Ned Raggett Ponders It All

Continued from here.

I thought this post would be longer than it will turn out to be, frankly. Part of me is tempted to set it aside and come back to it tomorrow when I’m feeling a little less cranky and slightly under the weather. At the same time, part of me wants to be done with talking about it for now — just to move on to other things and other thoughts. That being the case, this will be more of an abbreviated discussion of what I’ve been dancing around the whole time — namely, why I think Watchmen, for its flaws, some unavoidable, some all too consciously adding, is still worth seeing, is still something of note.

If you believe Geoff Boucher at the LA Times, who has been a major supporter of the film for months now, then this statement is of interest:

I think there’s a good chance that, like “Fight Club,” this movie will echo in pop culture for quite a while and become a landmark moment that will take on different contours when viewed in hindsight.

This is the point on which a lot of the positive criticism and discussion has been hinging — that’s all somehow a bold, dramatic, out of character step that’s been done by the Hollywood machine, something that ‘shouldn’t’ve’ been made that was, that questions expectations and so forth. It’s not mine though — frankly, I honestly don’t care about that aspect beyond doubting its applicability and relevance (and I was never much moved by Fight Club either). Any number of ‘bold artistic moves’ or the like have been hailed in all sorts of fields by all sorts of commentators with all kinds of vested interests — set that aside: does the film entertain and intrigue, at base? And does this film reach beyond its multitudinous drawbacks to do that?

I’d say it does, for three reasons:

First, it’s a slick piece of product. Which sounds dismissive but for all that there’s plenty about Snyder as a director that I clearly don’t like, he can put together a film with a team that knows what it’s doing on a variety of standpoints, production design, cinematography, costuming, special effects. If the film ultimately looks different from Dave Gibbons’ work in terms of color palette that is understandable in terms of both Gibbons’ own retrospective intent and in terms of current audience expectation — had Snyder gone the Gibbons route we would have ended up with something close to Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy to a large extent (reworking the Ozymandias costume alone was a life-saving move).

Second, aside from some notable goofs like the Richard Nixon performance, the casting for the major roles ranged from the serviceable to the stellar, and notably there’s been very little consensus over who the best actors were throughout. I’d like to think this is because there was enough of a range of performances that everyone found someone different to hold on to or to focus on throughout the film, and the variety of responses from friends and others has intrigued me. Even Malin Akerman’s performance as Laurie, which really bothered others and which I felt was there at best, has some strong defenders.

Perhaps unsurprisingly my two favorites were the two most grotesque characters in a broad sense, the faceless Rorschach and the godlike Dr. Manhattan. I realized in retrospect that what surprised me about both was that the voices used by their respective actors, Jackie Earle Haley and Billy Crudup, weren’t what I was expecting or necessarily hoping for at all, though what it was I was expecting was a bit unclear to myself. Yet both performances swiftly established themselves as crucial to the film and as perfectly suited for the narrative as performed and prevented, Rorschach’s quick, immediate snarl, Dr. Manhattan’s detached serenity. I’d go so far as to say that Crudup and his special effects team produced a collaboration that is the first real rival to Andy Serkis and Weta’s interpretation of Gollum for The Lord of the Rings, the slow float of particles in the air around Dr. Manhattan as key to his character as Crudup’s observational approach vocally.

Finally, most importantly, that changed ending — which wasn’t changed so much as, in the grand scheme of things, improved. The stunning “What in the WORLD?…” shock of seeing the looming mock-alien figure created by Ozymandias in the book, a psychedelic horror half Peter Max, half Lovecraft might be missing, but in reducing and simplifying the story on the one hand — the entire superstructure of the missing artists, the young psychic, Karnak’s Tibetan servants all reduced down to a team of earnest nuclear scientists assisting Ozymandias and unwittingly going to their deaths — and tying it in more fully to the larger scenario as created — Ozymandias’s dream to fully remove superheroes from the scene, above all else Dr. Manhattan, and to force unity and a stand-down among all the powers on earth on the brink of nuclear destruction — the film creates a more logical, more persuasive mechanism for Ozymandias to achieve his goals. If multiple cities, multiple millions, are destroyed worldwide, and if they are done so not by an unknown random force but by an all-too-well known figure who, for all anyone knows, might still strike again, then the fear and terror of the book’s population of the planet becomes all that much more so for the movie’s. It may not be faithful but it is not faithless to the larger themes — in fact, it is arguably an essential crystallization.

But perhaps it should be in keeping with my larger concerns about the film that even that final scene in Karnak eventually disappoints too, on different levels — the bloody end of Rorschach is as in the book, uncompromising maniacal morality against detached ‘what is best’ judgment, but to have Night Owl fall to his knees in an all too cliched spasm of agony, right down to the “NOOOOOOOO!,” was a headslapper. From there, the scene played out in ways that left me a little dizzy, especially in comparison to the equivalent moments in the comic but even on their own — Dr. Manhattan’s last kiss and beaming up, the music cue of Mozart’s Requiem Mass as Laurie and Dan leave Karnak…if the big change could be forgiven, in fact should be praised, these small changes made the end less than what it should have been, more of a sudden return-to-type I found hard to swallow.

Nonetheless, a bold move on the part of the filmmakers, that bigger change. It doesn’t necessarily forgive a lot of sins but it does ameliorate and counteract them, and in combination with ending just on the right note of uncertainty as the comic does, Rorschach’s journal perhaps to be shortly chosen for wider exposure, perhaps not, even the annoying ‘if only we were the Clash’ version of Dylan’s “Desolation Row” by My Chemical Romance was tolerable.

So I can sense why some outright love the film — there is something unusual in seeing this story presented, less in the way of backslapping for ‘boldness’ and more in the sense that sometimes nuance and hesitation really is the best way to end. In that, the filmmakers followed the book — and the book, however altered and compromised in other ways for this film, is a striking, unnerving and inventive story on its own. If the filmmakers didn’t have to put in the heavy labor to come up with the story, they did, at least, ensure that its lingering questions could still linger.

With that, I’ll just end with a clip of what’s already been making the rounds but deserves another view:

I admit, I wish they’d come up with a full fake episode.

Continued from here.

In a sign of how the media works in weird ways sometimes, one of the stories I’ve stumbled across today is this piece via the LA Times wherein Patrick Goldstein takes everyone else reporting on Watchmen‘s box office to task, with the notable exception of a story in, but of course, the LA Times. Goldstein prefaces this by saying “I’ve had my beefs with my own newspaper’s box-office coverage over the years,” though, so that means everything’s honest and hunky-dory now. Yeah. Indeed. Doubtless.

Last night a friend texted me to talk about how much she loved the film — she hadn’t read the original and her only source of complaint was Malin Akerman, who portrays Laurie/Silk Spectre. I’ve actually read some favorable comment for her but I’m not surprised she’s not getting highly rated by most. Still, it was good to hear my friend’s opinion, and I know some other folks planning to see it later this week as well.

Tomorrow I’m finally going to wrap up what for me has turned into a bit too long of a project, honestly — this was going to just be one post on Saturday, but since I wasn’t able to resolve it before I had to run elsewhere, I figured I’d just complete it the following day. Perhaps inevitably, the more I think about the film the more I think about illustrative examples and things to consider, so that it’s turned into a five-part mini-essay isn’t a surprise to me. Still, other things to do and write about and think about and etc.

And as mentioned yesterday, tomorrow will be all about why the film is worth seeing, why I’ll see it again, for all my doubts and disappointments and problems. But having thrashed most of the problems of adaptation in general to death, it’s now time to talk about the adapter, or at least the director who filmed the reworked adaptation of David Hayter’s script. Zack Snyder, I think, will remain the eternal stumbling block.

***

As I mentioned yesterday, I come to Snyder as a director from a position of general ignorance. Of his two major films previous to this, a remake of Dawn of the Dead and the adaptation of Frank Miller’s 300, I only know the ads campaigns and general discussion, especially in the case of the latter, plus a brief clip here or there. I’m not moved to investigate further.

A bit of background — as I said in this very early post of mine here:

I don’t follow directors much, I follow actors very little, I’m not a hyper genre obsessive…something has to somehow intrigue me enough to get me to make the effort. Something….And yet most of the time it’s not there, and I can’t really describe a negative very well.

So Snyder as a director hasn’t really done anything to warrant my particular interest, and I can’t entirely say that what I’ll complain about here is something that’s just specific to the film or is a hallmark of his work in general, though I can guess here and there. Still, the advantage of having read Watchmen already here is that it’s pretty clear at many points what he either added to a scene or approved of as an addition which might have appeared in either Hayter’s original script or the final co-written script with Alex Tse.

Not all of these additions or changes are bad — to (briefly) re-invoke Dune, what David Lynch brought to the film in terms of his own stamp was often striking, and Snyder and his team clearly have a good technical eye. I’ll speak more about that in tomorrow’s final post. At other points, though, there’s again ambivalency or spot-on choices slamming up against head-shaking “Wait, why?” decisions.

A good example would be the use of musical cues. Drawing on Moore’s own use of song lyrics and other epigraphs throughout the course of the original comic, there are some really striking examples throughout the movie. For instance, in the original the approach of Rorschach and Night Owl to Karnak is ‘soundtracked’ by a quote from Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” — for the movie, Snyder specifically chooses Hendrix’s frenetic interpretation, a ratcheting-up of intensity that suits both scene and film very well. Other standalone choices, like Nena’s Cold War New Wave hit “99 Luftballons,” also succeed as both contextual commentary and just by sounding good.

On the flipside, though, are some extremely dubious decisions. Over on ILE there’s been a bit of discussion over the (to me) eye-rolling choice of “The Ride of the Valkyries” playing over the scene where Dr. Manhattan destroys Viet Cong soldiers while helicopters follow in his wake. That this is a reference to a similar usage in Apocalypse Now is patent, that it is necessary or somehow required I reject. More indefensible in an even worse “Do you SEE?” mode, though, would be the version of Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” that plays under the scene where Veidt confronts various titans of industry. Frankly Real Genius used that song more effectively, and that was almost twenty-three years back.

But this is a case where the choices are hit and miss — you can’t please everyone, obviously, and I’ll allow for that. Similarly the two things I’m about to talk about can’t please everyone either but unlike the musical choices or similar sometimes-successful-sometimes-not decisions Snyder makes, I flat out dislike — often completely hate — these two things that Snyder relies on throughout the film. In doing so he puts a stamp on it that compounded with the earlier problems I’ve discussed results in the hard-to-love film that this is.

The first, I gather, is something he’s known for — which wouldn’t be an issue if it wasn’t known in general, namely slo-mo action sequences. As a technical development, it’s a bit like anything else — once out of the bottle, you can’t put it back in, and it’s not like I can wish it away. However I’ve never been fond of it as a general rule, though I admit I’m not completely able to articulate why. I don’t know if it’s some atavistic annoyance or simply me being the age I am, viewing films as I do via a certain perspective and with a certain set of expectations. To give you an idea how I tired I am of it, when at the beginning of Hellboy II where the evil warrior is practicing and there’s a shot of his spear slicing through a drop of water in that style — well, it didn’t kill the scene for me, but I’d like it a lot better without it.

One of the more consistent arguments for Watchmen, which I think I mentioned earlier in this series, is the supposition that it’s meant to be a metacommentary on comic book films in the same way that the original book was a metacommentary on comic book stereotypes and levels of expectation in turn. If so, then it’s understandable why such action sequences, while not limited to comic book films at all, would appear in Watchmen — you can see them all over the place this past decade and it’ll probably continue for a while to come. I gather Snyder used the technique constantly in 300 and my friend Dan mentioned how he didn’t mind it there and, for similar reasons, doesn’t mind it here.

But I admit, I do — it’s wearying and I think serves as a crutch more than anything else, and while Moore and Gibbons were as interested in having their cake and eating it too when they created the comic book, as I’ll argue in more detail later, I don’t think Snyder pulls it off with the same careful elan. I thought at one point as the film started that I’d make an idle count of how many slo-mo action shots there were going to be in the film, but gave up when I realized that there were a slew in the opening sequence alone. At a certain point, the explanation that this is parody or satire or commentary or some other form of response doesn’t gel for me in this or in similar cases — I just end up feeling like this is all that a director has to bring to the table, or that he or she couldn’t direct a film without this or without another technique to hand.

So much for that. But there’s a grimmer element used throughout which I like even less, in fact which leaves me less cold than angry — and, I’ve realized, is probably the biggest example of…I hesitate to say ‘hypocrisy,’ but judge for yourself when I reach the conclusion of my point.

That element is the gore, the bloodiness, the general increase in lovingly filmed violence. I have never been much of a fan of this in films — there are exceptions, where the sheer Grand Guignol laughs of it all works as intended. Early Peter Jackson, Sam Raimi, there are plenty of others. But it’s not something I’m interested in seeking out, and as a genre-as-such, gore in any context tends to leave me flat, disgusted, cold. I don’t feel a need to apologize for it either — it’s just there.

A comparative example — one of the most frightening films I’ve ever seen, still, is the Ray Milland classic The Uninvited (still not available in the US on DVD for some godforsaken reason — if you haven’t seen it, get to it immediately). It is a classic Hollywood production from the black & white studio days, there’s not the slightest hint of blood throughout, there’s no gore-drenched monstrosities, but the movie has never failed to send cold chills down my spine, up my neck, at its most intense, and it does so through suggestion, sound, visuals, often no dialogue at all.

The comparison may be unfair — Watchmen is not a supernatural thriller or horror film except in a very broad sense — but I hope to show what works for me as a counterpart to what does not. In the original comic book, certainly there’s gore to be had — the brutal assault scene on the first Silk Spectre, the deaths of various figures in the prison where Rorschach is held, and so forth. The mediation of comic art, especially intentionally backward-in-time referencing art like Gibbons in this instance, might be the reason why I’m not as unsettled than something on film, something theoretically real.

But nearly every scene with gore in it is not merely made more vivid for having been filmed, but is almost always changed to be more grotesque, more destructive — less something that I can stand, that I want to deal with. In the attempted assassination of Veidt in the book, a secretary is bloodily gunned down with a single shot to the chest — in the movie equivalent, limbs are shattered, skulls blown open. When Rorschach discovers the place where a little girl was butchered in the book, the cuts on the cutting board tell the grim tale — in the movie, the blood and matter clots the board. When a prisoner dies in the book because he’s blocking the way into Rorschach’s cell, his throat is cut — when he dies in the film, his arms are literally sawn through. And so forth.

Perhaps most obnoxiously to my mind is the conclusion of the scene referred to where Rorschach discovers the fate of the little girl, the moment where he becomes Rorschach as he describes it. In the book, he kills the murderer’s dogs with cleaver blows to the head — one of the book’s most shocking, vivid images — terrifies the murderer by flinging the dogs through his window, overpowers him and handcuffs him to a radiator, then proceeds to douse him and his surroundings with gasoline. The murderer pleads for mercy, for help, but Rorschach pitilessly offers him a choice — burn, or use the hacksaw he provides the murderer to cut himself loose…though it will take too long to cut through the handcuffs, so he will have to cut something else instead. The murderer reacts with utter disbelief and horror, Rorschach sets the place alight, then (as he describes it) watches the place burn for an hour, turning it all over in his mind.

It is hands down one of the book’s most intense moments, an ‘origin’ scene of the most extreme sort. That it is changed in the movie script is noticeable, but not necessarily a problem — there, after handcuffing the murderer and extracting his confession, Rorschach (in a very good acting moment by Jackie Earle Haley, especially considering it’s all done under the mask) wrestles with the alternate taunts of the murderer to finish him off and the murderer’s tearful pleas for help from his sickness. Rorschach finally snaps and kills the murderer directly via the same cleaver used to kill the dogs.

Different and, in keeping with the strange sense of priorities of the film on adaptation, seemingly unnecessary — why keep camera shots exactly in line with certain panels so vividly if alterations like this are being made? But it still works in a more direct resolution to the same situation — yet what does not work for me is the brutal series of shots directly portraying Rorschach chopping into the murderer’s skull. This isn’t done by implication or even just off-camera, which I actually could have dealt with — this was all on-screen.

At a deep-rooted level, this is a choice I could not stand. It’s why I don’t like horror-porn or torture-porn or whatever one wants to call it — I’m not about to be moralistic on the point, I’m not going to say it can’t be filmed or shown. But Snyder is who put the final stamp on keeping this altered sequence in and having it shown the way it was. Frankly, I despise him for it. On that level, I cannot be moved.

I’ll conclude on this subject, though, with a key reversal in what I’ve been talking about so far, where the gore and blood of the original, where present, is either intensified or, as in the scene just described, fully added. In one essential, Snyder in fact totally reverses this — and does so in a way that, again, I can’t quite call hypocritical per se, or cowardly or something else again. But I have to approach it that way, because I think it’s a massive failure on his part above and beyond those points I’ve already outlined.

In the book, the success of Veidt’s act of mass murder via the false alien invader is shown in the opening pages of the final chapter in a wordless, absolutely wrenching 360 degree pan around the city corner where so much of the secondary action of the story takes place, as characters meet, argue, talk, worry and more. It opens with the image of blood pouring down a clock face, and as the pages continue, there is nothing but wreckage and bodies, endless bodies, contorted and bloodied and brutalized. Nearly every figure of what seems like thousands of people, including all those secondary characters we’ve grown to know over the course of the book, is shown in extreme pain, shock and degredation, blood and other fluids spilling out all around them, from them. They slump against walls, against each other, jaws agape, eyes staring sightlessly. Veidt’s actions are bluntly, wordlessly portrayed — thousands, and as it turns out, millions of people are now dead.

In the movie, the alternate resolution of Veidt’s plot — which I do think makes more sense for both the movie and the general story than the book version — does not give us this. It does give us the comparative destruction of the center of Manhattan, and we do see the shredding and vaporizing of a number of people as a result of the reactor’s explosion. We do see Dr. Manhattan and Laurie at the scene of the tragedy, confronting a vast crater left by the explosion, the knowledge that, certainly, many thousands or millions people are now dead in turn.

But there’s no blood, no sightless eyes, no wrenched bodies. There’s no nuclear burn victims, there’s no melting skin, there’s no lungs burned dry, no horrors of the atomic age shown. None. It’s the most bloody, horrifying scene in the book, and following the logic of the film, one would have expected Snyder to, shall we say, outdo himself.

Doubtless there are many possible responses or explanations, beyond the simple ones of budget, say. The point could be the brutally antiseptic clincality of the attack, in the same way that, for instance, Veidt almost daintily removes the scientists in his employment after he kills them via the same mechanism that soon shreds Dr. Manhattan once more. The point could be, given the argument that this Watchmen is supposed to speak to a newer generation’s expectations and experiences, that in the same way that 9/11’s impact on the majority of the world was seen at a visual remove, that it was the destruction of the buildings and machines more than the people and the horrors visited upon them that was seen, that it was all in the implication. Or it could be as simple as the thought that, having built up the expectation that things were going to be worse for each comparative scene that the most unexpected thing to do would be to pull back instead.

Perhaps, and perhaps it’s something else, or a combination, or more or less. That’s why I’m not sure whether to call this change hypocritical, or to call it cowardly (in the sense of lacking the courage of convictions — if Snyder’s all about the blood, then why not continue the upward arc?), or even to call it a flaw. But the question remains, and it colors the scene and, in the end, the movie, and my own thoughts on Snyder. Those thoughts are, no matter what else, not positive.

***

Yet I’ll see the film again. It is a striking, compelling film, flawed and dragged down and compromised as it is, layered as it further is with the techniques and choices of a director that I reject. It IS worth seeing in the theater, even if, as I say, a matinee is the best level of payment for it rather than full admission.

More on that in my final thoughts tomorrow.

Continued from here.

As the days continue and more and more people see the film, the expected breakdown of opinion continues as well — lots of love, lots of hate, lots of ambivalence, with the third category being where I still firmly sit. The most amusing piece I saw today came from Patton Oswalt, who, intentionally or not, seems to capture what is the pro-camp in extremis, essentially saying what the far more ambivalent Matt Maxwell also did the other day — ‘it’s not the comic and you can’t expect it to be the comic’ — but adding what seems to be a further belligerence along the lines of ‘why can’t you people appreciate what you’ve got, jeez!’

I sympathize to an extent, I’ve felt similar about many other adaptations. But only so far, because there’s a feedback loop already settling in that basically insists that Snyder and crew haven’t compromised, have shown incredible ambition, and so forth, and that this alone is reason to praise sight unseen (which, as Oswalt hilariously notes, is literally the case with him — he wrote and posted his thoughts having not yet seen the film). But if there’s no room for nuance, no room for questions or unsureness or outright detestation of certain elements even while thinking the film is worth seeing, then we might as well all go home. If Watchmen‘s reception ends up being totally divided between love and hate, then I think it’s actually a greater failure than if it was universally hated.

My fifth and final post on Wednesday will be where I actually talk about what I love about the film, and while it’s worth seeing despite all my caveats. But I can’t ignore those caveats and, importantly, they’re not simply a matter of translating over the three overriding flaws of Lynch’s Dune that I discussed in detail yesterday. However, those are the starting points, and those points are, in the end, somewhat unavoidable, no matter the adaptation and no matter the adapter.

***

Each of the three adaptive flaws of Dune apply to Watchmen, though not necessarily in the same sense or scale. They hobble Watchmen, at best providing plenty of problematic moments, at worst providing a poor substitution for equivalent dialogue or scenes in the book that ends up making the movie less interesting than it could have been. I’ll repeat again here — just because they hobble Dune badly as well doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy the film. But they can’t be handwaved there, and they can’t be handwaved here.

The first flaw — massive frontloading providing reasonably exhaustive detail results in a rushed, crushed and heavily changed second half — is not as completely disorienting as in Dune. It helps that it’s a familiar enough setting that the world of Watchmen presents, similar yet different, with immediately recognizable elements. The necessary expository detail falls less on the world of Watchmen than it does on those characters whose stories are exposed and/or detailed, and the unavoidably episodic nature of the original work did at least provide room for each of the major characters to have ‘their say’ — even the Comedian gets this via the funeral flashbacks. Meanwhile, the sequence that I’ve noticed has come in for a fair amount of complaint as slowing both original story and movie down — Dr. Manhattan’s removal to Mars, first on his own and then with Laurie — contains what I think are some of the best moments in both versions, with Billy Crudup’s serene voice jumping through the chaos of simultaneous time. How his story is summarized and presented is an example of fine adaptive skill.

But the rush of the second half loses this balance, in a way that left me initially uneasy, then cold. Two sequences in particular stood out — the revelation of Laurie’s true parenthood, a moment of admittedly high melodrama that I think missed a step in only including the first meeting between Laurie and the Comedian rather than the angry second, something I think is important given the extremely unsatisfying final resolution of that arc at the very end of the movie — more on that in due course, but this was a shortchanging that put too pat a conclusion on one of the most wrenching parts of the entire story.

Meantime, a more problematic — though admittedly probably more insoluble — dilemma came with Ozymandias. The absolutely entrancing portrayal of his backstory and perversely attractive sociopathic megalomania via his extended monologue to his servants in the original could never have been filmed as it stood — it really would have slowed the film down to a crazy degree. The substitute scene touches on this in shorthand, leaving the burden to be carried by the fight scene in Karnak between him, Rorschach and Night Owl, where as in the original Ozymandias almost diffidently explains his decisions in between thumping people.

And yet it just didn’t work. Strange to say, but the fact that I knew where he was coming from and what he was doing and why, rather than filling in the lacunae that the film version inevitably created, left me feeling distanced towards Ozymandias as filmed. And for all that I’m talking about adaptive flaws here, to repeat: the character in the film simply hadn’t earned his moment for me to feel a full connection, the simultaneous attraction and horror that Ozymandias represents. Without it, a major element of the conclusion disappears.

Was something possible? If the reactions of others who hadn’t read the book and enjoyed the film are any indication, it was not only possible but was there in full force. I cannot predict how I would react in their shoes, yet the fact remains that where I felt the connections to other characters in the film as clearly as I did in the book, the compression of time and mechanics in the film compromised Laurie’s story and wrecked Ozymandias’s. It’s deeply regrettable.

The second flaw — the perhaps inevitable problem of translating things to the film medium that read well but shouldn’t’ve been carried over — is, as noted, near inevitable. Hammering on examples could go on forever, really, and I’m not interested in a cataloging. But what made me first think of Dune while seeing Watchmen, as it turned out, was a device that is simply essential in the book but which far too quickly caused me to laugh to myself, and not because of intentional humor — Rorschach’s journals.

It should be noted that I think Rorschach’s own writing is something that within the first page of the book is sent up as a red flare to readers that an unreliable narrator is being dealt with, or at least one that has a worldview that may make intrinsic internal sense but which is removed from that of most readers. There is, I think, humor to be found even in the grimness of what he writes.

Yet despite the fact that I think Jackie Earle Haley’s portrayal of Rorschach is one of the acting highlights of the film, and despite the fact that the journal simply could not be removed or dropped without completely undercutting the absolute conclusion of the film, hearing him narrate the journal against the various visual sequences, just as in the book, somehow first called to mind Kyle Maclachlan’s whisperings and random looks.

Then, more damagingly, I couldn’t hear him actually say “Rorschach’s journal” plus the appropriate date or time without thinking of an even more familiar figure from TV four decades back starting out each episode going “Captain’s log…”

Meanwhile, the final adaptive flaw — obsessive microfocus, diffuse macrofocus — is actually the one that Watchmen overcomes the most thanks to the most successful element of the adaptation, the changed mechanism of Ozymandias’s conspiracy. This deserves all the praise it gets and I’ll talk more about it in the final entry, but in ways it makes Watchmen even more frustrating — it got a lot of detail just so, it got a core element of making it work as a self-contained film right, but in between there’s a lot of things that took me out of the film far too quickly, too jarringly.

I should preface this by saying that there’s no one through line on the examples that come to mind — there are various, and they function in different ways. Further, the absence of a detail should not be taken as a sign of lacking wider focus — for instance, while the exclusion of the running Tales of the Black Freighter sequence and the characters of the newsstand operator and the comic fan is unfortunate on the one hand, it’s also completely understandable on the other.

Still, consider these two examples, one a question of screenwriting and editing, the other of directorial intent, both I think reflective of a film that can’t quite decide what it is trying to be:

First, the character of Hollis Mason is briefly introduced in the sequence, as in the book, where he and Dan Dreiberg chat over a beer and reminisce. It’s nicely done and on a detail level it works very well, but his absence from the rest of the film made me retrospectively wonder why he should be included at all. It’s already been said that his story arc will be kept in with the extended DVD version and I’m admittedly fine with this since such similar work helped radically improve the too-brusque story of Faramir in The Two Towers, for instance.

Consider, though, a complete removal of Hollis from the theatrical film — in otherwards, we first encounter Dreiberg as he returns to his house, finding to his surprise it’s been broken into. We don’t know who this man is at all, and neither do we know why Rorschach would be there in his kitchen. The scene could then play as it does, and with a bit of careful editing, possibly an extra line or two as needed, could build up to that moment where Dreiberg, Rorschach’s dismissive “You quit” ringing in his ears, slumps down to sit, his costume (already revealed and shown during the credit sequence of the film) hanging in its case. The question such a shortened scene would raise would still be answered, Dreiberg’s role still clearly identified, in a way that lets the visuals do the job.

This is of course the luxury of Monday-morning quarterbacking, of seeing the film and thinking back on it and going “Well you know…” rather than thinking of it at the time. At the time I watched the scene there was no way of knowing whether Hollis would be in the film any more or not. Yet it seems in retrospect that his scene feels more fanservicey than necessary, something that, if removed, could theoretically free up time elsewhere for other detail, for instance — and given that the filmmakers did eventually prove to be bold in the big change, one wonders why the hesitation in the smaller scale at points. Include Hollis’s sequences in full in the DVD if one likes, but why the half-hearted inclusion in the theatrical?

When it comes to intent, meanwhile, I think the first truly “Okay, wait a minute” moment I had with the film came with the capture of Rorschach. As written, and as filmed, it’s actually a marvel of compact storytelling — Rorschach’s insane self-beration and survival instinct in overdrive, his refusal to back down against all odds, an illustration of his autonomous nature at its angriest and most destructive. In both versions he breaks out through a window with a snarl and crashes to the ground.

In the comic, the fall pretty well knocks the wind out of him and he’s then quickly overcome, leading to the climactic moment of his being unmasked. In the film, though, he springs to his feet and, in a sequence that almost feels comical, proceeds to take down one cop after another in an action sequence that’s certainly pure post-Hong Kong (and its many derivations in America and elsewhere) in impact. He’s then overcome and the sequence concludes as in the book.

I knew it felt wrong when I watched it, at least to me. However, it wasn’t because Rorschach fought back, therefore not being ‘just like the book’ — in fact, it wasn’t until I reread the sequence the following day that I realized he didn’t really fight back at all, aside from struggling violently against the police who were already subduing him. The fact that the film Rorschach would fight back fiercely seemed perfectly keeping in character. Yet his crisp moves, his take-em-down-one-at-a-time approach, all that, however swiftly done, felt wrong on a wider level. This wasn’t ‘Rorschach’ as I understood him at this point in the film — instead, he suddenly transformed into a ‘superhero’ and then back again to just being a regular guy.

I can see an argument for this in the film’s logic — Rorschach (and to a different level Night Owl and other figures) have to be to some extent or another superhuman to truly be superheroes in the context of Watchmen as filmed, especially given the final confrontation in Karnak. I’m not entirely on board with this argument but even so, I understand it. Something does not quite gel, though, in this sporadic, sudden there-and-gone burst of power — it’s maybe not so much a lack of focus as a refocusing that raises more questions than answers.

It took me out of the flow of the film, and it was just one moment of many.

***

I fully realize that in the course of these posts it seems like all I’ve done is dump on Watchmen, explicitly or implicitly. So to reiterate, in my final post I’ll talk more fully about what I enjoy — or even just appreciated — about the film, and the reason why it’s compelling enough to watch at least once.

But before that, having put the Dune parallels to bed, I’ll talk more about those decisions and choices that were Snyder’s alone to make as a director and overall guiding light of the film version. I have never seen a Snyder film before this one, I should note, so this is not relying on comparisons to 300 or whatever. I will see Watchmen again, but I have no desire to ever see another Snyder film in the future now. In fact, I have an overwhelming sense of active, complete avoidance — I’m not interested in seeing Watchmen again because of him, I’m interested in seeing it again in spite of him.

More on that tomorrow.