The Watchmen - A Review

by Henry Vogel


Note: This review appears in place of Writing for Comic Books, Part Five. Part Five will appear next Monday.

People have been attempting to bring the Watchmen to the silver screen for more than 20 years. Something like half a dozen different directors have been attached to the project at one time or another. Scripts have been written and rewritten. Rumors have the original cast including Robin Williams, Jamie Lee Curtis, Gary Busey and Kevin Costner. When the movie finally hit the big screen, it had been in production longer than its director and six of the seven main actors had been in the film industry.

Was it worth the wait? In a word, yes.

In true comic book fashion, the movie opens with a fight scene. An aging, cigar-chomping man is just settling in to watch TV when his door is kicked in. The old guy puts up one heck of a fight, punching through a marble wall, getting back up after falls that would have broken the back of a normal man and finally being thrown through a window to fall hundreds of feet to his death. The credits haven't even rolled yet and I have a problem with the movie.

I'm not giving anything away by telling you that the old guy is a former masked hero, the Comedian. Throughout both the graphic novel and the movie, the term used is always "masked hero." There's a good reason for it. Much of the appeal of the story is that these are normal people; well-trained normal people in top physical condition, but still normal people. They cannot punch through marble walls. If they tried, the only thing breaking would be their hand. Any fall that would break a normal man's back would break their backs as well.

So I have a problem with the opening fight scene. It paints the two men as superhuman when they're not. As the credits start to roll, I have to wonder if director Zack Snyder could have totally missed something so basic. Over the next two hours and forty minutes, he shows me that my concern is unfounded. Zack Snyder knows what made the Watchmen work as a graphic novel. He makes it work as a movie, too.

The movie leaves out parts of the graphic novel. The sidewalk newsstand, an important location in the graphic novel, is hardly shown in the movie. The Black Freighter comic book within a comic book is not part of the movie at all. (Word is it will be included in the DVD release of the movie.) Not having these dark scenes, along with several other minor scenes, does not detract from the already quite dark story.

The story mixes current events with flashbacks that set the scene for the beginning of the movie. In flashbacks, we meet the Comedian and learn he is a ruthless, amoral man who does most of his work for the government. In the opening scene, you wonder what he has done to be savagely beaten and thrown through a window to fall to his death. By the end of the movie, you wonder why someone didn't do it earlier.

As the movie progresses, we discover none of the major characters, these former masked heroes, are particularly heroic. Rorschach is truly a psychopath, albeit one with a rigid code of honor. Nite Owl lacks self-confidence except when he's wearing his costume. Silk Spectre was only a masked heroine because her mother, the original Silk Spectre, expected her to be one. Dr. Manhattan, the only true super-powered character, is so powerful he is forgetting what it is to be human. Only Ozymandias, popularly considered the smartest man in the world, is successful in life.

This collection of anti-heroes is part of the attraction the Watchmen has. When the graphic novel was first released, anti-heroes were not that common in comic books. Oh, you had your heroes with bad attitudes, such as Wolverine, but you could always count on them to "do the right thing" when the chips were down. Even Batman, then-recently cast as a bit of an anti-hero in Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, followed the unwritten rules of the masked hero. So the Watchmen took comic book readers places they had not been before. And the movie takes us to those same places, even if anti-heroes aren't particularly new in movies.

Spoiler warning: If you don't want to know what happens in the movie, skip down to "End Spoiler" and read from there.

For those who haven't read the graphic novel, it is set during Richard Nixon's fifth term as president. Nixon maintained power easily after he sent Dr. Manhattan to win the war in Vietnam. He does this in a matter of weeks. As a result of a backlash against masked heroes, Congress passed the Keene Act in 1977, outlawing masked vigilantes, making an exception for government operatives Dr. Manhattan and the Comedian. In the mid-eighties, with the world on the brink of nuclear war, someone begins attacking masked heroes. We already know the Comedian plunged to his death after losing a fight to an unknown assailant. Sudden, surprising revelations concerning Dr. Manhattan cause him to exile himself to Mars. An assassin tries to shoot the former Ozymandias, who revealed himself to be multi-billionaire Adrian Veidt when he hung up his mask. Already suspicious of a conspiracy, Rorschach tries to draw his former partner, the Nite Owl, back into costume to help find the person behind the attacks. Rorschach fails to draw the Nite Owl out and is soon framed for the murder of a former masked villain, captured, and placed in prison.

If it sounds confusing so far, I'm not surprised. This build-up is complex and I'm just touching on the surface.

The scenes while Rorschach is in prison are some of the most disturbing in the movie. They also provide the movie's best line. Many of the men in the prison were put there by Rorschach and every one of them wants to be the one to take Rorschach down now that he's locked in with them. The first prisoner to make an attempt on Rorschach's life gets a face full of boiling oil. As the guards rush to subdue and remove Rorschach, he yells to the stunned prisoners, "You think I'm locked up in here with you. I'm not. You're locked in here with me!" Prophetic lines, as later, more-violent scenes demonstrate.

While all of this is going on, we find out what it really takes to get the Nite Owl back in costume. It turns out to be impotence, which is about as blatant an indication of Nite Owl's "regular" life as you can have. Nite Owl can only find the confidence necessary to have sex with the woman of his dreams, the current Silk Spectre, by first indulging in some adolescent male power fantasies. His confidence restored by getting some action both in and out of his costume, he convinces Silk Spectre to help him break Rorschach out of prison so they can all figure out who's targeting former masked heroes.

This brings us to the end game where Rorschach and Nite Owl discover who is behind the conspiracy and go to confront him. This is also where the movie takes its single greatest divergence from the graphic novel. And this is where I have to issue a second spoiler warning to those who have read the graphic novel and haven't seen the movie yet. Skip to the spoiler ending if you don't want to know the changes in advance.

In the end, all of our remaining major characters converge on Antarctica, where Adrian Veidt has built his very own fortress of solitude. Because, yes, Veidt is behind the attacks. Veidt does this to protect his secret project: a project that will result in the deaths of millions of people yet bring about world peace in the end.

The graphic novel featured a genetically designed "alien" which was teleported to the center of New York city. The teleportation kills the "alien" but not before it releases a deadly psychic wave that wipes out half the city. Horrified by this great, new threat, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. immediately resolve all of their differences, combining their vast resources to prepare for the next alien attack.

I have always thought this was far and away the weakest part of the story; so weak that it undermines the rest of the story. As we've seen since 9/11, the world's sympathy is a very fickle thing indeed. While the original ending could result in lessened hostility, I can't imagine it would last more than a few years. Unless Veidt kept killing millions of people by producing fake aliens and teleporting them into cities, horror would lose its edge, memories would fade, normalcy would return. I also can't believe that scientists wouldn't eventually be able to figure out the "alien" should have been stamped "Made on Earth."

Because of the involved backstory required for the teleporting alien, Snyder went a different route. In the movie, Veidt works closely with Dr. Manhattan to produce energy generators capable of replicating Dr. Manhattan's vast power. Veidt plants four of these generators in cities around the globe, including New York and Moscow. When they detonate, killing even more millions than the teleporting alien, energy readings lead everyone to believe Dr. Manhattan attacked all four cities. The U.S. and the U.S.S.R. start serious peace negotiations and everything is going to be wonderful. But we never really get told why this works. Do the great powers of the earth believe Dr. Manhattan blasted four cities as a warning against what he'll do if the great powers don't straighten up? That's the best guess I've got. And it does beat the teleporting fake alien approach all the Hell, if you ask me.

End Spoiler

As with 300, Zack Snyder utilized computerized special effects to successfully bring to life a story Terry Gilliam considered unfilmable. Snyder's cast strongly resembles the characters as originally drawn, which should please the fans of the graphic novel. In fact, once past the opening fight scene, I only had one big issue with the Syder's presentation, and that issue was Dr. Manhattan's voice. In the graphic novel, Dr. Manhattan had special speech balloons, double lined and colored blue, giving readers the impression that Dr. Manhattan had a strong voice. In the movie, Dr. Manhattan's voice was soft and slightly high-pitched. Nothing like the voice of a being of near godlike power.

As you can probably tell, I enjoyed the movie. I believe any fan of the graphic novel will enjoy it also. If you never read the graphic novel, it's a chancier call, but if the story intrigues you at all, I'd say give it a look.

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Henry Vogel is a former comic book writer who currently makes his living as a software tester and storyteller. He posts his writing, entirely fictional, at Tales and Telling. He's also one of the prime movers behind The Curse of the Were-Weasel. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.