Graphically Novel

"Oh yeah? You should have seen me in 'Sin City'"

Zack Snyder's film interpretation of the groundbreaking Watchmen comic series created by Alan Moore and David Gibbons, published in the mid-eighties and later compiled as a single volume graphic novel is exactly what you would expect. It is a technical marvel, stuffed full of eye-popping visuals, meticulous detail and near slavish devotion to the source material, but where Robert Rodriguez's pulpy Sin City and Snyder's own 300 excelled at bringing the 4-color page to the screen, Watchmen feels flat. While the movie begins promisingly enough with a superbly choreographed fight scene and a clever opening credits sequence set to Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A'Changin'" that provides ample exposition for the viewer unfamiliar with the comic book world's answer to James Joyce's "Ulysses," the remaining two and a half hours plod joylessly toward a cataclysmic finale that packs the emotional wallop equivalent to a city council meeting debate about water rationing.

At least the actors generally appear to be having fun with their roles even if we aren't. Jackie Earle Haley tackles the enigmatic Rorschach with gusto and infuses the movie with what little heart it has, while Billy Crudup is saddled with the tall order of playing an emotionless and often pantsless Dr. Manhattan. What any living actor could have done with the role is beyond me, but a more commanding voice would have helped. Finally, Patrick Wilson's Night Owl may be one of the worst casting decisions ever. I like the guy, but it's a sad day when they get a handsome actor like Wilson to play an over-the-hill impotent doughboy like Dan Dreiberg. Can't overweight guys ever catch a break in Hollywood?

While it's difficult to acquit Snyder completely for the film's lack of thematic depth, Watchmen the comic book series is a tough nut to crack. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' work was a dense and multi-layered commentary on society and how it would really be if costumed crime fighters walked among us. It's a conceit that's been revisited in film since Moore's comic treatment, most notably and with a lighter hand in Pixar's The Incredibles, which actually has more evocative things to say than Snyder's film-by-numbers.

The eccentric Moore has long since written off Hollywood even though Hollywood continues to plumb his work for screen fodder with varying results (see From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and V for Vendetta), and I had always written off Moore's opinion that his work was too "special" to be made into a summer popcorn movie by an able director. This time, he has a case. While Snyder was up to the challenge and even got Moore's partner in crime Gibbons to publicly bless the production, Watchmen was not written to be a feast for the eyes as much as it was to be a treatise on society at large and a glimpse at an alternate reality before CG effects were rendering alternate realities with such frequency in film.

Watchmen in comic form is a hodge podge of ideas and storytelling techniques. There are prose interludes and narrative tangents that make the books special and that popular film, for all its potential greatness, usually rejects. Popular film is a passive medium. Books are active, even when they are filled with colorful pictures. While "Watchmen" the mini-series could accommodate the ideas that populate "Watchmen" the comic book, "Watchmen" the movie has been so stripped of subtext that we are left with a series of bummers leading up to one giant bummer. Snyder's film is like reading the Star Wars comic book that George Lucas authorized and Marvel published to cash in on the cultural frenzy of 1977. It too was a pale substitute for the medium for which the story was designed.

Certainly books (even difficult books) can be turned into successful movies (cue Lord of the Rings music), but Watchmen the movie proves that for all of the clamoring from the halls of geekdom for the film adaptation of this, the beloved crown jewel of the comic book canon, some things should be appreciated just the way they are.