Some Words

Well that was a bit of a disappointment. It isn’t a completely bad film. It has its moments. Still, I always find it interesting to see what happens when Hollywood gets a hold of a script. It was visible even in Watchmen, where the story was that the director had been given almost total control. One cannot help but think that it would have been better to try to convince Alan Moore to come in and give him total veto power, but that is just speculation. Moore probably wouldn’t have done it anyway.

What really interests me about movies is the way that they change certain rules about how you provide information. There is an old adage that if you introduce a gun in the first act, you have to use it before the third. Watchmen (the movie) seemed to operate under the assumption that if you didn’t introduce the gun in the first act, it couldn’t be used at all. Additionally, if you didn’t remind people of the gun’s possible existence five minutes before it was used, they would be too stupid to realize what had happened.

Alan Moore trusted his readers. If something happened, it happened for a reason, but he didn’t telegraph it by saying “this thing is going to happen for a reason in a little bit.” I don’t know why they felt the need to work it that way in the film.

As for the rest of it, the casting was great, the special effects were great (with the exception of the age makeup, which was hit and miss), and the dialog from the comic was usually delivered well. The dialog written to replace dialog from the comic? That was another story. The pivotal argument on Mars was altered greatly, and in such a way as to render it a sappy piece of crap. I’d give the film a C+ and if I hadn’t read the book… maybe a B-.

Changes clearly had to be made to adapt this to the screen, but as in seemingly all the adaptations that have disappointed me over the years, it was the small changes that I felt were pointless, and not the large ones made to fit the plot into two and a half hours, that really frustrated. As an example, there was a scene in which Rorschach kills a man for crimes that I won’t go into. In the book, he insures the man burns to death, a grim fate that the comic does not gloss over or sugar coat in an attempt to make Rorschach seem less warped. In the movie, he chops the man’s skull up with a cleaver. This nets no additional horror in the grand scheme of the man’s fate, or the question the view asks about the presence of, or lack of, justice in the world, or in Rorschach. What it does is allow the director to put more blood spatters in the movie. In the comic the cleaver is used on two dogs that had been fed a corpse. Now, the argument for the director is that this saved him visual time, and that he included a verbal homage to the dogs in Rorschach’s dialog, but it rings hollow to me because he played the cleaver scene out so long that he didn’t really save time.

Also? Worst soundtrack I can think of. I can’t think of another that even comes close to being as intrusive and disruptive to the overall efforts of the narrative.

And as a small final note, the the ‘heroes’ in Watchmen, save one, are without super powers, but the director seemed to want to give them powers, as they did an awful lot of punching through brick and such in the movie.