Watchmen (2019), cr. Damon Lindelof
The Watchmen comic book/graphic novel is a masterpiece in the medium. Writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons crafted a story that could only be told via the comic book form. It 's a self-contained epic that presents a richly detailed world somewhat askew from our own, where costumed adventurers emerged in the 1930's, won the Viet Nam war for America in the 1960's and were outlawed in the 1970's, following which is where the story picks up. But the superheroics are ancillary to the people under the costume, the politics of the world in which they live (this was written at the height of Reaganism/Thatcherism and the last scary gasp of the cold war), and weight of what the future might bring. It's not dystopian, but it does cast a pretty bleak eye towards the nature of the "western world".
It's a sprawling tale that was originally told over 12 issues (at that point in the 1980's most single issue comics would use 26-28 pages for story, as opposed to modern comics which only contain 20 pages on average per issue). Also at that time most comics featured a letters' page, for fans to write in and interact with the creators. Since Watchmen was a mini-series, a proper letters' page wasn't established and Moore instead used the extra pages for prosaic backmatter, often in the form of in-world magazine articles or book excerpts that would flesh out the history of this self-contained superhero universe.
That dense backmatter is so integral to the Watchmen experience that it makes even the idea of adapting the comic to screen a real challenge. Not only that, Watchmen didn't just tell an immersive superhero story that doubled as a critique of the times (and human nature) but Moore and Gibbons also were deconstructing the medium in which they presented their story (there is a comic-within-the-comic even, with the Tales of the Black Freighter read by an ancillary character in the story), they deconstructed the superhero down from childhood idols and icons to flawed people under masks, dispensing with melodrama and forming more psychological profiles. It was revelatory and changed the medium of comics and the way superheroes were styled for decades to come. There's no way to adapt that to screen and have the same effect.
For almost 25 years in the world of comic book fandom (and certainly before the world became engrossed in comic-book and superhero-based media) Watchmen was an untouchable property. It lived a very pure form with no ancillary outreach save for a role-playing game handbook produced around the same time as the comic. It was put on a pedestal, and there are a LOT of people who thing it should have remained there. It was (and remains) a highly revered work, and DC didn't deign to touch it or alter it in any shape for so long, people forgot that it's just another corporate licensed property. It's a comic book derived from other sources using analogs of more famous heroes to tell a very specific story. It would be nice if Alan Moore didn't sign a crappy deal and still held rights to the property and had some say into it and made money from it, but that's not the case. It's a DC/Warner Brothers/whomever-their-parent-company-is-today product, and since 2009 they've been steadily churning out action figures, video games, new prequels (and sequels), and media containing the characters and its stark iconography
Even in the height of Watchmen idolatry, adaptations had been tried a few times, most notably Terry Gilliam made a concerted effort to get a Watchmen movie made in the 90's, but ultimately determined that it was better served on television as a miniseries to allow the story to breathe. But Hollywood has a hard time letting go of any idea, and certainly can't let go of any property that's steadily making money and garnering attention elsewhere. Until recently, the Hollywood movie studio system was the ultimate destination for any story, the ultimate validation, the ultimate point of exposure. It still sometimes just doesn't understand that some stories aren't meant for its medium.
While reports of previous attempts at Watchmen seemed like shady adaptations with ill-advised alterations, director Zach Snyder -- fresh off a very financially successful adaptation of Frank Miller's 300 comic -- promised to stick true to the source, effectively using the comic as storyboards for the feature with only a few tweaks (longer action sequences, wardrobe adjustments and very minor story changes). It was still relatively nascent time in supehero cinema. The Marvel Cinematic Universe was just starting, Christopher Nolan had just released The Dark Knight, and people were gleaning the real potential of big blockbuster superhero cinema that wasn't cartoons for kids, but deeply engaging, huge productions that offered up superheroes and their struggles as something legitimately worth investing into. If there was a time for Zack Snyder's Watchmen, 2009 was it.
The cinematic experience of Snyder's Watchmen was a bit of a mixed bag. He certainly captured the visuals of the comic book with striking, brought-to-life, slow-motion, moving panels that inspired familiarity and even a little awe in many fans (but by no means all). The dialogue had ringing familiarity to those who had read the graphic novel, and the story presented itself, for better or worse, almost exactly as Dave Gibbon's panels broke it down. It was far from a failure, but something was definitely off.
In the painstaking effort to lovingly recreate the panels of the comic, Snyder forgot to invest real time in the characters. There's a roteness, a going-through-the-motions to almost every performance in the film. There's little sense that the performers (most of whom have gone on to become quite familiar faces) had a real understanding of their character, and their emotional connection to each other (the unfortunate result of which was I thought for some time that Malin Akerman, Patrick Wilson, Matthew Goode and others weren't that good at acting). They're exceptionally attractive people, in amazing costumes, perfectly lit, directed it seems more to recreate a scene that worked on paper rather than create something that works for the screen.
The 163-minute cinematic experience was beautiful but hollow. It was certainly the story of Watchmen but it didn't do what it should have. Where was the "wow" that reading the comic delivered. I recall seeing (or reading) an interview with Snyder where he pointed out that the film was going to deconstruct the superhero movie the same way the graphic novel deconstructed the comic book superhero. Aside from a few visual winks -- like Adrian Veidt's (Goode) costume, complete with Joel Schumacher's Batman & Robin-inspired nipples -- there seemed to be no other thought put into this sense of deconstruction. There would have been real opportunity to take apart the "origin story" sensibility that guided most superhero films until the MCU era, and likewise Snyder could have really worked through visual aesthetics from various superhero films of the 70's/80's/90's in a pointed way. It would have taken real vision to do that and (as we've seen from Snyder subsequently) that's not really his style. Instead, what Snyder added to the Watchmen was just more fight sequences, and they're probably the least likeable aspect of the film, even more distracting than Dr. Manhattan's big blue penis.
There was a direct-to-DVD animated adaptation of Tales of the Black Freighter which seems like such an odd thing to do. In the comic, the Black Freighter story is told in small, brief sections throughout the 12 issues, so presenting it as a whole seems incongruous to its origins. A director's cut of the film emerged on DVD, adding an additional 20 minutes, but it's the Ultimate Cut of Watchmen, released around Christmas in 2009, that makes for a more definitive Watchmen experience. This Ultimate Cut, clocking in at 215 minutes, takes the director's cut and seams in the Black Freighter in pieces throughout (as was originally intended). The film does feel more whole with the Black Freighter and director's cut footage included, but it also feels like it should be more episodic rather than a barely-unified whole. Gilliam was right.
In rewatching this ultimate cut, I found the first hour the most engrossing. This is Snyder (and by proxy Moore and Gibbons) in world-building mode, and if anything the world of Watchmen is fascinating. It's sense of alt-history, how things differed because of the presence of costumed vigilantes and, moreover, Dr. Manhattan, is riveting. It was smart of Snyder to revert the production back to its mid 1980's setting if he was going to so literally translate it. It wouldn't have worked otherwise. And yet, there's a sense of anachronism between the costumes and the era its set in.
Snyder's opening title montage -- the slow-motion retrospective through the history of the Minutemen in the 1940s all the way through to the Keene act barring masked vigilates in the 1970s, all set to Bob Dylan's "Times They Are A-Changin'" -- is easily his greatest contribution to the Watchmen legacy. Snyder's seems to have more of a gift for music video storytelling than actual cinematic storytelling.
But after the first hour, once the world is well established, Snyder has to live with the characters, and the message of Watchmen and he couldn't seem less interested in them. I have to say that the most vital parts of the film are the Black Freighter sequences. They snap the viewer out of the lull that Snyder can't otherwise escape. In Snyder's live-action, the characters say all the right words, the actors move with notable intent, they are framed as if posed, the shots all look right out of the comics, but it doesn't flow like a movie should. It's only in the Black Freighter animation that the film escapes this need to "panelize" its shots. What works best is it takes the conceit of a comic-within-a-comic and instead makes it an animated-film-within-a-film, which is the kind of thing an adaptation is supposed to do, adapt to the medium, and use it to its full advantage.
I honestly don't know anyone personally who loves this movie, and I know only a few who like it. I do like it, but it's only effective as a "Cliff's Notes" version of Watchmen. It doesn't even come close to replacing the graphic novel, but at the same time it does absolutely nothing to harm it. Even the overblown sex scene and the unfortunate, overly elaborate, "bone-breaking" fight sequences aren't all that egregious. I do have to say that Dr. Manhattan's glowing blue genitalia are utterly distracting every time they're on screen. Whether prosthetic or CGI, it was someone's job to work with those things, either gluing them to Billy Crudup's suit or animating the movement of the phallus and testes as Dr. Manhattan moves around the scene. It's just a bizarre thought to me.
This may be a controversial opinion, but I think the ending of this Watchmen is even tighter. more realistic to the reality of Watchmen than Moore's original ending. Framing Dr. Manhattan as the bad guy for the world to rally around seems like a far more elegant solution than dropping a giant space squid on New York.
The big box set the Ultimate Cut came with also includes a great 40-minute in-story "news programme" that investigates the former heroes of this world. It covers some of the backmatter material that Moore had in the comics, and one could see how, were this an episodic TV series instead of a film, the post credits of every episode could feature a shorter 5-minute news segment akin to this.
Well, it's 10 years later, and we have a new Watchmen TV series. I was initially worried when I heard about it because I was afraid of another adaptation of the graphic novel. I think it was already proven that it can't be easily translated to any sort of screen, nor should it really be. So it was to my relief to hear that Damon Lindelof, a year or two separated from the excellent The Leftovers (and still-beloved Lost) was spearheading this as a sequel, and a sequel to the graphic novel, not the film. The Leftovers was such a richly envisioned world that I could only imagine what it is Lindelof wanted to do with the world of Watchmen 30 years later.
Halfway through the first episode of Watchmen I leaned over to my wife and said "I don't know what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn't this...and I'm so thankful for it".
Let's state it blutly, Watchmen is amazing. It's uncomfortable, shocking, upsetting, striking, funny, exciting and invigorating. It's definitely got that "Prestige HBO" vibe, and it once again reiterates (like Game of Thrones and Westworld before it) that television is now capable of producing cinema-quality stories in a serialized format. The times they are a-changin' indeed (callback).
The pilot opens brilliantly showing a silent film, fans of the comic will recognize instantly what the film is referencing, but the story pulls out of the film and into the reality of 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma, when the prosperous black community of Greenwood was massacred by white supremacists. I didn't even know this was a thing, and apparently it's a part of American history that's been forcefully swept under the rug. I think it's bold that its been given such a high profile awakening, and that it serves as the primary backdrop for this show in many different ways. It's a brutal historical reality which deserves to be remembered and addressed. Just one of many mortally deep wounds in America's long history with racism.
This show could be its own thing, just dealing with the legacy of the Tulsa massacre, but those sorts of stories don't quite get the same eyes on it, the same response. Lindelof, co-writer Nick Cuse, and director Nicole Kassell have taken this buried shame and displayed it boldly in front of their new "prestige superhero drama". They're doing what Snyder and team didn't do with the film, which was adapt it for the medium, and for the times. It's perhaps thanks to Snyder's film, though, that the pressure is off for Lindelof and co. to redo Moore and Gibbons' story. Instead he gets to use Watchmen as a brand, and as a surreality to set his story in. It's doing the same thing Watchmen did for Reagan/Thatcher-era and holding a reflective surface up to it to stare back upon it. It may look different and distorted, but things are all too recognizable to the world of today.
The craft of Lindelof's Watchmen is in using its comic book history sparingly, nuggets that readers familiar with the graphic novel will catch and have greater meaning, but serve as curiosities for the inexperienced. These tidbits, like the note that Viet Nam is an American state, or that the presidents can serve more than 2 terms now, or that whole raining squid thing, or even the "American Hero Story" segments...they all nod back to the comics and mean quite a bit more with the background knowledge, but they don't detract from the main story and they serve as intriguing world building on their own merits even without further elaboration. This isn't our reality, it's warped and different, but not unrecognizable.
Another brutal massacre, this time a fictional one in the show's history, saw all of Tulsa's police department murdered by a racist terrorist group that sport Rorschach masks as their main iconography. This has led to the police being masked and unidentified, and by the show's second episode, tensions have escalated into a war between the Seventh Kavalry and the police.
When I saw the commercials for this series, with the police in masks, it struck a note of "this is wrong", as in "what would the police get up to if they were anonymous, not held responsible"? There's a credible threat in a masked police force for sure, but the show weaves that narrative trickily into understanding the necessity, but it never sits comfortably with that decision.
There will be "purists" (ugh) who don't want any other Watchmen other than what Moore and Gibbons created. That's fine, nobody is asking them to read, watch, or play anything else, but this is vital TV right now, and Lindelof, Cuse and Kassell negotiate this unexpected superhero playground deftly, investing in all the right aspects, teasing all the right components and creating immensely engaging and thought provoking television in the guise of a comic book adaptation.
This feels like a comic book series properly adapted. One which uses what came before as a launching pad, not a bible, not a story to tell over and over. Its greatest success is with Regina King's Angela Abar as the show's focal point. It teases out her family life, her professional life, her trauma and her competency. She's a badass, in costume and out. Louis Gossett Jr. is a 105-year-old wheelchair bound stranger who imposes himself upon Angela's life in the most shocking of ways and the revelations he has to bring to her are personal in so many ways (and likely bigger than what she already imagines). There are cutaway scenes to Jeremy Irons' Adrian Veidt, living in isolation with only his genetic anomalies to keep him company. What his deal is 30 years later is still anyone's guess.
I'm already excited for Watchmen week-to-week. It's the first show in a while I'm making appointment television, not wanting to wait to watch it on demand or from the digital recording. Netflix and binge watching has trained me to be restless when there's something this good that I have to wait for. So I sit with anxious anticipation for episode 3.
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