Who watches Watchmen?

The long-awaited comic book adaptation, Watchmen, finally hit screens this weekend. I don't remember when I first read the graphic novel, but that is an experience no one should miss for its density, brilliance and humanity. The book is often cited as the greatest comic of all time; I'm not enough of a buff to dispute or validate this, but if there is a better one, I'd sure love to read it.

Watchmen has a long, troubled history in Hollywood; its own author, Alan Moore, along with many readers, claimed it could not be filmed (and Moore famously removed his name from this version). Zack Snyder has proved them wrong, in the literal sense at least. I was never one of those readers who thought it could not be filmed, but I have long thought it somewhat redundant to do so. After all, there is no rule that says every single comic must become a movie. Watchmen, in particular, was perfectly conceived as a comic book - some comics, just like some popular novels, seem to be written almost in anticipation of the eventual film adaptation, but not this one. The greatest aspects of the book are those that would also make it most difficult to adapt: its dense, multi-threaded storyline, its long list of characters both in the 1985 "present" of the story and in its rich historical digressions, its philosophical musings, its cynicism and melancholy.

Nevertheless, I was pleased to lower my expectations and disregard the predictable critical onslaught of the last few days as the reviews began to appear, because I just wanted to see this great story on the big screen. For awhile, that was more than enough to satisfy me, right through the second act. A great story that you love, no matter how flawed the adaptation might turn out to be, can often be great fun to watch just to see the filmmakers' take on it. In this case, Snyder gets quite a bit right - for a fan of the graphic novel like myself, here it is, come to life.

I don't think the film could possibly make a lick of sense, though, to anyone who has not read the book - which ought to be enough to classify the enterprise as an expensive failure. This was a foregone conclusion, however; unless it had been made as a mini-series, there's no way the adaptation could have been both faithful and comprehensible to the uninitiated. I think that most of the critics who slammed the film have not read the book, which is not unreasonable, though I believe it contributed heavily to the level of snark (sounds like some people didn't get invited to join the club).

In my viewing, last night at 10:30 in the historic theater at the Alameda, I thought the biggest problem for the film was perhaps one that could never have been reconciled. The story is set in an alternate-universe 1985 in which Nixon is still president and the U.S. won the Vietnam war, thanks to the unstoppable powers of the giant, blue, atomic god-man, Dr. Manhattan. All of this is not nearly as difficult to swallow as our own knowledge of the radical changes the American perspective has undergone since the mid-1980s, when the comic was written. A couple of years later the Berlin Wall would fall, along with Soviet communism, leaving the U.S. as the world's lone superpower in a world where the notion of a superpower was already passe, robbing the story of its true backdrop, the spectre of nuclear annihilation in a quick and dirty World War III. Add in the optimistic boom of the 1990s and the further erosion of the nation-state as the seat of supreme power, borne out in the chaos of 9/11 and the Bush years, and you get a social, political, technological and psychological context almost unrecognizable to anyone under 30, and only a subject of misty nostalgia to anyone under 40. It's too late for Watchmen.

The narrative backdrop, therefore, acts as a kind of distancing mechanism, that is, the audience must make a number of intellectual steps prior to reaching a point of engagement with the film. We must accept the strange datedness of the material as a time capsule from the past that might yet have some relevance to our world today just as we must strive to avoid being distracted by the typically naked Dr. Manhattan's penis (and blue balls). There are also some missteps in the musical choices in the film and a generally on-the-nose literalism with those choices that takes us right out of the stream of things. These distractions mean Watchmen sometimes seems more like a museum piece than a movie, difficult to get swept up in.

A number of critics have mentioned the brutal, graphic violence as a serious flaw - but here's where they've got things really wrong. I think it might be a generational thing, or a problem for people without exposure to the comic book, but the violent action, especially around the Rorshach character, is one of the best elements here, often suddenly yanking the viewer back into an emotional engagement with the story after we've been allowed to drift away. Why we have come to accept the bloodless, inconsequential PG13 violence so common in our popular films I don't know, but the shocking brutality of man's inhumanity to man is very much a theme of the book and the film, even when both glory in it. This is one of the things Snyder does best.

Like I said, I was engaged enough with watching the great comic book unspool onscreen (not a glowing endorsement, mind you, but an acknowledgment of very low expectations somewhat exceeded) through the second act, but the final quarter of the film was interminable, muddled, cluttered and confusing. The truly unfilmable comic book ending (because it would have required too much explanation and might very well have looked super-ridiculous) was changed into drab monologuing, more slow-mo chopsocky, massive genocide and dumb rationalizing. Up to that point, though, there were some moments of real beauty, making me nostalgic for the real deal, the masterpiece that started all of this.