Watchmen vs W.

People are being way weirder and more obsessive towards Watchmen than they have other comic book movies. I suppose that’s because Watchmen was a limited series, and tells a self-contained story. The characters are all original, and never appeared anywhere else. Whereas Batman has been around for decades and has been interpreted by dozens of writers and artists, Watchmen has, to date, only one artist and only one writer making any kind of contribution.  In other words, if you’re making The Dark Knight, you can invent the Batpod and kill Bruce Wayne’s girlfriend, and move the Batcave to a high-rise, and no one cares, because a. All those things are cool, and b. the next time we see Batman, more things will have changed, not only in the movies, but in the comics. Because it’s a pretty fluid universe, it’s much easier to adapt than Watchmen. 

Although…there’s still a way to adapt Watchmen, right? You have to get a really good screenwriter, someone who understands that a movie and a comic book aren’t the same thing. It also has to be, unfortunately, someone unafraid of the malicious, whining fanboys on the internet. No one’s afraid of them (cough, us, cough) in life, but on the internet, they’re in charge. Zach Snyder, who directed 300 as a fun, if overly dependent on CGI, tribute to his violence fetish, has taken on the task of adapting Watchmen, and he’s succumbed to the bullies on the internet, mostly. The times he’s allowed himself some freedom are the best of the film, even though they’re the ones that deviate from the source material. Odd, that. The poster says “From the visionary director”. Aside from the beginning and ending of Watchmen, you’ll be hard pressed to find evidence of anyone’s vision besides the ones who created the comic in the first place.

Watchmen opens with a vicious murder (from the comic) and a montage of the history of super-heroes in an alternate version of the United States (not in the comic). Around WWII, super-heroes were viewed as celebrities and patriots, and showed up at all the iconic moments of history. The most prominent ones were members of the Minute Men, who wear awesome Golden Age costumes and fight crime for the good ole U.S. of A. They have their detractors though. Heroes are arrested, put in asylums, murdered, and forced into retirement. 

And from then on, until roughly the last fifteen or twenty minutes (of nearly three hours of movie), everything else is straight from the comic. Oh, there’s some artistic license here and there; Watchmen the movie is way bloodier (almost laughably so in certain scenes) than its comic predecessor, and an extended love scene is one of the silliest I’ve ever seen (and I’ve seen the following: Color of Night, Basic Instinct 2, Showgirls, Cinemax in the 1990s, Body of Evidence and Wild Things.). But mainly it’s just like the comic, with varying degrees of success.

A second group of heroes emerged, calling themselves the Watchmen. A few, like Nite Owl and Silk Spectre, were carrying on traditions. Others, like Rorschach and the Comedian, had been around for a while. And then there’s Ozymandias and Dr. Manhattan, two heroes new to the scene, each more gifted and powerful than the other heroes. Ozymandias (Matthew Goode, in a terrible wig) is supposedly the smartest man in the world, and obviously also one of the richest. Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup, glowing in the dark and not always having his lips sync with the audio) is a being of energy, having lost his human form in a nuclear accident. Dr. Manhattan is the most powerful being on Earth (and Mars as well), able to see his past and future simultaneously, teleport himself or others, grow to huge heights, duplicate himself, explode people by looking at them, and not need underwear. His girlfriend is the Silk Spectre (Malin Ackerman, also in a terrible wig), who has no powers but lots of mommy and daddy issues, the former of which she places on her actual mommy, and the latter she places on every single man in the movie. The performances in Watchmen are mostly good, with Patrick Wilson as Nite Owl and Jackie Earl Hayley as Rorschach being the stand-outs. Hayley plays Rorschach like Travis Bickel reading The Maltese Falcon. He narrates many of his scenes in a hard-boiled deadpan and gives the film its only sense of danger or fun. When Rorschach is unmasked and sent to prison, Hayley takes ownership of the movie and never gives it back. Between this and Little Children, Hayley’s comeback is every bit as impressive as Mickey Rourke’s. 

Visually, Watchmen impresses…mostly. Nite Owl’s ship is one of my favorite hero transports in the movies (and further proof that Nite Owl isn’t the Watchmen’s Batman, but their Blue Beetle). And despite the random lip-sync problem, Dr. Manhattan has more heft and presence than most CGI characters (Billy Crudup was on set, and then replaced, Gollum-style, for the actual movie). The early scenes with the Minute Men have a vintage newsreel feel that I love. I’d like to have seen more of those characters, in that time. Of course, that would have meant deviating from the comic, and in this case, unfortunately, that’s sacrilege. 

The plot, which involves not only a love triangle, but also a murder mystery, government conspiracies, super-hero-team infighting, nuclear war, the media, generation gaps, corporate espionage, patriotism and dysfunction of both the family and sexual type. That’s a lot to cram into one movie, and honestly, it could have used a little more streamlining.  Without cutting any characters or changing the overall tone of the original book, Snyder could have cut something here or there, not to make Watchmen shorter, but to give it more of a focus. The original comic was spread over twelve months. You had time to pour over each one, to read them again if you wanted or needed to. The movie zips through each plot point, and honestly, if I didn’t have the comic in mind as reference (luckily I re-read it just a few weeks ago), I’d have been lost. If Mr. Snyder hadn’t been so loyal to the fanboys, he might have one heck of a movie on his hands.

Oddly, the same fate befell Oliver Stone, a director I didn’t think was afraid of anything. W. was so controversial that it made magazine covers before it even started filming. Just the story of the casting started the gossip and criticism. W. is the only movie ever made about a sitting President. And from the director who made JFK, Nixon and Natural Born Killers, it was bound to be a doozy, right? Not exactly.

Like Snyder, Stone was just too damn faithful to the source material. The leaps of imagination and speculation he took so flagrantly, and entertainingly, in JFK just aren’t in W. at all. Scenes play out almost exactly as they must have in life. Meetings, dinners, speeches; they’re all here, and not a one feels overly elaborate or satirized. Why not? Come on, make W. scandalous. That’s what I’m here for. Make it a black comedy, make it an indictment. You’re Oliver Stone! Shock me. But no. W. is pedestrian, inoffensive and predictable. In his quest for accuracy, Stone has removed any reason anyone would have to make or see a movie about George W. Bush. It’s the same story as the news, only eight years later and we have to pay? Uh, awesome.

But, there is a silver lining in the film’s casting. Josh Brolin and Elizabeth Banks play the titular W and his bride, Laura, respectively. Brolin, as weird as it sounded at first, is ideal. His W. is a spoiled fratboy, but also vulnerable, charming and prone to flights of cunning (he walks his cabinet out onto his ranch, where it’s obvious he’s the only one comfortable, for a meeting). And Banks sheds light on Laura, making her far more beguiling and interesting than the real article has ever appeared. The rest of the casting is sort of awful, even if the actors have done stellar work elsewhere. Thandie Newton plays Condoleeza Rice like she’s in an SNL sketch, and Jeffrey Wright is just flat-out wrong for Colin Powell, but part of me thinks that was a tactic on Stone’s part. Maybe if we see these politicians as facades, there’s a lesson to be learned about the pop-culturalization of our government? Or maybe it’s just bad casting.

One thing’s for sure. Even when adapting someone else’s work, there’s room for the imaginations of a screenwriter and director. Without that possibility, we’d never have gotten The Dark Knight at the movies, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Battlestar Galactica on television. Here’s hoping the next time Zach Snyder and Oliver Stone tackle figures important to the American public, they just forget about us for a bit and interpret the subjects on their own terms. Now that could be visionary.

Watchmen: B

W.: C-