Less is Moore

Rating: 6/10 (8 March 2009)

Alan Moore's beef with Hollywood is that it's a crudifying monster  its arms entering the spectator's mind through the eyes and once inserted, frenzied and aimless, pulping the grey matter contents into a kind of wit resistant batter which is no more capable of processing the dense psychological and social preoccupations of his work than wood can hope to ferry electricity.
For Moore, willfully ignorant in an effort to protect his own authorship, cinema just isn't up to it. The detail of each panel within the humble comic book is a gallery of ideas and story specific detail that you, yes YOU the grateful reader, pore over at your leisure, like the fine art connoisseur plotting their time through a superb exhibition and breathing in each piece in turn. This notion that film, by its very nature, is reductive in translation and confected on delivery, has lead the co-author of Watchmen to suggest that his 1986 graphic novel was "unfilmable". For the record, that's senseless toss but this adaptation isn't going to change his mind. It's not the mode of translation that's at fault  film is a perfectly viable tool for the job, it's the way that tool has been used.
Watchmen is a fascinating view because it vividly illustrates several of the problems transferring material between two visual art forms that rely on significantly different patterns of consumption and interpretation to work.
Dave Gibbons, who illustrated the 12-part series on which this is based, was, unlike Moore, happy to be credited and that's hardly surprising because Zack Snyder has used his art work like a storyboard, compensating for the rapidity of the moving image where appropriate, with fits of slow motion, designed to recall the experience of forensically eyeballing those all important panels. It is, superficially at least, a good technique, reverent to the original and designed to fluff the fanboys who will have envisioned it thus and will be in a furious masturbatory frisson as a result. Were this the only barometer, Watchmen would be a qualified success but its problems are manifest in those areas that required an artist rather than the fan at the helm  a director rather than a acolyte - narrative, backstory, tone; the elements of the graphic novel that, somewhat counter intuitively, may have benefited from a less straitjacketed approach.
Watchmen the graphic novel acknowledges the limitations of the medium, whether it knows it or not, by fortifying each part with written extracts from various fictional sources  a former super heroes autobiography, a police report, a magazine article  all of which add texture to the characterization and flesh out the stories alternative timeline. Inevitably the three act Hollywood picture isn't the easiest framework within which to add these deets, so what to do? Émigré directors of the 30s and 40s working in Hollywood (and a few of the natives), overcame these sorts of problems by investing scenes with expressionistic composition and shadow, which married with incisive, witty dialogue, hinted at what couldn't be shown or seen, and consequently your imagination became the bridge and added the depth. The result? Film Noir  the perfect fusion of artistry and suggestion and some of the finest American films ever made.
Snyder knows he has a problem in this respect but sentimentally in thrall to the source, is incapable of making the decisions that might have saved his bacon. It's a matter of hitting the same psychological points in the story but with greater subtlety than a word for word transfer allows. Much of the dialogue is lifted from Moore's script, but what works within the context of the comic book, feels clunky and coarse when it exits the mouths of real human beings. Rorschach is the case in point. On paper he's brooding, introspective and psychotic  on screen he speaks the same words, does the same things but has a pantomime quality that errs toward the ridiculous. Too often, when unable to mark out his roadmap to the story's political and socio-satirical cues, Snyder's instinct is to go for crunching violence and spectacle (as well as adding inches to Doctor Manhattan's flaccid penis not a bad metaphor for his approach), perhaps hoping to overpower the viewer's undernourished cerebellum. He'll say the noise is all on the page of course, and it is, but what felt cutting in the novel's more fully realised world, looks like a blunt instrument on screen. It isn't that you can't film it, you just can't do like this, but it's another case study to add to the files on the issue of how the filmmakers best equipped to replicate the EXPERIENCE of these stories, are seldom the ones who actually have an interest in doing so.