Watchmen (2009, Zack Snyder) (Patreon)

50/100

Read the comics as they were originally released (starting around issue #7, as I recall; a friend insisted that I borrow his copies); still own my first-edition trade paperback (older than you unless you're at least 34!); sought out Sam Hamm's hilariously bad screenplay for the proposed Gilliam version the moment that I arrived at NYU (second script I read, first being The Hudsucker Proxy which was then 18 months away from release). When Dreiberg, in the film, asks Rorschach if he wants that can of beans heated up, and Rorschach replies "Fine like this," I knew immediately that his preceding words "No need" had been cut, even though it'd been a good 15 years or more since I'd last read Watchmen. I know the material pretty darn well is what I'm saying.

As I always suspected, it's fundamentally unadaptable, though Snyder and his writers deserve credit for somehow cramming everything that's absolutely critical (plotwise) into three hours. Giant alien squid elision aside, this is about as superficially faithful to Moore and Gibbons' vision as a single "normal"-length film intended for a wide audience could possibly be. And that vision is strong enough to ensure that fidelity = basic competence. Many individual scenes play reasonably well, so long as you're willing to ignore the structural mayhem that inevitably results from collating a dozen into one. Were Watchmen to be made today—pretend for a moment that Lindelof's sequel/spinoff/whatever (which I quite liked) doesn't exist—it would almost certainly be a 12-episode miniseries, preserving the sustained focus on various backstories. As is, Snyder has to rush through a lot of that stuff, which results in some discordant oddities, e.g. the lack of any rational explanation for Rorschach's mask. (Doctor Manhattan's supposed to be the only "super" element. The other heroes are all deliberately quite ordinary, so it's actually important that the mask's constantly shifting pattern not come across like magic.) 

Length ultimately isn't the issue, though. Neither is casting, though most of the performances are at best serviceable and Goode actively stinks up the joint. (To be fair, any Ozymandias who's not 45-year-old Robert Redford was gonna be a disappointment. But it takes a special degree of ineptitude to completely botch "I [did] it 35 minutes ago.") I can even kinda roll with Snyder's usual variable-speed action bullshit, and only sighed a little when his few non-squid-related divergences from the text all just happened to add gratuitous gore. The "Hallelujah" Coitus is mortifying but whatever. No, Watchmen doesn't really work as a movie—couldn't really work as a movie—because Moore devised everything about it to play out in panels. The work's original form is intrinsic, not incidental. That's true of most literature, and it's especially true of this comic series turned graphic novel. Depicting the events of "Fearful Symmetry" (issue #5) without the actual visual symmetry doesn't render them meaningless, exactly, but it absolutely neuters their impact to some degree. Lines that function beautifully as the conclusion of a "chapter" (in the paperback version), like "What do you expect? The Comedian is dead," just kinda sit there onscreen, having been stripped of their blunt finality. I'd always been certain that it's impossible to make a live-action (or even an animated) Rorschach seem anything but ridiculous, and that's now confirmed; Haley actually fares pretty well once he's unmasked, but no actor could summon a voice that achieves even a fraction of the mental chill that readers derive from the character's distressed speech bubbles. (Can't say I ever really got used to hearing Doctor Manhattan sound like the MasterCard spokesman, either. Bold, counterintuitive choice, but super weird.) Rorschach's journal entries clang as voiceover narration; so does Doctor Manhattan's achronological interior monologue. This is a story expressly designed to be told in a procession of still images, making not just superlative but arguably revolutionary use of the comic-book medium. Any attempt to set it in motion was inherently misguided. 

(But I still got goosebumps when Lindelof delivered the squid.)