My take on “Watchmen”

A few weeks ago I asked my good friend and certified comic book geek (he once bought 6,000 comic books in one sale) Soweidy to write a review on “Watchmen,”   as I was stranded on a desert island at the time.   He wrote a great review;  you can read it here if you missed it.    Here are a few of my own notes, now that I’ve seen the movie for myself.  

Zach Snyder’s attempt to bring “Watchmen” to the screen is the most anticipated, and worried over, since Peter Jackson handled “The Lord of the Rings.”  The graphic novel has that kind of following, and is a work of that magnitude and imagination.   It’s a tough task, trying to balance faithfulness to the original work with finding what actually works in a completely different medium.   Jackson hit the ball out of the park, to everyone’s surprise;  Snyder hits a pop fly to the warning track.   Almost…but no.  Maybe if the wind was a little different….

The biggest problem I have with Snyder’s adaptation is his giddy, adolescent fascination with gory action.   Heads explode; open fractures abound.  This is so NOT in line with the tone of Alan Moore’s “Watchmen,”  which calls into question our fascination and devotion to just this kind of violence.   Are these violent weirdos really our heroes?   Well, they’re clearly Snyders’….

And it’s kind of flat.  It’s true that there’s not really a lot of plot in the graphic novel… somebody’s killing superheroes, but the villain is boringest guy in the story.   And Moore breaks it up by switching between mediums, adding in subplots and using other tricks to keep things moving.   Snyder eliminates all of these, and we realize just how little happens, really.    It’s hard for me to believe that anybode who isn’t obsessed with the graphic novel would find this to be a very interesting movie.  

I DIDN’T like the soundtrack. (Soweidy did.)  Clearly little or no time was spent on it.  I could’ve done better from my own iPod.  ”Hey, I know, let’s play “The Times They Are-A-Changin” over a sixties montage….and how about “Hallelujah” during a love scene?   Nobody’s EVER done that before!”  

But in the end, I did enjoy seeing the comic book “come to life,” as it were.   It wasn’t a great movie, but it wasn’t completely awful, either.   Snyder failed, but he tried hard, and that’s worth something.