Film: Watchmen
Year: 2009
Rating: 4/5
Summary: Stylised and glossy, a faithful adaptation, but incoherent.
Watchmen is a comic book written by Alan Moore and drawn by Dave
Gibbons in the eighties. Twenty years later, it was finally adapted
into a movie. I'll try to briefly summarise whether you'll like the
film or not based on whether you've read the book or not.
If you've read the comic book, then the film adaptation of Watchmen
is slightly less camp and slightly more violent. Very little was
made up for the film, making it quite a faithful adaptation, but
some parts were told out of order, and a lot - mostly character
development and the unease of the people - was missed out from the
theatrical cut. Hopefully the full version, to be released on video,
rectifies most of the omissions. The only thing you really need to
know about the adaptation is this: if you liked the book, you will
probably like the film. If not, then not.
If you haven't read the book, then you're probably going to be
confused for most of the movie. A lot of things are shown that don't
make sense without knowledge of their context or backstory. For a
very minor example, there was an advert for Millennium near the end
of the film, which is pointless without reading the internal office
memo about the product, showing what its marketing says about the
mindset of the people and of one of the main characters. There are
many more prominent examples of things that make sense in the original
comic but don't in the film.
As the book was split up into twelve different chapters, each one
with its distinct tone and sometimes even its own narrator, it seems
curious that the film's director didn't keep the order of events
intact or make the chapter breaks more obvious. Simply fading to
black at the appropriate points would probably have gone a long way
to helping the film look like several coherent stories instead of
one big incoherent mess.
If you've read the comic, and you think it would be neat to see it
come to life, then you'll probably like this film. If you haven't
read the comic, it'll probably look like an incoherent mess, but a
fun incoherent mess nevertheless.
Several people have since told me that this film isn't incoherent. I've managed to get my non-Watchmen-reading partner to elaborate a bit: the filmmakers tried to condense twelve solid issues of plot and character development into a single film, and the result is the equivalent of skim reading the whole thing. It's so fast paced, it's too hard to identify with any of the characters because as soon as you start warming to them, you're whisked away to another story.