Watchmen - A Scribbled Film Review

2:37p.m., Fri 27 Feb 2009

I was gonna write a review of Watchmen which I saw two nights ago, but my thoughts on the film hadn't quite crystalized. Then I had a quick email exchange with Ash. It went like this:

Ash = "How was it? I m kinda excited about it..."

Gareth = "
Have you read the book? I think this makes a difference...
You know how when Jackson made the LOTR films and he *HAD* to stay loyal to the source. Well it’s kinda like that.
I haven’t read LOTR, nor do I want to. I thought those movies were over-long and over-boring. I'm yawning just thinking about them.
I fear that ppl who haven’t read Watchmen might get bored. It’s very loyal to the source material, perhaps to a fault. This is the long way round of saying. It’s over long and gets boring.
BUT! Most of it looks fantastic. And the guy that plays Rorshach is ace. Rorshach is easily the most interesting character and Night Owl is easily the most likeable character. All the Rorshach/Night Owl bits are good. All the Dr. Manhattan bits are boring too. And the baddie (no spoilers here!) is boring.
It feels like the plot’s the least interesting, or important, part of the movie."

I scribbled this email (can you scribble an email? what I mean is a rush-typed it straight out of my brainium) and it came out as a pithy sum of my thoughts on the movie.

For the uninitiated. The Watchmen are a collection of superheros. The graphic novel tried to set their stories in the REAL world, rather than the hyperreal world that superheros normally inhabit. So the comics explored what kind of people really would become superheros and what it must be like to be both invincible and immortal. So, we have Rorshach, the murderous psychotic offspring of a prostitute with confused morals and a taste for violence. Dr. Manhattan is the result of a nuclear accident and is so powerful that he loses faith and interest in humanity. Night Owl is the gadget-obsessed Batman-lite who retires when the public turn on the super hero community.

As a series of character studies Watchmen is unparalleled. The rise and fall of the superhero is paralleled with contemporary history - so the changing mood of the vigilantes and attitudes towards them are affected by Vietnam and the Cold War.

All this is good. And you can imagine how this can exploit the episodic nature of the comic book. As a film though, it fails to work. The long-term story arc in the comic book was less crucial to its success. For a film to have such a weak overall arc is usually catastrophic. The movie struggles to build any kind of momentum or tension and, as a result, the final reveal of the villain and the extent of his evil plot just feels underwhelming.

Watchmen may have been better served as a series of films, the individual characters certainly have the depth to carry a dedicated plotline. As it is, a 2hr 40 minute rendition of the comic series isn't as rewarding as these characters deserve.