The perils of adaptation

Rating: 8/10 (8 March 2009)

This last Friday (12am showing thank you very much) I saw the highly anticipated moving-picture adaptation of seminal graphic novel Watchmen. Making this movie was a unique enterprise in that it was not just another comic book movie, but from the onset, publicized itself as being as faithful as possible to the source material.
This poses a problem for the director, in that the material was itself a piece of visual storytelling, and what, if anything, does a director need if not a unique vision. It seems fittingly poetic that the main flaw of the movie was that its director tried to prove that he was a necessary element of the production -- Gibbons should have received a director credit because of the number of sequences that were lifted directly from his illustrations.
The only place that the Snyder seems to have had visual input was the extension of some fight sequences and the unnecessary gratuity of female nudity. (The blue nudity makes perfect sense for the character and is part of the source material.) Which is blatantly an attempt to keep what, without the massive existing fan-boy base, would be it's target demographic, teenage boys, happy.
What fan-boys already know is that Watchmen is more complex than a typical super-hero story. Contained with it's 12 issues were the "origin stories" of half dozen characters, the the sketching of a parallel history where the US was not unsuccessful in Vietnam, the zeitgeist of impending nuclear doomsday, an exploration of existential determinism, the duality of female characters in the medium and a pirate story.
Even at almost three hours, the movie could not possibly keep all this detail, but I was happy to say that it got most of the high-points right. (The "Black Freighter" meta-comic looks to be an extra on the DVD.) The characterizations of Rorschach and Night Owl were particularly well rounded, and with the emergence of motion capture technology as a viable tool for enhancing performances a new Oscar category seems ripe for Billy Crudup's Dr. Manhattan to take home (or to become model for).
The art direction and FX were awesome and I was happy to see so much of the novel brought to greater detail. But while it was good to see these drawing brought to life; the conceit of the mission statement, bring the graphic novel to the screen, was its greatest flaw. (My review of 300 compared it to an animated David painting.) While the serial novel poses its own sets of problems, Moore worked well within those to make each issue sufficiently self contained, but still be contained enough momentum to give each issue a cliffhanger. I think that the movie stayed to close to that narrative pattern, so that there seemed to be a sort of climax every twenty minuets or so. It would have been better if the screenwriters could have adjusted the pacing a bit for a more cohesive arc.
While I will confess an appreciation of multiple chronology storytelling, found that, on screen, the lack of narrative pattern to be jarring. I remember my first exposure to Moore's work and having an immediate affinity for his ability to collapse and expand narrative time, which I later realized had been learned from the best of the 20th century, Woolfe, Joyce and Proust. Their lessons: the past is never really past and that writing allows anyone to be their own version Dr. Manhattan. (I'd be happy to be half as sexy without hair as Billy Blue. Sitting in a theatre however is not the same as sitting in an armchair and the movie cannot function in that same temporal environment.
Pacing is just one way that a movie needs to be different than a book. The most successful adaptations understand this and edit accordingly. The few movies that have been better than the books from which they were taken apply a light approach to their sources. (example: Cider House Rules and Wonder Boys.) Taking so much directly from the series chopped up the action and the addition of unnecessary sequences dragged out run time.
However I am happy to say that one small detail was changed that I completely agree with; changed I assume because, even for a super-hero movie that postulates a consciousness made up something other than a brain, it was just to far fetched to believe. The original story used this as a way to make a conspiracy once discovered implausible to those who would read of it in Rorschach Journal. (I too am glad that was kept Justin.) Other reviews I'd categorize into those that applaud the reverence, those that applaud the direction that the movie takes the superhero genre and those that were annoyed by Akerman's inadequate performance. I'll give it 3.25 stars B- only because it tried to please the wrong audience - those fan-boys slavishly praising the faithful transcription - but movies being the business they are, that was maybe a wise decision.