Watchmen - Putting the 'graphic' in 'graphic novel'

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Storyboarding was invented by Walt Disney (or, perhaps more truthfully, someone in the employ of Walt Disney.)  The artist would draw various scenes and pin them to a bulletin board.  This enabled them to change the chronology of scenes or delete them entirely.  It also allowed them to reinsert the scenes if they changed their mind.  It’s a process still used to this day.  It didn’t take long before live action movies saw the advantages to this process.  Gone With The Wind was one of the first movies entirely storyboarded.  Alfred Hitchcock was notorious (no pun intended) for his usage of storyboards.

For this reason, comic book adaptations have always been a frustrating endeavor for fans.  After all, what are comic books if not elaborate storyboards?  Screwing up the adaptation of a novel is easy.  You’re taking the written word and making it visual.  You’re adding a new element.  But a comic book?  Adapting a comic book should be a no-brainer.  It already has a visual component.  All the heavy lifting has been done.  And if the story was deemed good enough to turn into a film, why mess with it.  But mess with it they do.

Until now.

Watchmen has finally done what has always seemed so obvious to us outsiders…treat the book like a storyboard.  I think there will be much debate about whether or not director Zack Snyder  should have hued as closely as he did to the comic, but give him credit for finally seeing what no one before him had.

Watchmen takes place in 1985.  But it’s not the 1985 we remember.  It’s a world where superheroes (or, more accurately, costumed vigilantes) have been patrolling the streets since the 1940s.  The movie opens with an extended credit sequence that gives a wordless lesson in our alternative U.S. history.  It’s probably the longest stretch in the film that wasn’t taken directly from the book.  But their additions to Watchmen mythology are spot-on and quickly establish that we’re in good hands. 

As the story begins, The Comedian aka Edward Blake (Jeffrey Dean Morgan ) an aging costumed crime-fighter is brutally murdered.  The Comedian was one of the earliest superheroes; think a demented Captain America.  However, the government initially was supportive of superheroes and worked to suppress the level of his depravity.  When costumed types fell out of favor with Americans in the late 1970s, they were outlawed.  But The Comedian remained gainfully employed subverting third-world communist dictatorships on behalf of the U.S. government. 

Most people are willing to dismiss his death.  But not Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley).   Haley gives a performance that virtually guarantees The Bad News Bears will no longer be the first film mentioned in his obituary.  As Rorschach he is an ultra-conservative, hyper-violent vigilante who metes out a particularly unforgiving brand of justice.  He makes Christian Bale’s Batman look like Adam West’s Batman and he’s on a one man crusade to discover the reason behind The Comedian’s death.  But ultimately, Watchmen is no more about discovering who killed The Comedian than Citizen Kane was about discovering what “rosebud” meant.  It’s merely a framing device for a plot that allows us to explore and dissect a strange world and its even stranger inhabitants. 

Fans of the original comic book (sorry, it’s not a graphic novel…it was originally released as individual issues, that makes it a comic book) will be relieved with how closely it follows Moore’s story.  While there is some slight tinkering with the ending, it revolves mostly around the motivation of The Comedian’s killer.  More importantly, what few changes are made are in keeping with the spirit of the book.

Snyder’s devotion to his source material is both a plus and a minus.  No comic book has ever received as much unanimous critical praise as Watchmen.  Snyder was handed such a richly developed world that he would have been a fool to tinker with it too much.  Large portions of the film are lifted verbatim from the book.  Not just dialogue but blocking, set design, costuming and even the camera angles mimic the book’s panel structure.  The costumes and sets are identical replicas of what readers are no doubt intimately familiar with.  The businesses on the streets of New York are the same.  Even the signs on those businesses are the same.  I’m pretty sure even the people inside of those businesses were the same.  Filmmakers adapting The Bible aren’t this reverent. 

That being said, Watchmen is an astonishing achievement.  It’s visually stunning and treats its subjects more seriously than any other comic book film ever made (and, yes, I remember The Dark Knight).  Some will find that seriousness off-putting.  And while The Dark Knight will have certainly helped pave the way, there are surely people that just can’t wrap their minds around treating this subject matter with any level of realism. 

Watchmen is the comic-book film’s first true epic, and it’s spectacular.  Snyder provides us a richly detailed world, steeped in its own mythology.  This is a meticulously constructed alternate reality, but Snyder never bogs us down in talky exposition.  What we need to know is on the screen.  Whether it be a small aside in the dialogue or a newspaper headline in the background, the information is there if the viewer wants to find it.  It’s similar to Lost in its subtle incorporation of plot points (both past and present) within its set pieces.  (Although, perhaps it would be fairer to say that Lost is similar to Watchmen.) 

Make no mistake; this is a dark, nihilistic vision of superheroes.  It’s much darker than even The Dark Knight.  But, if we are to accept superheroes on their own terms, this sort of world would seem to be the natural conclusion.  Costumed vigilantes with no oversight would become jaded, cold-hearted, burnt out victims of their own hubris, drunk on power and a sense of entitlement.  Most comic book films shy away from this fact.  Watchmen revels in it.  There’s graphic violence, nudity, sex, rape, etc.  This one ain’t for the kiddies.  To paraphrase Rorschach, “Your children will look up and shout, ‘Take us!’ and you will whisper ‘no’.”

But the answer for everyone else is a resounding “Yes”.

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being The Dark Knight and 1 being Condorman, Watchmen gets a 9.

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