Some Of Us Are Actually Robots. - Review: Watching The Watchmen.

The film itself was a big disappointment for me. I saw the first 20 minutes at WonderCon last week, and my apprehension washed away with every minute they showed. Snyder had convinced me he really cared about preserving everything about the book, and would go to great lengths to achieve his goal.

Then I saw the film. Spoilers follow, so only read ahead if you've seen it or don't care.

So, as the film went on, I started to realize that Snyder was imbuing a great amount of personality on the work. The nuances in visuals, the extraneous fight scenes and wholesale violence--these things didn't bother me greatly at first, but as they became more common, I began to doubt the film's ability to concisely adapt Moore's ideas to the screen, in spite of Snyder's fervor for doing just that. But I stuck with it; I wanted to reserve judgment until they had actually done something irreparable to the story that would change the way the meaning is seen by movie goers. This is the important part--you can replicate every panel in the book to perfect accuracy, but if you impress too much upon the words, the visuals, or the tone of the film, you corrupt it's core message, the part that's most important. You can, in fact, unapologeticly change and remove things from the story so long as you retain it's primary goal.

So, we get to the sex scene. This is the part that convinced me that Snyder had decided that this was "his movie" and that he was going to do it his way, maybe with regard to Moore's intentions, but certainly not without a large signature on the film. What was one panel in the book became three minutes of outright fucking. Different positions, steamy closeups...it was basically the sex scene from 300 in Archimedes, the Owl Ship.

It trudges along, mixing faithfulness with Snyder's personality at whims. The jail break scene was good, and done in the "just right" way of the opening, but then we get this stilted scene of Rorschach and Nite Owl reconfirming their friendship...before, somehow, figuring out that Veidt was behind it and traveling, without any kind of direction or prior knowledge, to the high tech superfortress in the arctic. At this point, it has devolved into a purely action movie structure. A stereotypical one, at that. Pretty pictures, nothing else. No intelligence, no subtlety, all pointless exposition and hero bad ass-ery.

So they get to the fortress, and the inexplicably German Ozymandias is hanging out, having set off his doomsday. This is followed by about a dozen or so mini-fight scenes, all of which are stilted and non sequitur. More fighting for the sake of fighting, that's all.

But this is the greatest failing of the film. The scene in the book, Ozymandias' great speech, his master plan, his savior of humanity mentality is flattened into "I blew up teh world" PUNCH KICK PUNCH. The monologue to end comic book monologues is completely removed and replaced with punch up after punch up, to a point where we get tired of seeing superheroes punch things. This is the kind of monologue people would write papers about--classic literary monologue, amazingly grandios exposition while still remaining pertinant and unobtrusive to the story (much of the added dialogue was counter to this).

So we get a movie that keeps near-pointless dialogue completely intact, but removes one of the lynch pins of the story for sake of a few extra fights at the end.

But, when it comes down to it, is the ending in tact? Is the point of the book retained in spite of the schizophrenic nature of the faithfulness of the movie? In short, not really. You see, instead of a transdimensional squid monster, Ozymandias pins it all on Dr. Manhattan.

But...wait, the whole point is that there is a universally external threat that is not from within us, but from some other, alien place that can only be feared. This brings the world together to create peace in the face of a universally common enemy.

Now, I get that Dr. Manhattan's character arc is one of moving away from humanity at no small rate, but he's still an American Citizen, and not only that--but a highly publicized public figure in the United States. He is quintessentially American, and being such, if he attacks every country in the world, whose fault is it? America's, GODDAMNIT!

"You didn't reign in your ubermensch and now millions are dead!"

So, essentially, Ozymandias fosters the worldwide hate of America, and for what purpose? He's staved off Armageddon to have America become a world villain, or at best a ne'er do well of a nation, thereby reshaping the political landscape not for the better, but for the homeostatic nature of politics. Same story, different names. He doesn't save anyone.

More importantly, he is not portrayed even slightly objectively. You are told he is the villain, and there's no two ways about it. The objectivity of the end is completely removed. You only have the "Big Powers" of the group agreeing that mass death is better than Armageddon, and your non-hero Rorschach is martyred for it. He is not killed because of his staunch Objectivism and sociopathic nature, he is killed for trying to do the right thing. It's even punctuated with a classic "NNNNNOOOOOOOOOO!!", an old action movie trope that is more of a joke than anything.

We don't even get the most important punctuation: "Nothing ever ends." It is intensely important that Ozymandias end up with ambiguity in his heart for what he did, because even though he knew it was wrong, the lesson is that nothing you do will ever end the cycles, you can only do what is possible to prolong their duration. Nothing ever ends.

Don't get me wrong, there were things I liked. Rorschach was badass, if misrepresented slightly. I loved the way Snyder handled the opening sequence, condensing fifty years of superhero history into one, poignant, informative sequence. It worked perfectly. But that's about all that worked perfectly. The scene changes were jumpy and jarring, and the acting was poor at best.

Let's see...Laurie knowing that The Comedian is her dad is retarded and only serves to yell it at the audience in fear they won't get it on their own. Silk Spectre and Nite Owl remaining heroes at the end is bewildering...the age of heroes is supposed to be done after this event. More is wrong, but it's not important.

Um...I guess I went off here. Sorry, but it had to be said, or I was going to go insane. I'm more disappointed than anything, really. Snyder had, for so long, said that it was going to be 100% faithful, and he was so self centered that he forced himself into the movie, shooting himself all inside it, to drip out the end and onto our collective, offended faces.

*cough*.