| 9:01p |
Who Should Watch The Watchmen?
I was recently discouraged from continuing my writing on this blog due to the overall negative elements in roughly everything I bother to say. Would I have bothered to review Wall-E if I'd enjoyed it? I'd like to think so, but then, now I find myself worrying about the many ways in which I simultaneously express myself and annoy my friends. Having a blog feature which is explicitly about drawing attention to things I like, things I enjoyed, rather than venting my spleen about the odd things I've read or seen. It seemed for a while there that everything I enjoyed was diminished by my enjoying of it, or my contributing to it - and I was better off just linking it to people rather than trying to offer my thoughts along with it, adding to the discourse.
So we have a movie arrive on the horizon - and yes, we're going to be talking about Watchmen - which is based closely on a seminal work of comic history, something that I both very much enjoy, and, much more uniquely, something that other people take as seriously as I do. This is liberating and obnoxious because suddenly I have to step up to the plate and provide my analysis and opinion in such a way that I don't repeat something everyone already knows while still coming across as appropriately pretentious and gittish else be lost on the sea of uncertainty as to my own identity.
Spoilers ahead, obviously. Jump to the word 'liverpudlian' to get the summary.
So, Watchmen. It's a visually amazing film that draws from the comic book almost perfectly in every visual sense; it carries with itself a shocking amount of grunge and makes the violence overvisceral - the good guys don't just punch people, they put their supposedly-normal fists through concrete. At first, from a reading of the comic, this could be seen as a departure, but I don't see it as such. In 1986, when the comic was written, the mere idea of creating a comic in such a tone was shocking and weird, making the tone and atmosphere quite visceral. By emphasising the violence and exaggerating it in this way, the movie carries on that shocking nature. The reality, the mundanity of the world and the people in it means that that tinge of unsettling nature flows through, while also engaging our adrenal sense.
One of Alan Moore's great complaints about comic movies is that they're trying to make sheep out of cows; that comics are comics and movies are movies and the two things should be kept separate. While I would agree that it would be nice if every work ever created could be striking and individual, not everyone has that gift, and the gift of translating something from one form to another can often breathe new life into it. The beautiful thing to be seen in this movie was that it did. One of the things film does better (in my opinion) than comics is depict point-by-point actions. The way a creature transforms, the way a person fights, these are elements that in comics have to be defined by a huge amount of odd, expository verbiage, in novels by paragraphs that take longer to read than entire fights can take to play out, and in theatre by awkwardly-defined stage dancing. In a movie, done well, you don't see the wires, you don't need to obscure things - if the Comedian is strong enough to incidentally punch through a concrete wall, he can damn well do so.
The opening fight scene, I felt added something else: It highlighted that the Comedian was actually a badass. In the scenes the movie would otherwise show, it would highlight that he was basically nothing but a swaggering bully - flamethrowering VCs, shooting (not punching!) a pregnant woman, firing his shotgun (seemingly) into civilian protesters, and generally being a dick using a big metal penis extension.
One of the themes the comics touch on which the movie seems to skirt is the sexualities of the masks. The original story featured snippets and excerpts from police and medical reports that gave away that no less than three members of the original Minutemen group was 'sexually deviant,' in that they were gay and maligned by the society around them for that. This was actually well-handled in the movie in that it barely mentioned it. While it emphasised a bit more Nite-Owl's need for the heroism sexually (rather than, in my opinion, a need for it to feel empowered at all), the movie generally stepped away from the issue of noting anyone in the movie as being anything but hetrosexual, white, Americans (even Doctor Manhattan, who started out as a white guy). Now, to be fair, the comic had actually a largely diverse and interesting and supremely fucked-up secondary cast, and at least one character who got a whole issue of the comic to himself as a narrator who was black, but by and large, the story is a bit White. Not a big deal, but it does leave a sad aftertaste in my mind - the fact that in a story which did feature multiple touchings upon fucked up people who happened to be gay or black, the ones who got excised from the main thrust of the plot were the ones who inadvertantly interrupted the homogenity of the plot.
The casting was quite good. One of the very good signs, to me, was that I recognised nobody in the cast, nobody at all. If someone who nobody has heard of gets cast as Rorschach or Nite-Owl or Doc Manhattan or something then it's a good, solid sign to me that the person is actually good in the role, not chasing Oscar bait or worse, a reliable character actor who is going to play the same damn person as they always do. The outside third possibility is some young up-and-coming star trying to use a position's sex appeal to try and amplify their career, trying to latch onto movies that are guaranteed to be relatively successful due to built-in fanbases like Shia LeBouf in Transformers - which I feel a need to mention, was shit.
One of the real highlights of the casting was Nite-Owl. He was well-played as a pudgy, bespectacled nerd, someone who genuinely would enjoy an outfit that came with a bit of girdling and painted-on muscle. Someone who could appreciate the effect of being a symbol, someone who would really revel in the superhero lifestyle. While he chooses to give into the lie and let Ozymandias win, chooses to compromise and becomes complicit in the murder of millions, Nite-Owl's character is the closest thing realistic nerds have to a proxy in the movie... and he's sexually dysfunctional, bullied, lives in a rundown dump, squanders his fortune on Cool Toys that he doesn't use and has about two and a half friends in the world. The actor doesn't shirk from this, doesn't try and cool him up, even around Laurie - there are no moments where he isn't exactly what he should be, no moments where he doesn't wear who he is on his sleeve. Some think it's a bit hamfisted the way he shows his emotions in the dark, when Laurie mentions Jon - I think it's perfectly obvious that that's how a guy like him would react.
The music was exceptional. Really, really goddamn good. I found myself really wishing for the soundtrack, up until the rather unfortunate instance of Hallelujah rearing its head. Once upon a time, I thought Hallelujah was a pretty, interesting song; then I heard it again and again and the lyrics began to bother me, then I heard it again and again and again and the appropriateness it had to the scene it was played over would start bothering me, and suddenly it'd be showing up in every film ever and generally only be related to the scene in question because it let people indulge a Chris De Burgh-like fascination with sex under choral guise. I don't think the point of the song was sex (though I've been told that's a theme of Leonard Cohen's), but it gets connected to the same general theme over and over again. At least in one brief stint, it was used in a movie to highlight that someone was about to die. Anyway, I can't gauge the scene fairly - I know there are some people to whom Hallelujah can't be overused, and some people who just plain out like the song. These people might be a bit disappointed with the bafflingly unerotic sex scene that it heralds.
The opening sequence is a wonderful way to demonstrate the way you can use a long song in a movie, by the way; the credits play out to Bob Dylan's The Times, They Are A Changin' and does so with such a wonderful meter that I couldn't help but smile my way through it, watching as the events of my own father's history were played out in this strange, brave new world. None of the music came from after the movie's time-set piece except the ending credits, which was a My Chemical Romance cover of Desolation Row. As of this writing, I can't find a place to get a copy of this song online, and I doubt there will be a Watchman Soundtrack. Either way - good stuff.
The movie brushes on a lot of the reasons people enjoy superhero stories. Rorschach deals with our desire to punish wickedness, beyond all reason, circumventing the societal rules about what to do in these cases. Doctor Manhattan plays to a very real, very human desire to be so powerful that we cannot be threatened, to be the superman that transcends all human limitations. Then there's Nite-Owl, who's the contrast - while Doc Manhattan is our wanting to embrace the superhero because we want to feel better than people, Nite-Owl is embracing power to feel like a person at all. Silk Spectre, our desire to be titillated in a morally acceptable way in a world full of wicked titillation... and then there's Ozymandias, who is a wonderful monument to the nerd fantasy of beating everyone because you're smarter than they are. Which is nonsense - Ozy isn't just smart, he's also super-fast and rich as hell, giving him Wonderful Toys. Unfortunate, that's kinda the point. And the Comedian is the worst half of Rorschach. While Rorschach indulges his raw, murderous kind of justice, he does bad things to bad people - the Comedian just gives into the desire to do bad things to anyone, and then externalised the blame, so he could operate guiltlessly. Bad person? You betcha. But he's the kind of bad person people cheer for.
So what of these types in the movie? Well, they were all handled quite well. Doc Manhattan was able to benefit somewhat from the way science has marched on since the 1980s and has been able to integrate some quantum physics into his discussion, which I suppose kinda sharply highlights his idea of predeterminism. I mean, we know full well that the universe is altered by its observation, and that we may well face quantum universes determined by differentation engines - life, specifically. As far as we know, nothing can serve the same purpose in quantum physics as living observers, which means that nothing but life can collapse wave-forms like we do. In that regard, especially if you view the universe on a quantum level, the presence of life is not some inessential thing, though it might leave a person somewhat convinced of the importance of life in general and instead hell-bent on the removal of the forms of life that might destroy the rest of life - yes, that'd be us. Though I doubt we could really exterminate all life on the planet even if we tried.
There's no real way around the fact that the movie changed the story. The ending in the comic book was playing on our fear of alien invasion, the ending in the movie plays on a semireligious fear of a god made manifest, Doc Manhattan. Ozymandias gets away with it in both cases and Rorschach gets the last laugh from beyond the grave. They didn't have Rorschach come back from the dead, they didn't have him beat Ozymandias, they didn't fall into any of the Hollywoodification I would have feared possible. Many of the things that were changed felt, for the most part, like they were changed for time. It's a long movie, after all, and even things like the device of the Doomsday clock are discarded in the early half of the film just because there was insufficient time to use them. The peeing conversation had between Nite-Owl and Silk Spectre in the prison is cut as well, almost certainly again for time. All the side characters are cut, all the backstory of the Minutemen except for the most obvious ones (the Comedian and the original Silk Spectre, though even their story was compressed). Curiously, despite the fact they weren't going to develop it, they still had Comedian taunting the Hood. Curious, that.
So most of the changes take the route of convenience. Things just don't get said, and sometimes, subtle conclusions that are the result of long strings of dialogue or repeated uses of a motif are instead explicated and summarised ('The Comedian was your father,'). Rather than build the character of Rorschach throughout the whole of his truly paranoid dialogue (though a lot of it is there, including some of the more memorable lines!), they have Nite-Owl yell in his face what he's supposed to evoke to the reader... and then, it underscores Nite-Owl by having him apologise for it. So not all the changes are for the worse, you know? Still...
Of the changed scenes, Rorschach has one that has me gnashing my teeth. For any afficionado of the books, they'll know the scene in question - Rorschach is relating from an event in his past where he dealt with a kidnapper and murderer, with all the 'evidence' he needs for a conviction. In the movie, Rorschach murders his dogs, throw them at him through the window, cuffs him to an oven, threatens him with a cleaver, then chops into his head, with the damning condemnation: Animals get put down. Nice, etcetera.
Now, in the book, Rorschach actually cuffs the man in place, then tosses him a hacksaw and sets the house on fire. He notes that cutting through the chains of the handcuffs will take too long, with the house on fire, and that the man's only option is to cut off his own limb. Dutifully scary and whatnot, but unfortunately, the Saw series has done it. Plus, Rorschach adds a twist to the scene - he waits outside the building, with an axe. I don't think I could live with sitting in a movie theatre and hearing someone mutter, 'Oh, they totally ripped that off Saw.' I would leap the aisle, pulling up a seat as I did it, and brain the person in question, hollering, 'SAW RIPPED OFF THIS, YOU FOOL! AND THIS RIPPED OFF MAD MAX!'
The reason why I liked the scene as it originally played out is it demonstrated three of the iconically understood (at the time) signs of sociopathy, the things you look for in a child. Setting fires, a lack of empathy, and cruelty to animals. Since this is the night that he's 'born' as Rorschach, it was a nice little image to me, a vigilantistic act that contains within itself the message that should be obvious: Something is very, very wrong with this man.
The movie scene is more visceral, less sadistic, and almost exonerates Rorschach with the bad guy claiming he could beat a murder charge without being refuted at all by anything, not even an act of disbelief. Rorschach's actions suggest that he believed it - which implies to the audience that yes, the world is so fucked that having a little girl's bones in your backyard, her blood on your chopping block and her panties in your oven isn't enough evidence to suggest you were involved. It legitimizes the next act - which in the book is an act of utterly unredeemable sadism, while in the movie is just a furious, simple dispatch. After all - Animals get put down.
So, not satisfied with that change.
Another is the way they further the position of Laurie in the ending of the movie, shooting Ozymandias. Since I'd just finished reading Monster (which I might write about), the sequence where she shoots Ozymandias was underscored with a phrase from that book: Always shoot twice. The lone bullet shot is a pleasantly dramatic gesture, but since it'd been telegraphed that Ozymandias can catch a bullet, all that it really did was let Laurie join in on the futilities - made worse by the fact that she's doing so, knowing that it's futile. Rorschach and Nite-Owl fight Ozymandias aggressively when they still think they have a hope to stop things - a hope that should have been well and truly quashed by the fact Laurie was in the crater. Then the shot becomes not about justice but about revenge, and it diminishes what little ideal Laurie has to offer.
It shouldn't bother me - I mean, it's a very realistic thing to want to do at that point, especially if you have the gun (though, two days later, I find myself fumbling with my memory; did that gun get telegraphed somewhere? Or did she just have it?). It's certainly what I think most audiences would want to happen - and it means that Laurie actually does something, rather than the alternative, which is to do nothing and be a prop handed from Doc Manhattan to Nite-Owl. Is it better to be the most futile character there, or to not really be a character there, I wonder?
And the third change, possibly the oddest change, is in the prison, where Big Figure has Rorschach in his cell and is trying to break in. In the comic, it's done by using an acetylene torch, and the death of the man with the arms in the cell is more prosaic - they stab him, he slumps, so they can pull his arms back through the bars without his complaining. In the movie they go for a far gorier end, where they depict the man having both his forearms cut off with an angle grinder. Now, I have to wonder: What the fuck? It's not like the scene was made all that much faster by the showing of it, and it honestly felt like it was done to continue the shock-violence theme. But then we have a lengthy sequence of Nite-Owl and Silk Spectre kicking all kinds of ass downstairs - a scene where the details like differently-pointing legs and massive bloody death are all Not Happening. What was it? An attempt to highlight that the Spectre and Nite-Owl are good guys opposed by bad guys? It loses some of its bite when the same pair had a thoroughly messy fight in an alleyway with random gang thugs.
It wasn't like it was a major moment of problem in the film. It was just something that left me going: What the fuck? Right now my favourite theory is a couple of the special-effects guys had come up with a neat way to shoot the effect of someone's arms being cut off mid-way and wanted to try it out. It certainly has more impact than the alternative, but I think I'd have rathered it - showing that Big Figure was heartless. Being willing to slice a man's arms off is a bit ruthless, a bit messy. Just stabbing him seems far more pragmatic and simple, far more right for a criminal mastermind. Sawing someone's arms off when there are less gory options seems like the kind of order you issue from a Doom Fortress.
Liverpudlian
Alright, so what do I think? Overall, if you're coming into this tabula rasa? Go see it, it's a very good movie with a lot of depth to it and an intense, well-acted storyline that deconstructs the insanity around the Superhero Genre. It's got fantastic music, nicely well-acted characters and really only one awkward scene that I honestly would have skipped. The special effects were nice, but understated, the changes to the plot quite forgiveable and the overall tone of the movie very introspectively hopeful. As with V for Vendetta, I feel that Watchman took a great comic book and made a good enough movie. |