10 years on, Watchmen remains a vital comic book… | Little White Lies

In Praise Of

10 years on, Watch­men remains a vital com­ic book adaptation

06 Mar 2019

Words by Hannah Strong

Muscular humanoid figures with glowing blue skin and closed eyes in a dark, moody setting.
Muscular humanoid figures with glowing blue skin and closed eyes in a dark, moody setting.
Zack Snyder’s ambi­tious and divi­sive take on Alan Moore’s graph­ic nov­el deserves a sec­ond look.

The world is a garbage fire in the most lit­er­al sense. At the time of writ­ing, cli­mate change is melt­ing the polar ice caps, bring­ing unsea­son­able warmth in the mid­dle of win­ter; Britain is career­ing towards a No Deal Brex­it; and Don­ald Trump bare­ly man­ages to go a day in the White House with­out hav­ing a tantrum. As such, nos­tal­gia is on the up and up, as we look to the past to try and make sense of our present.

Ten years ago, an upstart Hol­ly­wood direc­tor with a pen­chant for com­ic books made waves with a big screen adap­ta­tion of Alan Moore’s sup­pos­ed­ly unfilmable’ graph­ic nov­el Watch­men’. Nowa­days Zack Sny­der might be best known for his myth­i­cal Jus­tice League director’s cut and ill-judged CGI mous­tache removal, but his auda­cious, risk-tak­ing 2009 epic remains his great­est achievement.

When Watch­men’ was first pub­lished in 1986 by DC Comics, the film rights were swift­ly snapped up by 20th Cen­tu­ry Fox. A mar­ket for adult com­ic book adap­ta­tions was emerg­ing, hav­ing begun some­what inaus­pi­cious­ly with Ralph Bakshi’s Fritz the Cat back in 1974 (fea­tur­ing the immor­tal tagline, He’s X rat­ed and animated!’).

But Moore had always been opposed to adap­ta­tions of his work, ask­ing that his name be removed from the result­ing films, and famous­ly stat­ing, Most of my work from the 80s onwards was designed to be unfilmable.” Of course, that nev­er stopped stu­dios and film­mak­ers from try­ing, first with From Hell in 2001, then The League of Extra­or­di­nary Gen­tle­men two years lat­er, and again in 2005 with V for Vendet­ta.

Watch­men, the fourth Moore adap­ta­tion, arrived on screens after spend­ing 23 years in devel­op­ment hell, with Ter­ry Gilliam, Dar­ren Aronof­sky, Paul Green­grass and Tim Bur­ton all hav­ing been attached at var­i­ous stages. It’s a minor mir­a­cle we ever got to see the film at all.

Although not the first R‑rated super­hero movie, Watch­men was arguably the most risky up to that point. With a hefty bud­get, a whop­ping 162-minute run­time and a cast com­prised of job­bing bit-part actors and rel­a­tive unknowns, its release came at a time when super­hero movies were grow­ing in pop­u­lar­i­ty but still large­ly con­sid­ered the pre­serve of younger viewers.

Mar­vel had intro­duced the moviego­ing pub­lic to Iron Man the pre­vi­ous year, to both crit­i­cal and com­mer­cial acclaim, and Christo­pher Nolan’s The Dark Knight gar­nered eight Acad­e­my Award nom­i­na­tions, includ­ing a posthu­mous win for Heath Ledger – but Snyder’s film asked audi­ences to invest in some­thing more bizarre, from source mate­r­i­al large­ly unknown to those not already immersed in the world of com­ic books. Cou­pled with the film’s graph­ic vio­lence, explic­it ref­er­ences to sex­u­al assault, child abuse, nuclear war and geno­cide, it was a hard sell.

Man with beard in leather jacket reading a yellow book with raised finger.

Sny­der was an obvi­ous choice for direc­tor giv­en the suc­cess of his ear­li­er Frank Miller adap­ta­tion, 300, but giv­en the mul­ti­ple time­frame and set­ting span of Watch­men’, bring­ing togeth­er the nar­ra­tive arcs of six dis­tinct char­ac­ters was no mean feat. Addi­tion­al­ly, the com­plex­i­ty of said char­ac­ters, from the lit­er­al­ly and fig­u­ra­tive­ly blue Dr Man­hat­tan to homi­ci­dal abuse vic­tim Rorschach, required a cer­tain deft­ness. Stand-out per­for­mances from Jack­ie Ear­le Haley as Rorschach and Jef­frey Dean Mor­gan as The Come­di­an helped sell Snyder’s bom­bas­tic vision, but a spe­cial men­tion is due to Car­la Gugino’s effer­ves­cent charis­ma and aching fragili­ty as the orig­i­nal Silk Spectre.

Sim­i­lar­ly, Lar­ry Fong’s cin­e­matog­ra­phy and William Hoy’s edit­ing give the film a unique visu­al iden­ti­ty. Close-shot fight scenes are engag­ing because they aren’t over­laden with CGI, remind­ing us that the major­i­ty of the heroes’ in the sto­ry are all too human. The film’s stream­lined end­ing may have enraged the purists by strip­ping away some of the comics’ weird­ness, but it makes per­fect sense in the con­text of the film and helps to deliv­er a more com­plete narrative.

Films don’t have the ben­e­fit of a mul­ti-issue arc, and nuclear holo­caust is eas­i­er to explain in a rel­a­tive­ly tight run­time than a giant octo­pus alien inva­sion. This devi­a­tion also means Snyder’s Watch­men stands sep­a­rate from Moore’s work – not a shot-for-shot ren­der­ing, but a mar­riage between the art of com­ic books and the art of moviemaking.

In the decade since Watchmen’s release, Snyder’s gigs have got big­ger, but he’s failed to repli­cate the spec­ta­cle of his 2009 mag­num opus. Some­what baf­fling­ly, he fol­lowed up Watch­men with Leg­end of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole, an ani­mat­ed film about…owls. Then the round­ly-derid­ed Suck­er Punch, which sold bar­gain base­ment Girl Pow­er (but did at least gift us this musi­cal moment).

In Jus­tice League, Superman’s funer­al in the rain is set to a moody piano cov­er of Leonard Cohen’s Every­body Knows’, in a scene that bears a strik­ing resem­blance to the The Comedian’s lay­ing to rest in Watch­men, sound­tracked by Simon & Garfunkel’s The Sound of Silence’. There’s a sense of going through the motions in Snyder’s more recent out­put which feels con­spic­u­ous­ly at odds with the punk sen­si­bil­i­ty of Watch­men (as punk as a $140 mil­lion stu­dio film can be, anyway).

Per­haps this comes down to the need for com­ic book movies to adhere to a par­tic­u­lar for­mu­la – they’re no longer overt­ly polit­i­cal, and are invari­ably designed for mass-mar­ket appeal. But Watch­men intro­duced a gen­er­a­tion to the infi­nite pos­si­bil­i­ties of both com­ic books and com­ic book movies, and the day when Sny­der returns to his risk-tak­ing, rule-break­ing roots can’t come soon enough.

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