Good not great film is too faithful to be truly wonderful on its own terms

Rating: 6/10 (7 March 2009)

n an alternate 1985, when Richard Nixon is working on his fifth term, someone throws former superhero The Comedian out of his high rise window. One of his former allies, a masked crusader name Rorschach smells a rat and he begins to contact his old cronies because he fears that some one is going after former superheroes. What Rorschach doesn't know is that what is going on is way beyond simple murder.
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's classic comic story has finally come to the screen. This is a story, which along with Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns changed not only comics but culture (all culture) forever. I remember reading the graphic novel version of the comic when it came out and being so floored that I went around giving people copies of the novel.
The film is that its good but not great. It is too faithful and too artificial to truly be great. There are the seeds of a great film here and when they eventually remake it there will be a great film version.
Zach Snyder is a transcriber here. He is far from the visionary director that the ads and some reviews have described. What he's done is essentially take Dave Gibbon's panels and put them on the screen. There is very little original to what he's put on the screen. Much of the dialog seems to be Moore's as well. On some level its almost as if he ripped the pages from the novel and put them on the screen. Yes Snyder and his collaborators have made cuts and changes, but for the most part what you see is the novel.
The problem is that Snyder in being faithful to the comic has forgotten that with a comic the mind will connect the panels and that the mind will add life to material between "the lines". Snyder in being faithful to the material never added the life to his tableaux.There is no life past the edges of the screen. I never really became engaged until about half way in when the power of Patrick Wilson's acting lifted the film despite the other short comings. Wilson brought a life to the proceedings that transcended the rest of the film.(This isn't to sell the rest of the cast short. Jackie Earle Haley, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Matt Frewer, and Stephen McHattie are Wilson's equals) Snyder's faithfulness to the book has also caused another problem, it shows the limitations of the source novel. This is not to sell the novel short only to point out what works on the page doesn't work on the screen.
(I want to raise questions about plot points not being all that great but I'm not sure if the problem is Moore's or Snyder's so I'm going to reserve picking the plot apart until I see the directors cut and reread the novel- though I will say that some of the Mars material is silly)
Snyder is also too faithful in his shot choices. We don't need all of the shots that are exactly the same as the comic. Set up the situation, and let it play out in real space with out the need to match the comic panels. And while I'm bitching about being too close, we don't need the whole sex scene between Night Owl and Silk Spectre, nor do we need to see ever broken bone, every whack in the head with a meat clever. Less is more. We know the pair is having sex, we don't need a Leonard Cohen video. And didn't Snyder ever realize that when you want to have violence continue to have an effect you show the results once and then you have the audiences attention, since after the third time it becomes silly.
I know it seems like I'm taking the film apart, and I am. I can't help not doing it because this film should have been better, this should have been so much better. I mean the moment when Patrick Wilson suits up for the first time in a long time was magical. but little else is. I blame director Snyder who either just is copying some one else's material or is falling back on tricks- say Slow Motion. to cover his limitations. I think if Snyder had used this script and this cast and had dared to be different in something other than the ending I think he would have made a great film. Lets face it the reason the novel is so popular is that its a great story and when thats allowed to shine, mostly in the second half the film is really good.
I shouldn't be able to pull as much of this film apart as I am. I should have been more engaged and not thinking about what didn't work.
Its a good film but its not a great one.
And I know you probably want to know what about the ending. How is the end of the film as compared to the novel. I think its okay, it works. I don't know that its works as well as the original but it works.
(I should point out that I don't think the film as a bleak and dark as many people have said. I don't see the heroes in the film as any darker than any other hero in comics. They are heroes and anti heroes, and the only difference is that the damage they cause is "real". What did people think would have happened when Batman kicked the snot out of someone? The joke always was that Batman could beat someone into a coma but wouldn't cross the line to killing some one...here...things are less clear.)