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The book is always better. Seeing a movie made from a favorite novel, or even an ordinary one, the reader-viewer invariably finds something missing, lacking, overstressed or just plain wrong, because it was changed. When we read the book, we make the movie: we cast it, visualize it, control its pacing. We own it. Any other version of the book — say, Hollywood's — competes with our original experience and simply can't measure up. And this applies no matter how good the film, how bad the book. If there'd been a cheapo novel called Citizen Kane that preceded the movie, somebody who'd read it first would have said, "Nice try, but it's not MY Citizen Kane." (TIME's Lev Grossman, a devout Watchmen fan, sizes up the movie. Listen to the podcast)
So who would have the gigantic steel cojones to make a movie of Watchmen? Written by Alan Moore, illustrated by Dave Gibbons and colored by John Higgins, the serialized comic book came out in 1986. This was the pre-Internet age — Moore pounded out his scripts on a manual typewriter — when most comics had an afterlife only in the back-issue bins. Yet Watchmen quickly achieved status as the Grail, the Bible, the Citizen Bob Kane of its medium. (TIME canonized it as one of the 100 best novels since 1923.) And it continues to expand its reach. Last fall Gibbons put out the latte-table book Watching the Watchmen. The story is also available on DVD in "moving comics" form: 5 hours and 25 minutes of very limited animation of the drawings, with a narrator reading the text and dialogue. There is also, you may have heard, a movie version that opens Friday. (See pictures of the Watchmen.)
From the start of the Watchmen cult, film people knew two things about the comic book: (1) that it simply had to be made into a movie and (2) that it couldn't. An epic superhero saga, spanning 45 years, with six major characters who all sport double identities and crucial, intertwined back-stories, does not lend itself to the narrative turbo-thrust of a standard action film. Indeed, the superest hero of the bunch — Dr. Manhattan, once known as Jon Osterman — is not an action hero; he's a passive one, a contemplative godhead, a sinewy blue nude Buddha, emotionally removed from the comic's central whodunit quest: Who killed Eddie Blake? A.k.a. the Comedian.
Complicating this is the possessiveness felt by hardcore Watchmaniacs, who believe that any change is an act of treason. When director Zack Snyder showed clips of the movie last fall to an audience of rapt but wary votaries, one portly fellow told him, "On behalf of the obese-obsessive demographic, I want your assurance that the ending does not puss out." Such is the snakebite of hype, especially for a project with such outsize expectations. The film, budgeted at $100 million and the object of a rights wrangle between Warner Bros. and 20th Century Fox, has received less than rapturous early reviews. In his Hollywood Reporter critique, Kirk Honeycutt predicted that the film would be "the first real flop of 2009." (See the top 10 graphic novels.)
That's the dilemma the director faced: to risk disappointing both the fan base (for diverting from the sacred text) and the agnostic mass audience (for being a confusing, unsatisfying movie experience). Snyder — who had a big hit two years ago with 300, and who took Watchmen on after interesting auteurs from Terry Gilliam in the '80s to Paul Greengrass a few years ago fell out — went with the fan base. He worked from a script written in 2001 by David Hayter, and filigreed by Alex Tse, that was as close to the original as a movie could be. The best and worst thing to say about the Watchmen film is that, if you read the book, the movie you made in your head probably looked a lot like this.
Should a real Watchmen fan see the movie? TIME has the answer
All Along the Watchtower
The story's kernel of genius, which Moore kept popping over 12 monthly installments, is that actions have consequences, even in Action Comics. (That early comic book, which in 1938 contained the first adventure of Superman, was published by D.C., which 46 years later ran Watchmen.) The world of fantasy alters the "real" world it parallels. When superheroes do stuff, it changes the history of the America we've lived through. Moore's alternate history went like this:
Soon after Siegel and Shuster's Superman appeared, and a year later, Bob Kane's Batman — and, perhaps not coincidentally, right after the first science-fiction convention where Forrest J. Ackerman came dressed as a spacemen, thus inaugurating the pulp tribute costume — a group of citizens donned masks and gaudy couture and called themselves the Minutemen. Not so much groupies as avatars of the fictional superheroes, they spent World War II getting off on doing their truth-justice-and-the-American-way thing. Disbanded in 1944, they reconvened with some new personnel, and by the '60s were important factors in the country's social and foreign policy. By 1985, when the main story takes place, Eddie is one of the last original Minutemen/Watchmen still in action — and after being on the losing end of a ferocious fight in his high-rise apartment, splat, he's comedy history. (See pictures of animated movies.)
At its heart, Watchmen is a detective story, with Eddie (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) as the victim and Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), he of the shifting-inkblot mask, as the questing sleuth. Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup) is not much help in the search, preoccupied as he is with helping another superhero, Ozymandias (Matthew Goode), in a secret experiment that may save the world or put a big hole in it. Dr. M. has also paid scant heed to his girlfriend Laurie (Malin Akerman), a.k.a. Silk Spectre II, who's ready to fall into the open arms of nerdy Dan Dreiberg (Patrick Wilson), a.k.a. Nite Owl II — some new Watchmen have moved up when older ones retired. Meanwhile, still-President Nixon (Robert Wisden) and other top U.S. officials are poised to avert a nuclear strike from the U.S.S.R.
Moore conceived the story when Reagan and the Russkies were still spitting threats across the Berlin Wall, and few imagined the Soviet Union could collapse under its own dead weight. In that sense, Watchmen is another replay of the Nixon years to which Hollywood filmmakers are addicted — Frost/Nixon, Milk, etc. — and a period piece that may not resonate with audiences who weren't alive when Tricky Dick was in power. (Snyder says he was asked if Nixon could be replaced by George W. Bush; he wisely declined.) Set in the recent past, it features characters who cannot escape their own, more remote past. (See pictures of movie costumes.)
All detective stories move from the present to the past; they're essays in social archaeology, the metaphorical digging up of the corpse to discover what made him tick and who stopped his clock. It's an apt structure for the Watchmen, since most of them are past their prime — Eddie's 67 when he dies; the first Silk Spectre (Carla Gugino), who had a carnal run-in or two with Eddie, is in her 60s; and Dr. Manhattan is 56, though he looks great for his age — and facing serious midlife introspection. International celebrities for decades, they have a lot of history to remember or suppress, to warm or haunt them.
The movie sketches the four decades of this vigilante group in a brilliant opening-credits sequence, set to Bob Dylan's The Times They Are A-Changin'. 1945: In the Times Square revelry on V.J. Day, a nurse is kissed by the slinky superheroine Silhouette in the style of Alfred Eisenstadt's famous photo. 1961: President Kennedy greets Dr. Manhattan at the White House. 1963: JFK is gunned down by the splenetic, cigar-chomping Comedian. 1969: A U.S. astronaut walks on the moon, and finds Dr. Manhattan waiting for him. 1971: President Nixon sends Manhattan and The Comedian to Vietnam; the war is over within a week, with the locals lining up to surrender personally to the big blue guy. 1976: Nixon is elected to a third term. 1977: Nixon pushes the Keene Act through Congress, outlawing the Watchmen. 1985: America is an open sewer of drugs and porn, and The Comedian is defeated, defenestrated, dead.
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When Snyder showed this four-minute sequence in New York last fall, Gibbons was in the audience and rose to say, cheerfully, "Didn't suck too bad." I'd go further, and say it's among the zippiest, most thrilling assemblages in modern movies, and the film's single great burst of creation and concision. Three times I've seen the credits sequence, and repeated viewings help harvest new goodies — like the few second showing Silhouette in bed, with another woman, murdered, and WHORES scrawled in blood on the walls in her bed (which is different, by the way, from her fate in the novel, where she's killed by a minor adversary). Watching in awe, I'm prodded to wonder why all movies can't be this bold, smart and elliptical. (Watch an interview with Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons.)
Maybe there's no way the rest of the film could match this opening, and for sure it doesn't. Snyder spends much of the movie's 2 hours and 40 minutes on the splatter of crushed limbs, the chatter of Strangelovean science fiction and the nattering of the obligatory romance. He also encourages a little festival of tone-deaf acting. Yet Watchmen has moments of greatness. It proves again that the action movie is where the best young Hollywood brains have gone to bring flesh to their fantasies.
The Passion of the Spliced
As on the other films made from his stuff (From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Constantine, V for Vendetta), Moore has declined screen credit on the Watchmen movie. But whatever his thoughts on the corruptive properties of cinema, he could have found no more devoted Watch-man than Snyder. The ultimate fetishist-auteur, he takes hallowed pulp artifacts — the '70s horror movie Dawn of the Dead, the Frank Miller graphic novel 300 and now this — and films them with the near-fanatic fidelity of someone constructing an Eiffel Tower replica out of matchsticks.
To Watchmen he brings a reverence for the text that equals Mel Gibson's in The Passion of the Christ and comes close to Gus Van Sant's shot-by-shot remake of the Hitchcock Psycho. He uses Gibbons' panels as virtual storyboards for his scenes, and quotes Moore's ripe dialogue verbatim. (From Rorschach's journal: "Beneath me, this awful city. It screams like an abattoir full of retarded children.... The dusk reeks of fornication and bad consciences.")
Yet this is a real movie, vigorously visualized from Gibbons' template, and daring to splice flashbacks within flashbacks, toying with the conventional notion of screen time. The section showing the mutation of mild-mannered scientist Jon Osterman into Dr. Manhattan is a gem of lucid storytelling. Shuffling the sequence of tenses, the film shows Jon as a young man in love, a fellow scarred by a nuclear accident, a boy watching his watchmaker dad, a superhero who can change size and location at will, a middle-aged stud letting his old love slip away as he finds someone younger and finally a sad sack of blue mourning the ordinary life he lost. Again, all is conveyed in a few minutes, a few quick deft strokes.
The movie also has more than its share of long, clumsy scrawls. The budding romance between Dan and Laurie is tepidly drawn and wanly performed; those who've seen 300 know that Snyder is in no way an actor's director. It's not the energizing ineptness of an exchange in an Ed Wood movie, or the carefully detailed high camp of the performances in David Lynch's Dune. It's just, mostly, inert. (The two self-starters are Haley, who does right by his grizzled role, and Morgan, a Robert Downey Jr. knockoff, who chews the scenery and his stogie with equal aplomb.) And while the climax is unusual in a comic-book movie — bad guy does very bad thing, then escapes his comeuppance by persuading folks that what he's done is really kind of a good thing — it lacks the kick of apocalyptic retribution the mass audience expects and deserves.
Maybe Watchmen is one of those cult films that doesn't expand beyond the true believers. It probably won't make even alternative movie history. It certainly contains its share of popcorn breaks: hit the concession stand whenever Dan and Laurie start their mooning. But it bravely pursues its agenda with a monomaniacal grandeur, on the order of Speed Racer and Synecdoche, New York. (Loyal readers will understand that I mean this as a compliment.) Both admirable for and cramped by its fidelity to the Moore vision, this ambitious picture is a thing of bits and pieces. Yes, the bits are glorious, the pieces magnificent. Still, this Watchmen is more like a swatch-man.
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- Richard Corliss