Dave Snowdon

It was thanks to the film that I discovered the graphic novel. I’m not normally into graphic novels and so I hadn’t heard of Watchmen until I saw the trailer a few months ago. I first looked at the official film website but that site commits the heinous crime of resizing the browser window (I really hate it when web designers think they know better than me what size I want my browser windows). I turned instead to a Wikipedia article which intrigued me enough that I bought the graphic novel itself.

Suffice it to say that I feel that the graphic novel lives up to the hype - there is so much going on so many levels. So, does the film do it justice?

Given the complexity of Watchmen it was inevitable that the film was going to have to make compromises and for the most part they make sense. For example the plot by Veidt is changed to remove a whole host of minor characters. "Tales of the Black Freighter" is also gone completely and the kid reading it and the news seller appear very briefly. Other changes are stranger: why is it Dreiberg and not Rorschach who goes to warn Veidt about the threat against masked vigilantes for example? An environmental theme is also present in the film that I don’t remember from the graphic novel - Veidt sets out to produce free energy to make fossil fuels obsolete - this does not advance the plot and is a distraction from the main concern: the threat of imminent nuclear war.

For the most part the dialogue is relatively close to the original but the screenwriters (David Hayter & Alex Tse) don’t have Alan Moore’s talent and the modified dialogue doesn’t live up to the original.

The main trouble with the film though was the action scenes - part of the point of Watchmen is that, with the exception of Dr. Manhattan, none of the characters have super powers. The graphic novel gets away with cartoon violence because it’s a cartoon but, IMHO, it does not work at all well in a live action film. We accept exceptional strength or speed in a Spiderman or X-men film because the point of those films is that the characters have exceptional powers and we can still suspend disbelief. Unfortunately, I don’t think this works at well for Watchmen and seeing ordinary people punching through walls, for example, just doesn’t work.

Watchmen the movie is not a bad film, but it’s not a great one either. As entertainment it’s not bad, as an attempt to bring the graphic novel to the screen it’s a disappointment. Given the complexity of Watchmen it was obviously going to be a challenge and, unfortunately, it seems to be a given that great books often result in mediocre films. There have been exceptions - Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy for example - sadly Watchmen the film is not one of them.