Because this is a fairly long rant which I doubt very many of you will want to read, I’ll summarise

Watchmen was thoroughly enjoyable, but I don’t know how much of that was because I loved the graphic novel. The film comes across as a literal transition from page to screen, and as a result it’s stylistically perfect but emotionally lacking.

Damn. I just said my whole post in two lines. Why didn’t I just do that in the first place? Not much point in your reading the whole thing now…!

Despite every attempt on my part not to build up Watchmen before I got to see it, despite every attempt to avoid the hype, I was excited.

I read and re-read Watchmen several times when I was in school and college, I discovered Watchmen along with The Dark Knight, V for Vendetta and other ‘serious’ graphic novels. Watchmen is an important cultural item for me, not just because of what the book itself represents but also because of the impressionable time I read it.

So it has to be said that the four stars associated with this review may be somewhat inflated due to the fact that ever since I saw the film of Watchmen in my head as I read the graphic novel I have been curious to see it on the screen.

Zack Snyder brings Watchmen to the screen in what seems to me to be an incredibly faithful way. In doing so, he raises some very interesting questions about the nature of comic book adaptations.

My biggest fear in going to Watchmen was that it would seem slight. Watchmen seemed incredibly deep reading it as a teenager, but then comparably Watchmen was always going to seem deep. It didn’t have a huge amount of competition in it’s genre, and a good portion of it’s competition was by the same author.

What seems deep in a comic often translates to the screen as incredibly shallow and two dimensional. The imagination can imbue a comic that has any vague notions of grandeur with great depth, but a film version will often be found wanting because the screenwriter, the director and the actors must all work very hard to fill in every gap with a loyal and faithful additions to create the same illusion of reality.

Often this necessary padding is at odds with either the original author’s vision, or the original audience’s imagination resulting in a poor reaction from fans of the original comic.

What Snyder has done is to slavishly turn the comic into one which moves on the screen. It’s an incredible feat, and perhaps Snyder hopes that the expectations of depth we have from a film would be circumvented by the fact that this is not truly a film as we have come to expect them, but a moving graphic novel.

However, if this is the case, it’s not fully successful. Watchmen seems lacking in emotion and depth of feeling. Not a criticism I feel could be levelled at the graphic novel. Much of the emotional responses I felt while watching the film were evoked by the memory of the comic and not by the film itself.

There were two exceptions to this, where I felt it was not only my memory of the comic was at play, but also the performance I was watching. Both were contributed by Rorschach, played brilliantly by Jackie Earle Haley (Almost all of the performances were wonderfully faithful to the graphic novel, but as a big Rorschach fan I have to hand it to Jackie Earle Haley – his voice grated on my momentarily at the start but all in all he embodied Rorschach precisely as the character existed in my mind. He gets my comic book to film adaptation Oscar ).

The problem with this emotional detachment, due to the faithful but two dimensional spectacle playing out on the big screen, is that the story of Watchmen revolves around fear. Fear which in the graphic novel is palpable and real, but which is absent in the film. In order for Watchmen to have remain truly and fully faithful to the graphic novel we need to feel the pervasive fear which informs every panel of the graphic novel, but in order for this to happen we need the film to reflect the real world in a more meaningful way.

This is all in the way of observation rather than criticism, because Watchmen as directed by Snyder is an incredible achievement as is. He has put Watchmen the graphic novel on the big screen. Perhaps it will be up to someone else, in the future to make a film version of it. One which can depart from the graphic novel in style, but not in spirit and thus deliver the emotional punch that was missing from this version.

Further reading:

Justin Kownacki makes some very good points in his article called ‘Ten things people don’t seem to get about the watchmen‘.

Update: Just found another great article on Watchmen the film. The author goes into great detail and dissects the film and it’s faults expertly. In doing so I think he more ably explains why the film is flawed. Interestingly, in a kind of a way he also goes into the issue that I have above:

Taking Watchmen out of its native medium was a risky decision artistically, and no attempt has been made to adapt its central conceits, so perfectly fitted to that medium, to its new celluloid context. This slavish imitation critics are referring to is a hoax: Watchmen, the movie, if it did what it already does quite a bit better, would be like one of those child prodigies who can play Mozart flawlessly. The notes are right, but the music isn’t there. There’s just something to be said for the appreciation and the discernment that can only come with experience, and that’s the quality most obviously missing from Snyder’s adaptation.