In as much as a comic…err…graphic novel…can, Watchman is a story that kicks the living shit out of you. It claws at your brain with the persistence and innocence of a faucet-drip, innocuous in its individual moments, disastrous when allowed to run its course. Seething with rage both political and aesthetic, the story grips you like the best of novels, it expounds upon its own alphabet of symbols and iconic moments with some unimaginably fresh characters, and it leaves you breathless—if, let’s face it, a bit depressed. The testament to its true craft, however, is how utterly enjoyable it makes the experience of going through the ringer. But whether or not you’ve read this genre-defining classic, you probably have some inkling of the scope of this movie’s pedigree, it’s built-in fandom, and—because of all this—its cinematic expectation. But whose expectation? And what does it matter? No, Watchmen the film is not Watchmen the graphic novel. But more than the sad failing that moviemakers see “successful intellectual property” and think “great film,” however, is the resounding fact that one hundred and sixty-seven minute movie simply isn’t that much fun.
Let's start with the good. Jackie Earle Haley is perfect as Rorschach, a fact made even more impressive considering that Rorschach is the character I was most certain director Zach Synder would get disastrously wrong. Also, to my surprise, I enjoyed the handling of Dr. Manhatten – the ghostly de facto god and the only conventionally superpowered hero in the film. To be honest I never quite imagined him that way but it worked almost entirely (I could have done with a bit less flaccid-blue-penis, perhaps): he was surreal, transcendently powerful, and still so stubbornly human. Although I didn’t appreciate Nite Owl’s boy scout-schtick, I understand the compromises they made to his character (who really wants to go to the movies and see a middle aged, flabby, impotent guy in tights?) One character I couldn’t accept or swallow was the Silk Spectre, who stalked around town ridiculously and yodeled so woodenly that her performance almost single-handedly exhumes and then mercilessly rapes the peaceful corpse of Konstantine Stanislavky himself. On the other hand, The Comedian, what we see of him, is fine, played with a certain gritty depth (the “Wolverine” of this particular pack) that makes sense there. Overall, although there isn’t enough of any of them (particularly Rorschach) I do admit that at least the characters approach the general vicinity of the corresponding comic-book namesakes in a vaguely authentic way.
But, otherwise, the greatness of the comic is never quite captured. Like its saucy characterization of Richard Nixon, the filmed Watchman shares certain gross geometric properties with the real deal—here, for sure, entire panels are ripped from the graphic novel for weird, filmic tableaus. But, lo and behold, something doesn’t quite click. The graphic novel (I want to call it comic so badly, it just seems like lying) holds together with its own murky sense of doom; the possibility of death lurks not merely in the story’s apocalyptic finale but in its paroxysms of intense violence, like when Rorschach breaks a man’s fingers, or a Vietnamese farmer explodes into tachyons, or half of New York City is destroyed. But what made the story great is that these moments float like icebergs in seas of political theorizing, narrative tangent, unrushed exposition, and regurgitated Nietzsche. These were not boring sections, for sure, but heady ones where nigh a punch is thrown. Here, the violence is maintained (often, outright copied), and so is the headiness that deepens the story’s so-called “literary value.” But instead of delivering these moments of violence and intensity with the craft of irony or suspense or restraint, Synder’s bad-assery is thrown in our faces with the jolt of Dolby’s most cacophonous atonalities: the whip-of-wind around a thrown punch (WHOOOOOOASSSSH!) or the hollow crispness of a “back” being “broken” ( CRUNNNNCH!). This sort of onomotopeona actually does well to describe Watchman as a whole, a movie that sort-of sounds like the real thing but is synaesthetically within the wrong medium, celluloid when it should be paper, the written THWACK when the thwack of the actual thrown punch stings all the more. In the end, for all its huff and puff and THWACKS, the filmed Watchmen simply doesn’t kick your ass enough.
