Not Your Father’s Superheroes

There are two things you need to know about Watchmen, the lavish new film adapted from the 1986 limited-run comic book series that is universally recognized as a seminal point in the history of comics-as-literature:

1. If you haven’t read the comics, you are going to be seeing a different movie than viewers who have.

2. The movie was made by Zack Snyder, whose last film was 300. Also adapted from a graphic novel (by Frank Miller), 300 not only made a huge pile of money ($456 million worldwide, on a relatively small budget of $65 million), it made so much more than expected that Snyder almost certainly had carte blanche for his next film, as long as it would appeal to the same basic audience.

I hadn’t read Watchmen before I saw the movie. I knew that it sought to deconstruct superhero myths, and that numerous attempts to film it over the years had come to naught. Terry Gilliam tried in the late 1980s, but after failing to compress its complex structure and characters into a script that met with studio approval he declared that it could only be adapted as a five-hour miniseries. (Creator Alan Moore said he intended it to be “a superhero Moby Dick—something with that kind of weight, that kind of intensity.”)

For at least the first two-thirds of what turned out to be a two hour and 41 minute film, I was completely uncentered. I could not locate the moral center of the story, nor could I trace a linear thread through what I was seeing to guess where it might be going. This is, to say the least, unusual—most movies are like carnival rides in that you know exactly where it’s going and more or less what’s going to happen along the way.

Watchmen takes place in a 1985 America with a slightly alternate history. In the late 1930s the country is struck by a fad of people trying to better their neighborhoods by dressing up in costumes and fighting criminals. Some take this more seriously than others and carry on after the fad passes; some are good enough at what they do that they are hired to work for the government.

Through their efforts, the US wins the Viet Nam war; Richard Nixon evades Watergate by having Woodward and Bernstein killed and becomes a five-term president. In the late 1970s “superheroes” (as they are called even though none of them, with one exception, possesses more than normal human abilities) are outlawed. Most retire; a few carry on secret government work, while others become vigilantes.

The movie initially seems to be a whodunit centered on the murder of one member of a loose-knit group of such “heroes,” the Watchmen. (At the same time, the US is under increasing threat of a nuclear war with Russia.) But it diverges wildly from this plotline, taking long tangents to explore the history of the group and the personalities of the individual members. It gets so deep into some of these, in fact, that you start to wonder if it’s ever going to get back to where it had been going.

Of course it eventually does, though never quite in the way you would expect it to, arriving at a climax that will frustrate some for not having a clear dramatic structure of conflict and resolution (that’s intentional), and others for not having the kind of impact that the events it depicts should (that’s a failure on the part of the film).

Watchmen is, in other words, a movie that seems while you’re watching it to be a dazzling display of bravura structural sleight-of-hand, but which in the end turns out to be less than the sum of its parts.

It will probably play better for fans of the graphic novel, who will realize that Snyder and screenwriters David Hayter and Alex Tse are being slavishly faithful to Moore’s original work. The elaborate tangents come from the episodic way the story was originally presented, in multiple issues of a comic book series. Snyder et alia haven’t so much adapted Moore’s work as they have used it as a blueprint without doing the kind of compression needed for a different medium. But where Snyder was able to pull that off with Frank Miller’s relatively slight 300, this story is too complicated. It really should have been made as a five-hour (or 10, or 20) series for HBO.

Snyder’s best work comes in the opening scenes, as he works to put us quickly into this alternate America. (Most of the backstory I related is dispensed here.) It’s good stuff, maybe too good—I was so intrigued by the prospect of what our country might have become with a few tweaks in its recent history that I was disappointed that the film didn’t follow along that path.

Devotees of Moore’s comics can argue about little changes, like why the ages of some of the older characters were adjusted to have them born in 1918 (the end of World War I?). And they can complain about how Snyder amps up the gore and violence content, to the point where it sometimes threatens to turn into another Sin City. But for the most part fans will recognize that he retained its essential mood. Even more so than The Dark Knight, this is a story clouded with resignation, depression, defeat, and regret. If your standard Hollywood superhero film is a movie on speed, this is a movie on heroin, with a narcoticized mood and matching pace.

You may recognize one or two faces in the cast, or none of them: It’s not a star-driven movie, and the acting isn’t much more than adequate.

Is the youth of America, whose allowance money is the engine that fuels Hollywood these days, going to respond? It will be interesting to see. I think that they’re going to reject it as confusing and gloomy, the very facts that others will embrace. That’s probably why Watchmen is hitting theaters now, when it has no competition for its target market, rather than summer, when it would be up against more conventional blockbusters like Wolverine, J. J. Abrams’ Star Trek, Terminator: Salvation, GI Joe, etc., etc.

If you have any patience, and can stomach the occasional dollop of gratuitous gore, go see it. It may be less than the sum of its parts, but those parts are not inconsiderable.