The dangers of translating comics to the big screen
Watchmen, a legend among comic books, has long been thought unfilmable, not only by its author, Alan Moore, but also by the comic’s rabid fans, who point to its intricate comics-within-comics, flashbacks, and rapid shifts in focus, all ill-suited to the big screen. After 20 years of abortive efforts, we finally have a Watchmen motion picture adaptation — and a verdict. While the original stands in the pantheon of graphic literature as an unorthodox, subversive, and thoughtful comic, the film is, unfortunately, a drawn-out, overwrought, self-important superhero flick out of touch with a post-Cold War world.
An Alternate History
Certainly, this movie’s turbulent birth did not bode well for the $100 million adaptation. After several failed screenplays, Hollywood meddling, and filming rights lawsuits, the job fell to Zach Snyder, “visionary” director of 300. For Watchmen, Snyder interpreted his directorial role as steward and interpreter rather than creator, remaining strikingly faithful to the comic, reportedly to the point of using a copy of the comic as his storyboard. Snyder even extended this fidelity to casting, recruiting a group of unassuming but decent actors chosen to best match each character.
Published serially in 1986 by DC Comics, Watchmen follows a group of masked vigilantes in their efforts to stop crime and avert nuclear apocalypse. In the alternate 1985 that depicts Richard Nixon is serving a fifth term, having won the Vietnam War with the powers of Dr. Manhattan, a giant, blue, naked physicist, defied by a research accident. The world stands on the brink of nuclear destruction, and American society has devolved into crime-ridden rot and perversion. To the rescue come the Watchmen.
Lost in Translation
What was truly innovative about the Watchmen in 1986 was the flawed humanity of the heroes. At times arrogant, amoral, impotent, and psychotic, the masked saviors seem true and flawed, not idealized white knights. Even more striking was the comic’s unprecedented embrace of sex and violence, with panels filled with graphic, though stylized, blood and fornication. In the mid-1980s, the gritty, realistic Watchmen stood out among innocent, idealistic superhero comics.
Snyder embraced these qualities eagerly, filling his film with bloodshed. On screen, the comic’s violence would have been jolting enough. Yet Mr. Snyder opted to inject more, adding seemingly endless scenes of sawed-off arms and entrails. Instead of the subtle horror of the comic, the film’s spatters of blood are gratuitous; the camera lingers on broken bones and heads, too often in slow motion. Where the comic artfully omitted the worst of the violence as overly vulgar, the movie revels in it, beautifying and even celebrating it.
The film’s largest failings, however, stem not from Snyder’s obsession with viscera, but from his attempt to force the comic to the big screen. The nature of the comic allows readers to reread passages, to hang onto and scrutinize details in any panel they choose. Snyder heavy handedly tries to simulate this feeling, constantly panning and zooming the camera slowly for neat, but unimportant, details drawn from the comic. While die-hard fans may reward fidelity, few moviegoers wish to spend minutes focused on a meaningless bookshelf.
In contrast, when Snyder is not lingering on exposition, the movie flows smoothly, and the comic’s difficult jumps and distinct chapters are managed with aplomb, as with the charming and clever introductory set chronicling the background of the Watchmen. But the majority of the movie, with a runtime of two hours and 43 minutes, feels drawn out to the point of disinterest.
Indeed, time is not on the film’s side. With the Cold War over for about as long as the film has been in production, Watchmen feels dated and even irrelevant. The modern audience is unlikely to relate to the film’s pervasive threat of imminent nuclear extinction. We fear terrorism and the end of investment banking, not the end of civilization; we live with gentrification and suburbia, not 70s-style urban decay. Ultimately, Watchmen represents a courageous effort on Snyder’s part; he captures the grim climate and the flawed heroes of the original, but his unyielding faithfulness presents a film plodding and crystallized. The transition from nine-panel page to the screen may have proved too ambitious and difficult for anyone, let alone Mr. Snyder, to do justice to the comic.