Not bad!

Rating: 10/10 (6 April 2009)

Being a comics collector, I usually attend new superhero movies on the opening night, but I have a bit of a strained relationship with the Watchmen comic. And, having decided to reread it before seeing the movie, I had to delay seeing it for a week or two. The comic (not originally a graphic novel; that's the collected edition that people call a "graphic novel" now, although it's more properly a trade paperback, only recently also given the hardcover treatment) has always been hard for me to read. Reading it is not much of a pleasure-giving experience for me - it's too dark, too misanthropic, too marred by a negative view of human nature. Which is kinda funny, because a lot of Alan Moore's other work is not like that at all. Watchmen is a singular work, probably intended as an experimental take on what a realistic world with superheroes, who were realistic characters, would be like. As a fan of classic superheroes and science fiction, I'm really not that interested in realism; I'm much more into idealized stuff where it's pretty clear who the good guys and the bad guys are. Watchmen only has relatively grey characters who're neither entirely good nor entirely bad, partly because they live in a complicated world where very few choices can be all-good. That's what this story is, mainly: an exercise in greyness. Even if the world is saved, it happens at the cost of millions of lives. There can be no good here, only a variety of evils, and the trick is how to choose the lesser evils over the greater ones. Of course, in such a world there can't be any proper superheroes, and that is one of the biggest reasons that Watchmen (the comic) doesn't really work for me.
However, as a story containing an intentional message about moral greyness and the immense difficulty of making morally good choices, Watchmen is very successful indeed. It comprises an uproarious contrast to the usual superhero comics, which are morally black and white, never in doubt as to what's good and what's bad. I don't think Watchmen is intended as a scathing critique of the usual type of superhero stories; rather it is simply an exercise in reversal, in doing something different, and in so doing throwing the usual tropes of genre storytelling into sharp relief.
The movie translates the comic into its own medium very successfully - if perhaps a bit *too* faithfully. Since I had just read the comic when I saw the movie, very little in the movie surprised me at all. It was really just going through the motions of the comic, using it as storyboards for the movie, and as such appearing as if any director could have produced an identical movie. The comic, and all its images, have become so iconic that nobody dares make any substantial changes, it seems. Well, all right. I suppose I would have complained about it if it hadn't been like the comic. Still, I do think it looked more like "a comic book movie" than a proper movie in its own right. But I enjoyed the images, and found them quite a bit more palatable in this form than in the comic. So, high marks from me!
The ending of the movie was the only thing that was changed from the comic. It was a fairly good change, using a quite convincing substitute idea. But the change also has bigger implications. In the movie, we end up with a world that believes itself to be watched by Dr. Manhattan, who then scares/forces people into submission much like the anti-war robot Gort did in the original The Day The Earth Stood Still. But, what's to keep people from reverting to warlike ways once they discover that Dr. Manhattan is gone? In this way, I think the movie transmits an even bleaker view of human nature than the comic.
The genius of the ending in the comic is that you don't quite know whether Ozymandias' new world order will remain in place, or whether Rorshach's notes will blow the whole thing wide open and throw the world back into chaos and war. This is brilliant because the individual reader will interpret the ending according to his particular political view! If you are a cynical republican (or even just a conservative or libertarian), like Rorshach, you will believe that his notes will reveal the truth and throw off the yoke of Ozymandias' world order, replacing it with "freedom", in whatever form. But if you are an idealistic liberal who thinks that Ozymandias actually and heroically chose the least of all possible evils, and in so doing best represented human nature, then you will be unlikely to believe that the publication of Rorshach's notes will make any difference at all. Nice one, Mr. Moore!
By having an even bleaker view of human nature, the movie actually understands the point of the comic, and enhances it by disguising itself even more (also through the Comedian - a "good guy" who keeps doing things that no remotely heroic character would do) as cynical and pro-Rorshach, when in fact its deeper attitude is the reverse: The world of this story really has a true hero, and his name is Ozymandias.
Look upon Alan Moore's genius, ye mighty, and despair! :-)