Who Watches the Watchmen…Film?
I wasn’t intending to update this thing so soon1, but there’s something that’s been bugging me and as some of you out there in mystical internet land know if something “bugs” me I’m generally being overly subtle in my wording and I’m actually on the verge of bubbling over like a cauldron of lava-hot excrement.
I’ve only just got around to watching the Watchmen live-action film adaptation on DVD. It was okay. Nothing special, I didn’t want to watch it again afterwards and, likewise, I didn’t feel the overpowering urge to set fire to the DVD and launch it out my window at that bastard tomcat that keeps picking on my cat Snowy. After reflecting on it for the whole of five minutes, however, I need someone to answer me a question.
Just who the hell was the Watchmen film aimed at? Could someone please tell me? I honestly want to know. It wasn’t aimed at casual movie-goers, that’s for sure – my folks want to watch it and that’s going to be bloody awkward when the amateur softcore sex scene comes on, if they get that far given that I suspect that the plot is so smart that it can book a plane and fly directly over my parent’s heads (and yes I realise I just strained the bollocks off of that metaphor). The film certainly wasn’t aimed at fans or people who read the book, either, since there were just enough plot alterations and scenes cut from the source material to annoy the hell out of them, and I’m not just referring to the Giant Squid of DoomTM, there are many subtle changes that build-up to annoy the informed viewer.
Who does this leave, then? I reckon we’re looking at a very niché audience of twenty and thirty-somethings who were probably expecting another The Dark Knight, and this just goes to further annoy the nerds like myself as it means that we then have to explain to our twenty-something friends who haven’t read the book that no, there wasn’t actually a group called “the Watchmen”, the heroes of the story didn’t have superpowers (Dr. Manhattan aside), and yes the Comedian discovering the villain’s plan is indeed a huge plot hole caused by removing a large element of the source material.
I agree with Alan Moore, the guy who wrote the graphic novel and wanted his name nowhere near the film – Watchmen is unfilmable. Okay, Zack Snyder2 filmed the unfilmable. It just made for a very ineffectual movie. If the Watchmen movie experience was a colour, it would be beige.
The major flaw was this: films spoon-feed the audience. Through camera angles, tropes, music and an actor’s body language, films constantly tell the audience how they are supposed to be feeling right now. The guy in the black velvet suit with the twirly moustache is the bad guy because black is inherently dark and reflects his intentions, and he’s just tied a woman to the tracks, which we know is a bad thing because the camera is focusing on her tortured screams and the music has just taken on a sinister vibe via violins and saxophones – that sort of thing. Sometimes films can admittedly transcend from being a linear medium, and you can get morality tales that allow the viewer to make their own decisions about what they are watching without important points being launched into their face, and these films generally go down well at Cannes and occasionally get noticed in big-league award ceremonies (but not very often).
This is also the realm of comic books. A really good comic writer can evoke the reader into thinking outside of the constraints of the plot and can take their time in setting up scenes and character profiles. This is what Alan Moore did in Watchmen, and he did it by filling the tale with nuances and asides that all mattered come the end. Zack Snyder came through with some shears and cut all those bits out, removing the character of the tale in the process3.
I’ve rambled far away from my point, so I’ll try and cut this short now. I suppose I’m just annoyed since the Max Payne film was tremendously awful to the point where I can clench my fists with unbridled rage until they bleed, and I just want to know why. What is the bloody point, movie people? Who the hell are you making these films for? I suspect I already know the answer already, in that you’re making it for yourselves in order to extract cash from the vast (and generally entertainment-hungry) movie-going public, but I’d like to keep one shred of hope in the idea that you do actually have some sort of target audience you’re aiming towards as you maim a wonderful concept into your overrated medium.
If you really want to experience Watchmen properly but are dead against reading (which I find hard to believe since you’re reading this wall of text right here), try The Motion Comic instead. It’s literally the comic book animated scene-for-scene with a narrator reading the story, and is well worth the investment if you want to know what all the hubbub of the book is.
…Or you could just watch Saturday Morning Watchmen, which was the best Saturday morning cartoon ever.
- This was originally posted to my journal on deviantArt, and when I first created this blog I just copy/pasted a load of old journals into it so there would be something to display. ↩
- If that is his real name, it sounds more like a teenage protagonist from a Saturday morning cartoon. ↩
- I was going to make an analogy to a poodle with all its legs cut off and a bright red bow on its head – you can dress it up all you want but the damn thing is still a mutilated cripple that’s a shell of its former self, but that’s probably a bit excessive. I didn’t think the Watchmen film was that bad ↩
Post by Sean Patrick Payne+ | August 19, 2009 at 7:16 am | Films | No comment
Tags: Alan Moore, comic book movie adaptations, comics, films, Watchmen