Watchmen : Brett

I have read the graphic novel 3 times and studied its pages countless more times. So the night I was at the midnight premiere of the Dark Knight, and the first trailer for Zack Snyder’s film adaptation came on, I was enthralled, to say the least. As it went on, I sat at the edge of my seat, leaning forward, jaw on the floor, muttering “oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.” And when the movie was over? I went home and watched the trailer online even more times. That trailer stuck with me more than the film I was there to see in the first place.



So now the wait is over and the film is out. I attended the midnight premiere with my Rorschach-obsessed girlfriend and two other friends, we firmly seated ourselves, excited, anticipating the greatness that would wash over us.

Nearly three hours later, we walked out scratching our heads, with the same opinions: it was beautiful, it was good, but something wasn’t right…

It took a day of thinking back on it to figure out why it didn’t feel right, and now I know: it was too damn artificial feeling. Let me put it this way: this film is incredibly faithful to it’s source material, insofar as the attention to detail, the events as they happen, right down to the lines spoken by the actors coming straight off the pages of the graphic novel. The problem is, while it captures all of that, what it fails at is capturing the FEEL of the book.

That was what irked me the most, for the entire time I sat in the theater watching the movie, I never felt any of what I felt while reading the graphic novel. No shivers down my spine, no holy shit moments, none of it. It just didn’t feel right.

Okay, that’s not entirely true. I enjoyed every scene with Rorschach in it, because he was nailed pretty much perfectly. I also loved the guy who played Dan Dreiburg/Nite Owl II, aside from a few moments here and there that I felt were really out of character for him. The rest of the characters, however, did not work for me. Doctor Manhattan’s voice was too plain and soft, and the way he recited his lines just came out as flat. I mean yes, Manhattan’s supposed to be detached from humanity and all that, but it just didn’t work. The Comedian had a lot of potential that you could tell was just waiting to be unleashed, but never happened. Veidt was painted into a corner. Laurie contributed nothing, same goes for her mother. Arg.

And then there are other things wrong with it. The pacing is terrible, while it moves at a decent clip and is never boring, some scenes are way too rushed, while other sequences go on for far too long (see the Comedian’s death and Dan having sex with Laurie), and you never get that gut-punch feeling that the book accomplishes when important things happen. The movie is also ultraviolent, unnecessarily so, and it’s just distracting and takes you out of the film. That, along with the horrible score and bad song choices, just gives the movie an overly-cheesy feel, which is precisely what it SHOULDN’T be.

*sigh* I know it sounds like I hated it. I didn’t hate it. There were some great bits to it, like I loved how they handled Veidt’s bullet catch, the opening credits were amazing, and like I said, Rorschach was perfect. I’m going to wait on the director’s cut to hit DVD, with the Black Freighter stuff included, and we’ll see how that goes.

[Brett]