Watchmen: Bigger, Louder and Uncut

I went to see Watchmen last night.

As a somewhat obsessive fan of the original comic book (alright then, graphic novel), I expected this to be something of a Manichean moviegoing experience. I'd leave the theatre either loving or hating the film, hailing Zack Snyder as a cinematic genius or denouncing him as the New Schumacher. Like the moral standpoint of Rorschach, one of the anti-heroes from the film (alright then, motion picture), there would be no middle ground, no compromise.

That was yesterday. Now, I'm not too sure.

My good friend Phil likened the film to the Ludovico technique, that fictitious aversion therapy from Clockwork Orange in which Malcolm McDowell's Alex was forced to watch a barrage of lurid, violent images with his eyes prised open. Watchmen was two hours and forty minutes of relentless sensory overload which made me feel happy, annoyed, ecstatic, angry, gleeful and perplexed and often all at the same time. It's also left me feeling a bit like Malcolm McDowell.

I'm still trying to process it now. Like Schrödinger's Cat - which is both alive and dead at the same time - I find myself simultaneously loving and hating Zack Snyder's Watchmen. I'll try to write something more coherent once my neurology settles down.

Or I might just go to see it again.

Nite Owl and his Amazing Friends

Re-reading the Watchmen

As you might have already noticed, the Watchmen movie comes out this week. Unlike most online commentators with geekazoid tendancies, I'll try my best to reserve judgement on the film until I've actually seen the damn thing. Whether I end up loving it film or loathing it, at least it's given me an excuse to re-read Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons' original comic series for the umpteenth time:

"Moe Vernon was a man around fifty-five or so, and he had one of those old New York faces that you don't see anymore. It's funny, but certain faces seem to go in and out of style. You look at old photographs and everybody has a certain look to them, almost as if they're related. Look at pictures from ten years later and you can see that there's a new kind of face starting to predominate, and that the old faces are fading away and vanishing, never to be seen again."

I first read Watchmen when it was released as a 12 issue series between 1986-7. A lot of things have changed since then, but it's still my favourite comic.

Et in Arcade ego

Despite my numerous misgivings about the soon-to-be released movie adaptation of Watchmen, its ingenious viral marketing campaign continues to bring out the worst out in me.

The latest is a an 80s-style, 8-bit, beat-em-up arcade game manufactured by Watchmen's fictional Veidt Industries. I shouldn't like it, but I can't stop playing it.

Insert Coin HERE.

New Watchmen trailer

Alright, I've been a bit sniffy about Zack Snyder's movie adaptation of my favourite goddamn superhero comic ever in at least one previous post, but - I must admit - the new trailer does look rather tasty:

Who Watches the... What?

With the hype machine for next year's Watchmen film already powering up (it was the cover story to last month's Empire and the trailer is attached to Dark Knight, that bat-themed vigilante flick that's currently doing the rounds), it's only a matter of time before non-comics literate friends and affiliates start asking me: "What's it all about, fanboy?"

Sadly, I'm no better equipped at providing a straightforward, snappy and easily digestible answer than I was when other friends and other affiliates were asking another me exactly the same question over twenty years' ago. It's just as well, then, that there are people out there prepared to do the hard work for me. Tom Spurgeon asked his Comics Reporter readers to define Watchmen to the uninitiated. I quite liked Cole Moore Odell's take on the book:

"Watchmen is about power: its trappings, its limits, and the consequences of its use. We see the USA and Russia as global superpowers; Dr. Manhattan with the literal power of a god; the power that normal people have to affect both individual lives and the course of history, and the power of writing to shape thinking. It is also about powerlessness -- as embodied by the child who would become Rorschach, or the inexorable slide toward war -- and the self-deception practiced by people (Ozymandias in particular, but all of them) struggling against that helplessness. It's only about superheroes to the extent that the genre allows Moore and Gibbons a multitude of ways to explore the theme."

I'm also quite partial to Matthias Wivel's explanation:

"Watchmen is about a lot of things, many of which have been brought up in your round-up, but fundamentally it is about what all Alan Moore's comics are about: Order. The sense that there is a structure to the universe, and to existence, and how this structure starts in ourselves and determines our perception of the world. Moore exemplifies this in the meticulous structure of the comic itself, but also in the character of Dr. Manhattan who perceives the order we can only intuit.

"The conflict of the story arises from the way the individual deals with it, and the main characters each make their own choices: The Comedian absolves himself and becomes amoral, Ozymandias wants to control it, Rorschach has lost faith in it, Dan and Julie chose to make their way within it, and Dr. Manhattan stands back. The play's the thing."

But the award for the most straightforward, snappy and easily digestible answer goes to Dustin Harbin:

"Watchmen starts out as a superhero murder mystery and turns into a really dense rumination on the motivations behind might and right."

It doesn't provide a full explanation as to why this book is still considered so important by people like me, but it'll be a damn sight easier for me to remember.



Thanks to Pete for the heads-up.

W For Watchmen

During my absence a couple of rather yummy trailers have turned up on the Interwebs. First, there's this:



James Cromwell as Daddy Bush? Richard Dreyfus as Dick Cheney? Mr Fantastic as Tony Blair? Oliver Stone, I salute you!

Then, there's this:



As a huge fan of the original 'graphic novel' (God, I hate that phrase), I've got real mixed feelings about this one. On the one hand, I'm fascinated by Zack Snyder's almost pornographic attention to detail. I've read Watchmen many, many times. I know that particular fictional world pretty much inside out. On a visual level at least, it looks as though he's nailed it. Everything pretty much looks exactly like it should do.

But, but, buuuut...

One of the reasons Watchmen is a great work is because it works on many levels. Yes, it's a conspiracy thriller. Yes, it's a deconstruction of superhero mythology. But, at another level, it is a meditation on the nature of power and authority. The title, after all, comes from the Juvenal line "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?", or "Who watches the watchmen?" That line pretty much spells out what Robert McKee would call the 'Controlling Idea' of the piece.

(And, yes, I get really annoyed when lazy, research-averse, miss-the-point journalists writing about the film describe the protagonists as 'The Watchmen'. That's a bit like thinking that I Am Legend is all about some bloke called Legend. Did these people assume that Silence of the Lambs was all about a young herd of mute sheep?)

But I digress. One of the things Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons did brilliantly with Watchmen was exploit the comic book to its full potential. They took this despised little medium and asked themselves: "What things can we do with a comic-book that can't be done with any other medium?" "What makes it unique?" "What's never been done before?"

I imagine James Joyce probably asked himself similar questions when he decided to write a ambitious yarn about a day in the life of Dublin, circa 16th June 1904. In 1967, a movie adaptation was made of Ulysses and the dialogue was remarkably faithful to the source material. Practically every line in the film was taken from Joyce's novel, including the word "fuck" (which makes it a contender for The First Ever Film To Feature The F-Word award).

And despite all this, it wasn't very good.

For fear of sounding tautological, what makes a novel like Ulysses great is the fact it's a great novel. Joyce exploited the medium to its full potential. He did things with the novel that had never been done before. It seems that ambitious, groundbreaking novels do not lend themselves particularly well to movie adaptations (mediocre novels, on the other hand, do surprisingly well).

I can't help but imagine the same applies to ambitious, groundbreaking comics...

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

To some, it may look like a typically seedy New York intersection. To others - and you know who you are - it may convey a certain spooky resonance...



More here.

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