Book vs. Movie
Watchmen
By Russ Bickerstaff
March 9, 2009
BoxOfficeProphets.com
And in this corner: the Movie. A 112-year-old kid born in France to a guy named Lumiere and raised primarily in Hollywood by his uncle Charlie "the Tramp" Chaplin. This young upstart has quickly made a huge impact on society, rapidly becoming the most financially lucrative form of storytelling in the modern world.
Both square off in the ring again as Box Office Prophets presents another round of Book vs. Film.
Watchmen
Having received acclaim in both mainstream and comic book circles, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' graphic novel Watchmen is probably the single most respected super hero story in the history of the genre. The mid to late 1980s deconstruction of the superhero genre was written in a way that was originally intended to show those qualities unique to the comic book medium. In spite of this, there have been numerous attempts to adapt the story to film dating back to 1986, when the series hadn't even been completed yet. Over the course of the past two decades, many names have been attached to the film adaptation, including Joel Silver, Sam Hamm, Terry Gilliam, David Hayter, Darren Aronofsky, Daniel Craig, Jude Law and Sigourney Weaver. Finally, in 2006 it was announced that 300 director Zack Snyder would be directing the project. Snyder has endeavored to be very true to the comic book his move is based on, but can even the most faithful film adaptation hope to capture the essence of a story that was meant for another medium?
The Book
In 1982, British publisher Eagle Comics acquired the rights to Marvelman — a grandiose Superman-like hero from the golden age of British comic books. Soon-to-be-acclaimed British author Alan Moore was given the opportunity to work with the character and promptly went about updating him for a much darker, contemporary world. Remaining true to the stories that had made the character so popular, Moore explained away the grandiose ‘50s adventures of the hero as a sinister pseudo-virtual reality experiment that didn't actually happen in the real world...creepy, but kind of a cop-out. When US comic book publisher DC Comics acquired the rights to a line of golden age super-heroes from the now defunct Charlton Comics, Moore approached them with the idea of showing what happened between the panels of all those larger-than-life, black and white ,good vs. evil superhero stories of the 1950s. DC liked the idea, but didn't relish the idea of giving Moore the Charlton characters to work with, presumably since they had paid good money for them.
Moore was allowed to re-work his dark super hero story with all-new characters based off of the ones he'd intended on using from DC's Charlton comics acquisition. The resulting story ended up spanning much of the 20th century and featured heroes drawn from just about every major type of hero seen in mainstream comic books. It explored the nature of heroism from the era of the masked crime fighters of the pulp era to the costumed heroes of World War II and the golden age of comics, following through to the dark times of the silver age in a post Watergate, post-Vietnam, post-nuclear era. The series was completed as the ‘80s heat-up of the cold war was about to end it.
Being based on pre-existing characters, there wasn't anything terribly original about the cast of Watchmen. Furthermore, the plot, which featured a single gleaming hero taking utopian heroism to its bitter, bloody extreme, was nothing new either. Stories of heroism taken to fascist extremes go back to the golden age of pulp sci-fi and were nothing new in the ‘80s. What makes Watchmen so brilliant is not the story that's being told, but rather the way the story is being told. We see a complicated picture of these characters emerge in a way that can only really be revealed in comic book format — multiple different visual clues give a feel for a character's personality as well as their dialogue and information revealed in the text-based pages found at the end of each chapter. More so than standard text-based novels, one does not read Watchmen so much as walk into it. By using the kind of static, unmoving density of the comic book page to its fullest extreme in a way that had never really been seen before, the Watchmen comic book is considered by many to be one of the best books of the 20th century. It is interesting to note in light of this the fact that it's far from being the author's best work. His spoken word piece The Highbury Working was far more accomplished in the depth of its stylistic details and sheer beauty of its composition. His graphic novel Brought to Light is a much more chilling look at human nature in 20th century politics. His text-based novel Voice Of The Fire was considerably better storytelling. Relatively few people have heard of these works. For better or worse, Moore's most acclaimed work is destined to have been Watchmen.
The Movie
Director Zack Snyder deserves a considerable amount of credit for trying to be as true to the comic book as possible. He has been credited with having gone so far as to using the panels of the comic book as storyboards for the film. A previous director was rumored to have wanted to update the story from the mid-'80s to a more contemporary era. From a certain perspective, this would have made sense — sure, the graphic novel was set in the 1980s, but that's when it was WRITTEN. Wouldn't it make sense to bring the story into a more contemporary setting? Yes, but it would lose track of the ‘80s Cold War themes that so inspired the original novel. It also would have displaced the mid-20th century setting that formed the backbone of the story.
Snyder's attention to detail with respect to the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s is impressive. Costuming, sets, technology - every aspect of the style fits together remarkably well, except for the music. The scoring for scenes set in the story's "contemporary" ‘80s does feature some direct references to music of the era, but it's more of a distraction than anything. As Dr. Manhattan's origin flits across the screen, we hear Philip Glass' score for Koyaanisqatsi. Rorschach is leaving Dan Dreiberg‘s workshop and we can hear a distinct, un-credited cue almost lifted verbatim from Vangelis' score to Bladerunner. Moments like these give the film an anxious feeling — it wants to be brilliant and ahead of its time. It wants to be as brilliant as its source material and seems to think it can do so by associating itself with brilliance, but it only serves to remind the viewer of the brilliance they're NOT seeing. The music isn't all distracting, however. Adrian Veidt is discussing the future of technology with a group of people in his office tower and we can hear a Muzak version of Tears For Fears' Everybody Wants To Rule The World. It's a subtle reference, but it's frighteningly clever. The film is at its best when it's doing those things that combine sound with moving pictures in a way truly unique to film that advances the central themes explored in the story.
The unique aspects that film brings to a story are crucial here. What often gets overlooked when discussing film adaptations of comic books is how similar the two art forms are. Aside from being generally more commercially and critically accepted than comic books, films are very much like their less-respected siblings. Both comic books and films are dramatic, visually dynamic renderings of stories that were originally written in script format. Being a finished product, a film has more in common with comic books than it does with a more ephemeral dramatic art form like theatre. In this respect, it's a bit disingenuous to the pen and ink artist to praise a film adaptation of a comic book merely because it is a faithful rendering of that comic book. Unlike films based on text-based books, a comic book-based film has to do more to justify its existence than merely compellingly transfer a story to the screen. Being based on long-running monthly corporate-owned comic book series, most super hero films can at least rely on the fact that telling a story in a single film (or single film series) is distinctly different from telling a story that appears in smaller bits every month for a string of decades. Known much better as a single, 12-chapter graphic novel than it was as a 12 issue limited series, Watchmen is far more like a feature film than a traditional comic book series. The similar formats between a relatively short graphic novel and that of a feature film makes any film adaptation much more difficult to justify.
It is in that need to justify moving a story from one visual medium to another that Snyder's desire to remain true to the comic book ends up becoming a liability to the film. The film is 163 minutes long. The comic book is 384 pages long. Do the math and that means that the film covers something like two pages per minute. Regardless of how true you want to be to the comic book, you're going to be cutting scenes. This raises difficulties with the format of a feature film, which traditionally has a standard three-act plot structure — not a 12-chapter story that distinguishes itself in details. In remaining true to those scenes that are presented, the film comes across as being wholly uneven and doubtlessly very difficult to follow for people who haven't read the book at least once. The story that cascades across the screen ends up feeling profoundly disjointed.
Another problem with a desire to transfer some of the book's scenes directly to the screen is that it ends up amplifying what differences there ARE. This is particularly detrimental to a work of art that is so defined by its details. Snyder seems to have been so focused on making the film look like the book that he seems to have overlooked the importance of the acting ensemble — Malin Ackerman seems almost listless in her performance as Laurie Jupiter — lacking the anger and bitterness that makes her so interesting. Billy Crudup summons enough of Dr. Manhattan's sense of detachment, but he never manages to bring the character's loftier intellectual side to the screen. In the role of Adrian Veidt, Matthew Goode never seems quite charismatic to bring the image of a shining, godlike hero to the screen, which balances his performance out on the edge of being a pretty simple villain. The script doesn't allow him enough time onscreen to become the hero he needs to be to make the ending as much of a shock as it should be. Jackie Earle Haley actually does a pretty good job as Rorschach/Walter Kovacs, putting in a performance that gives the character an odd kind of young Clint Eastwood feel that adds to the mood of the film. Jeffrey Dean Morgan never seems quite bitter enough as the Comedian. Patrick Wilson seems to have the balance of Dan Drieberg down pretty well and even manages to carry a couple of really good moments. Due to the efforts of Haley and Wilson, the scenes between Rorschach and Nite Owl are the most compelling dramatically, which would have been fine if the film had focused more of its energy on the two characters. Instead, the whole thing feels like a rushed effort to get as much of the comic book into the film as possible.
Comparing a big-budget adventure film to a more complicated dramatic novel may not be fair to the film, which has at its heart a desire to entertain with sweeping, epic energy. To this end, the fight sequences have been extended from comic book to film. In theory, this makes the film much more exciting to watch on a gut level, but the actual effect is just the opposite. With the amount of physical action extended, the intensity of each instance of action becomes less dynamic. The fight between Veidt, Rorschach and Nite Owl at the end of the book was far more impressive due to its brevity than the drawn-out sequence the film attempts. As in so many other instances, the film makes so much less of an impact than the novel.
The Verdict
While far from being perfect, the book is quite a bit more accomplished than the film. Packed with details formed far from the traditional Hollywood three-act plot structure, the film does attempt to challenge traditional film the way the book challenged traditional comics, but it comes across a bit too dependent on its source material to be to film what Watchmen was to comics. Anybody can enjoy the film, but only those who read the novel will be able to decipher much of it. In this respect, the film seems like a really good way to market the graphic novel, which has already seen increased sales prior to the movie even being released. With any luck, people will be interested enough in Moore to check out his more substantial work.