Watchmen: A Review

I can remember my high school junior year. Our English teacher had assigned us a paper to be written on the book of our choice. While we were trying to think creatively of titles that might pass muster with her critical eye, a friend and I decided to make a pitch for the Watchmen. This was the early-90’s, just a few years after the book’s serial publication, and already among those in the know it had obtained a certain reverential quality and was being held out as a real example of literature in the somewhat discounted genre of graphic novels (that is the respectable term for comic books). We brought her a copy, made our best pitch, and waited for her review. She was less than thrilled, and we proceeded to do our papers on a different book.

Well, time vindicated us, but oddly enough, I’m not sure the movie would be key evidence for that vindication. Watchmen over the years eventually obtained respected status in many literary circles. Long considered unfilmable, it took 300’s Zack Snyder to finally see the project come to bear. And, consistent with 300, Snyder delivers a film that is surprisingly faithful to its source material. Yet it may be this faithfulness that keeps the film from rising to the level obtained so recently within its genre. It is certainly an engaging and faithful adaptation of a marvelous work, but fails to achieve greatness in its own right.

The story that the film is trying to capture is a tough one. For the uninitiated, Watchmen posits an alternate mid-80’s in which costumed heroes, both ordinary and super, have been around for decades. While the vigilantes of the early years were entirely human, things changed with the arrival of the first legitimate superhero, Dr. Manhattan, in the late-50’s. His appearance changed world history, such that this alternate ’85 has Nixon still as president, serving a 5th term after bringing an end to the VIetnam War. The costumes eventually were outlawed, and so these heroes have retired, except for two who work directly with the government: that same Dr. Manhattan and the Comedian, a tough fighter who has been doing the government’s dirty work for decades. It is the Comedian that we get introduced to in the early moments, as we see his brutal murder at the hands of a mystery man.

The Comedian’s death begins an investigation by Rorshach, a costumed hero who previously worked with him and now continues his vigilante work in an underground capacity. As the investigation deepens, he reforges relationships with old heroes, as he becomes increasingly convinced that the Comedian’s death is part of a larger conspiracy against these heroes. These introductions become occasions for flashbacks through the lives of these heroes, whom we quickly discover are less than heroic. We see their failings, and for the most part the basic tragedy that their lives have become.

As if this story wasn’t enough, this is all happening with the end of the world looming in the background. The Soviet Union is threatening to invade Afghanistan, and it is made clear that their decision to do that could easily provoke a nuclear response from the United States. As the investigation deepens, so does the looming political crises, all the while leaving us to wonder if there may be some connection between the two.

Fortunately, the film’s best acting comes from some of my favorite characters. At the top of the list is Rorschach, who is brilliantly played by Jackie Earle Haley. Rorschach maintains a bleak view of the world, and everything we see throughout the film leaves us nothing to counter his conclusions. It is his voice, both literally through his narration, and figuratively that dominates the film. We see him dealing with the darkest parts of human nature, with no sense of hope that things might get better, yet somehow willing himself to fight.

In contrast to Rorschach, we have Dr. Manhattan, voiced by Billy Crudup. Dr. Manhattan was once a scientist with passion and hope, but years of living as this odd creature that he has become has left him a shell of a man. Crudup brings a low-key distance that captures well the oddities of this man. The more we see his distance and disconnect from reality, the more we feel the horror that the world has literally placed their future in his hands.

For fans, I’ll say that the end of the film, a significant alteration from the book, felt contrived and was one of the two biggest mistakes in the film (the other is with the lighting in the opening shots). I look forward to talking to folks that haven’t read the book to get their impression. I won’t comment on the details as I simply can’t without giving away major plot points, but I will say that I don’t think they arrived where they needed to arrive.

Despite this, the film largely brought to bear the powerful themes of the original work. Where it stretched away from the material, it experienced mixed results. Snyder, like in 300, made intense use of music to drive home emotional moments, and some worked better than others. Where the film tried to ramp up the blockbuster action aspects of the story, it felt like it was pushing against its own noir roots. The film probably needed more Sin City and less Dark Knight, and where it went towards the former, it generally worked fine.

This film had a vicious lawsuit that delayed its release for about a year, and leaving the film I felt that it really benefitted from that delay. Thematically, Alan Moore, the writer who disclaims connection to this and all of the films that stem from his works, explicitly stated that Watchmen was a criticism of “Reaganism” and the conservative global politics of the US and the UK in the ’80’s. As the book explores the fears of the Cold War, it runs the risk of being an interesting relic of a time that is passed.

Indeed, if the film were released a year ago, I think it might have diminished the story’s impact. After all, a year ago the message from media was virtually univocal when it came to politics: Bush bad, War bad, Need change. To put out this film in that environment could easily have seemed to echo the same message.

A year later, maybe there’s a chance we could see it differently. If Watchmen is nothing more than a criticism of cold war politics or conservative politicians, than it is simply too small a work to still be talked about 20+ years later. But the question that it asks, “Who watches the Watchmen?” has less to do with any particular brand of politics than it does our propensity to place our faith in heroes who are incapable of rescuing us. Watchmen is quite explicitly a godless universe, and the bleakness and hopelessness of its characters is at times directly linked to their acceptance that there is no God and their wrestling to understand how hope might endure in light of that tragic fact. The answer the story sees is that we place our hope, foolishly, in politicians who cannot provide the hope that we need.

In 2001, I was told I just needed to trust Bush and he would make things better. In 2008, I was told I shouldn’t have trusted him, because he didn’t make things better. It is as if he joins a long line of politicians of varying quality (I won’t put his dad and Winston Churchill in the same camp, but here they are) who endure summary rejection by people after their war is over. But instead of learning the lessons, I’m told now to place my faith in another politician. And here I thought I needed Jesus. Turns out I just need Obama.

The cautionary note of Watchmen, a note that still comes through in the film, is that our hope in these figures is simply misplaced, whether that hope deals with war, foreign affairs, or a bum economy. That we keep coming back to that well and appointing one messiah after another strikes me as our collective act of Sysyphus expressing or deep hope that simply will not be satisfied in the way that we keep looking for it. Instead, we need to look elsewhere, or as C.S. Lewis mused: “If I discover within myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”