Watched It

Dear J-

I keep getting distracted; right now we’re half-following Watchmen as I try to ignore my sneaking suspicion that it’s somehow been turned into Forrest Gump with masks (seriously, what’s with the un-subtle musical choices, calculated to appeal to, well, me and my fellow Gen Xers? And who’s going to buy Carla Gugino as a sixty-seven year old? Well, I suppose that if Sally Field can be Tom Hanks’s mother in a movie just a few years after she was his love interest …). I suppose that there’s a lot that can be excused in the name of spectacle, but it plays out like a series of disconnected vignettes instead of a cohesive story.

It’s what the style is now, I suppose; instead of the rich tones of the original, to compress it down to the three hours (!) of film, we get it painted in bold strokes and pastiches. I said it before the film came out — so long as it pushes people to read the original, I suppose that it wouldn’t be in vain, but too often we substitute the movie as a reward for reading the source. Sometimes I wonder if the reading lists in high school was set by the availability of movies (likely the other way, as getting good stories cheap is easy when you can pull them from copyright-expired classics).

Back to the movie, then; what made dramatic sense and great pithy bon mots in the comic fall leadenly on screen. You might think that it’s inherent in the nature of the source material — how could you count on something as crass as this, especially compared with something like, say, Dickens, right — but it’s better than advertised: Alan Moore has written a believable world that breathes with as much menace and decay as, say, Blade Runner but this is the treatement it gets? Maybe I’m getting too jaded by movies in general, or my tolerance for crap is decreasing.

Mike

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Watchmen Speculation

Dear J-

I keep reading about the Watchmen movie; am still conflicted on watching it, as the graphic novel did things that I thought would be impossible for movies to replicate.  Rumor has it that the Tales of the Black Freighter will be brought out as a standalone DVD, which will pretty much tip me over to not watching it unless an extended cut is restored to interleave the story with the pirate comic.  The crowning achievement of the graphic novel is the world that created — a world parallel to ours and yet believably different because of a simple schism:  how would our lives change if superheroes became commonplace?

Central to the believability is how Watchmen — the novel — treats its source materials; the long text interludes are not bonus supplemental reading, they’re prerequisites.  By forcing the extra material onto a DVD to be purchased and watched prior to the actual movie, you doom it to mediocrity;  inexplicable to casual fans, unimaginable to folks who just want an action movie, and limiting appeal to those of us who’ve memorized line, chapter, and verse.  The fanbase is not, I suspect, large enough to support the movie’s ambitions; we’re talking about a twenty-year-old book here, steeped in the everyday worry of the Cold War, after all.  Should it spur sales of the novel, then yes, good job, great.  Should it spur people to reject comic book movies in general — and boy, have there been a lot lately, and of books less deserving than the big titles (Fantastic Four, Ghost Rider) — then you have succeeded in killing that golden goose for the sake of the hardcore.

On the one hand, it’ll be interesting to see how Cold War fears play out twenty years out of date, though a newly resurgent Russia may give us some fodder for reflection.  On the other, will the central plot have enough meat in it to explain the intricacies of the world and enough hooks to grab a large-enough audience?  I’m not convinced that there’s enough without extending the movie well past four hours, interleaving the pirate comic and forcing people to do their homework.  The shame of it is that it’ll likely turn people off the Watchmen book and Alan Moore in general, when he’s one of the strongest modern writers, regardless of genre, I’ve read lately.

Mike

Watchmen Speculation

Dear J-

There’s been a surfeit of comic book movies lately — growing up when I did, sure you had your occasional Superman movie or Batman, but the great majority of franchises crossed over from film into print, graphic or otherwise.  I have a Blade Runner graphical adaptation sitting around somewhere that reminds me of how it was in the days before home video — and even when VHS tapes ran $80 plus, no one except those crazy Laserdisc folks actually owned movies.  Instead we had still-illustrated large-format storybooks (some prepared well in advance of the final cut, if you ever get a chance, look up the Star Wars storybook, which includes a deleted scene between Biggs and Luke on Tatooine) and novelizations, where now it’s just much simpler to wait for the inevitable DVD in six months or so.

But back to comic book movies; it’s not to say that there aren’t ambiguously good heroes in graphic literature, but the movies that have been chosen draw from source material with reasonable brand recognition — Superman, Batman, Spiderman, the X-Men, Iron Man — with pretty cut-and-dried heroes.  When they come from more obscure sources, the advertising budget suffers (Ghost Rider came and went with hardly a peep, although maybe that was due to the general awfulness of the movie) and it’s not a mainstream viewing.

It’ll be interesting to see how the Watchmen are handled in their big-screen translation.  For what it’s worth, I agree with Alan Moore’s assertion that parts of it are essentially untranslateable from print to film, but comic book fans demand a certain verity and fidelity to the source material — more than most, I would assert — and I don’t doubt that they will be much disappointed.  With that said, I can’t help but believe that the character development must be far shallower, just based on time constraints.  How will that Cold War tale play out?  Only one way to learn.

Mike