is broadcast by every cool flicker of Ozymandias' face. It's the biggest problem the film has, not because they removed the squid, but because it comes up so fast, and with so little emotion. The enormity and the horror of Ozymandias' plot isn't felt. It's not a sucker punch, it's like a slap on the knuckles. It's here where Watchmen splits into Zack Snyder's and Alan Moore's. Snyder's Watchmen is zeroed on the costumed adventurers, and he eliminates the electric cars and the opium pipes to bring them into a sharper focus. The sucker punch of his ending lies not in the destruction of major cities but in Rorschach's death. He's the loss, not New York, and in reality that's how you measure tragedy. You don't mourn for the faceless, but for the ones you know. By the time Rorschach died in Moore's book, I was emotionally beaten. I couldn't feel bad for him, because I was still sickened by the deaths of the newspaper man, the psychiatrist and his wife, and Gail the cab driver. He was just one more face to the count. It was too much. It's supposed to be.

By narrowing it down, I think Snyder stressed the film as a cinematic superhero deconstruction, and where he played the most to non-fans, as opposed to those clamoring for a giant squid. Moore's was a distinctly literary one (and will always be the richer for it), and Snyder was faithful to it while trying to chuck some bombs at the latex trappings of our movie superheroes. Snyder knows that his newbie audience expected a film where the bomb stops at 0:01 because Dr. Manhattan saved the day. Evil plots are not supposed to succeed, heroes are not supposed to compromise in the face of Armageddon, and if they die, they die as the Spartans did in 300. They are not supposed to end up as a bloody smear on the snow, destroyed for a convenient and temporary lie by one of their comrades.

Many people are screaming that Snyder didn't "get" it, and pointing to the slow-motion, the gore, and the squidless ending. But if he hadn't gotten it, he'd have opted for the Sam Hamm script, or insisted on seeing Ozymandias killed in retribution by Nite Owl. He got it. and he made a film that's a thematic companion to The Dark Knight. That film also ends with peace that's built on a lie, and the sacrifice of Batman, and Nolan's Gotham is one where Batman may be driven forever underground, and never be admired again. But where The Dark Knight glorifies the sacrifice, Watchmen makes it something tawdry – and you find yourself rooting for The New Frontiersman to destroy the lie, even if the peace goes with it.

If I had my doubts that newcomers might not pick up on that, they were quickly dispelled in my audience. Someone behind me audibly gasped when Rorschach's journal appeared on the crank file – the kind of "Oh! from someone who didn't know the story, and who were now experiencing a satisfied thrill that Rorschach gets the final word. I don't think this person will be alone. So, I think the film succeeded, and I think Snyder deserves a hell of a lot of credit for what he managed to do. Because if nothing else, it was the work of a fan, and directed to the fans. Once the frenzy and the emotion dissipates, I hope more of them will realize and appreciate that. Even where the film fails, it's still pretty amazing. It's Watchmen.

Now bring me the director's cut and an Owl Ship toy. And may this pave the way for a ballsy Preacher.

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