image c/o Amazon.com
Last Friday, Allison and I went to see Watchmen. By all accounts, Zach Snyder’s version of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ much loved Comic is faithful to the material. It has all of the key characters, much of the dialogue, and treats the 1980’s cold war setting with the same level of care that an Ang Lee period movie treats Elizabethan Europe.
I was impressed. But not blown away.
When you go to a movie, you expect to see a work of vision by a director, writers, and actors that takes you somewhere you’ve never been before. The best movies do this.
Watchmen felt, in some ways, like looking at a well executed forgery of a Picasso. It gets the visuals right, but it doesn’t have the same feel. Part of this has to be editing. Knowing that the original cut of the movie was close to 40 minutes longer makes me think that a lot of subtext and emotion was left on the cutting room floor. Hopefully the DVD version fleshes some of this back out.
Watchmen as a movie made me think about Douglas Hofstadter’s book Le Ton Beau de Marot and how the nature of translating material from one language to another (or one medium to another in the case of the movie), fundamentally changes that material no matter how faithful the “translator” tries to be. Watchmen the Movie may be a translation of Watchmen the graphic novel, but it isn’t Watchmen the graphic novel, no matter how accurate it is. I’ve talked to a few people who saw the movie without any notion of what the graphic novel is about. Not surprisingly, they didn’t “get it”. On the other hand, almost every fan of the graphic novel liked it, but seemed to be a little bit let down. They applaud the effort while being underwhelmed at the result.
Is it possible that a translation, like Watchmen, can at once be too faithful and still not be accurate enough? Watchmen seems to show that this is true. If newcomers to the material don’t “get it” in it’s silver screen guise, then it becomes a visual spectacle but not a story. In an attempt to get every single detail correct, Snyder may have forgotten that the reason we see movies is to be transported somewhere. To be told a story.
3 Comments
I agree with the ‘translation’ comments. In many ways it may have been too faithful a translation, and in staying so close to the novel they lost some of the power and emotion of it. I’m hoping the DVD will be the directors cut and will also include the black freighter (integrated, and not stand-alone) and more details about ‘the new frontier’, which I think was a bit too left out and made the end odd to anyone unfamiliar with the novel.
We saw it Saturday and I think a lot of people in the theatre had no idea what they were about to see. I think on its own, without reading the novel the film makes enough sense and flows well, if you keep an open mind. The people who were disappointed were probably going in expecting some sort of batman or spiderman superhero movie, which is obviously not what watchmen is, and in many ways the entire point of it. I think that was lost on most people, which was pretty obvious as I overheard their comments as they left the theatre.
I think your assessment is correct.
The “The Times They Are A’Changin’” sequence literally caused me to choke up….but for the rest of the film I was a little in shock, and interested without really being engaged. And I felt like I didn’t have to be, because I wasn’t seeing anything too new.
The opening sequence was indeed brilliant.