Monday, Mar. 09, 2009

'Watchmen' nearly as good as the novel

By Edward Robertson, atomictown.com

So who here was cool enough to have read the Watchmen graphic novel before we'd all heard they were making a movie out of it?

Not me! That stuff's for nerds. In fact, I don't even know how to read, and when it come to looking at pictures, they may as well be hieroglyphics. Nope, no nerds here — I'm as buff as Aragorn, as witty as Gimli, and as wise as Gand — aw hell. Yeah, I read it. I read it twice! Then I spent the last several months alternately fretting and scoffing over the possibility of a movie capturing even a fraction of its vision, beauty, bleakness, ultra-good-artness, etc.

To my way of thinking, remaking a great movie or adapting a beloved book to the big screen is a no-lose proposition. If the movie's good, then hooray for everything. If it ends up bad, then you get to adjourn to the Hating Parlor and hold a Hate Party, which is a lot like a tea party but with more lace. Despite that, I went into Watchmen a heavy skeptic.

When a botched and unrepeatable experiment turned an American man into Dr. Manhattan (played by Billy Crudup), a godlike being of almost unlimited power, the world changed. Soviet aggression stopped cold. The U.S. won the Vietnam War. With the arrival of an actual superman, the masked vigilantes — normal men and women who anonymously fought crime — became obsolete.

It's now the mid-'80s, and one of the old heroes has been murdered. His former associate Rorschach (played by Jackie Earle Haley) immediately suspects a conspiracy against masked adventurers, a suggestion the others take about as seriously as all his crazy ideas.

When Dr. Manhattan is forced into leaving Earth, the others change their tune. Suddenly, nuclear war with the Soviets looms large. And someone seems bent on removing the rest of the masks before they can do anything to stop what may be Armageddon.

There was essentially no way for Watchmen the movie to live up to Watchmen the book. It's too complex, too much a product of its medium, too good. If tasked to convert the book to the screen, Dr. Manhattan himself would have thrown up his bright blue hands, embedded himself in the couch, and declared it Miller time.

Amazingly, director Zack Snyder comes danged close. His secret: an adaptation so faithful it exposes all other book-to-film translations as like the lying, adulterous scum they are.

His cast looks like 3D photocopies straight off the pages of the novel, and incredibly, these comic-clones can act, too. Without their talent, one of Watchmen's greatest strengths — the psychological depth of its heroes — would have gone squandered. Though the movie can feel slow as it's establishing who and what these people are, the payoff is worth it.

That depth is built through a lot of weirdness, perversion, and what some would call "grit," which is critical shorthand for "messed up, disturbing stuff that will leave you wanting to make a tent out of your blankets and then live under that tent until you run out of food." Even by modern superhero standards, this movie is dark. Let me be the first to say: awesome.

It all looks outstanding, too, both the world and the scenes of ass-whompery. Big surprise. With 300, Snyder proved he could make a movie so pretty you'd want to take it into international waters and marry it. Now it looks like he can tell a good story, too.

Yet for those of us who swoon over the book, his hyper-faithful approach, successful as it is, is a reminder of all the small things the novel did better. Among other things, that nervous Cold War paranoia never really comes through, making it possible to lose track of just what the heroes are fighting for.

It also makes it incredibly damn hard to separate the one from the other. The book is a masterpiece, so if the movie is the book put into moving pictures, but not quite, does that make the movie not quite a masterpiece? I don't think it works that way. The heart's there, it's some of the spirit that's missing. But give it extra credit for an ending that's in some ways better than the original, and yeah, it's pretty close.

Grade: B+