Another day, another blockbuster preview. This time around, Zack Snyder was in town to talk about what is, hands down, the most eagerly (or nervously, depending on your point of view) awaited comic book adaptation of all time.
I’ve been pretty sceptical about Watchmen in the past. I agree with the sentiment of Neil Gaiman when we asked him about the adaptation a few months back. He said: “I’ve never had any interest in seeing a Watchmen movie. Not even back when they were talking about Arnold Schwarzenegger painted blue.”
It’s not that I think it will be bad per se, it’s more a case of what’s the point? What could you possibly do in a Watchmen movie – what idea could you present, what character angle could you explore, what political nuance could you imply – that Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons haven’t already enshrined in a more perfect format? The genius of Watchmen is its integrity: it’s the perfect meeting of form and content. Unlike so many modern comics, which are built from the ground up with the movie version in mind (we’re looking at you here, Mark Millar), Watchmen was conceived, designed and brilliantly executed as a graphic novel and nothing more.
For sure, when you adapt any form of literature, you’re going to go through the same process of omission, elision, updates or just a general watering down, but there’s a crucial difference when it comes to the comic. For books and plays – whether Shakespeare, Dickens, or just Alex Garland – there is space for interpretation because the act of reading is fundamentally imaginative. Every time you look at words on a page, you bring your own cast, crew, cuts and camera placement along with you. With comics, for all that the spaces between the panels are steeped in history, mythology, context and, yes, imagination, the visual aspect of the story is already pre-decided – pre-recorded if you like – and so doesn’t allow for the same kind of personal interpretation. It’s simply not necessary and, if you’re being really purist about it, maybe even not right.
Alan Moore certainly seems to think so. His name is the one glaring omission from Watchmen the movie as he refused to let them use it, leaving the only credit to co-creator Dave Gibbons.
All these thoughts were in the aether, as was the memory of some so-so production stills, as we sat down to listen to Zack Snyder introduce three clips from the film, running to a total of something like 25 minutes of footage.
What was most striking about the tone Snyder adopted was how completely different it was to JJ Abrams’ Star Trek preview on Tuesday. Where the message from Abrams was all about a break with the past, for Snyder, the watchword for Watchmen is ‘fidelity’.
In a convincing speech, he revealed that he only took the job because the draft that Warners presented to him was so bad – set in the present day, no Cold War, no Nixon and, wait for it, PG13… – that he felt if he failed to take it on and bring it back into a more credible Watchmen universe, then Warners would go ahead with a less passionate director and ruin the film before it had even had a chance to succeed. In the post-event Q&A, he also gave short shrift to the notion that this was an unfilmable book (“I just pointed the camera at an actor and shot it”) to begin with.
Most strikingly, in a solipsistic and brilliantly arrogant way, he characterised the last 10 years of pop culture and superhero film history as being part of a larger journey to this point and this film. Audiences are sufficiently savvy about the way superhero films operate that the ground has been prepared for Watchmen to come in and “shake some shit up”, as Snyder put it. Watchmen, he said, was all about making the extraordinary work in the realm of the ordinary, the messy, the mundane and the political – in the real world. As he explained it: why doesn’t Superman ever just round up the world leaders and threaten to kill them if they don’t stop dicking around? His film, he promised, will be all about taking the moral ambiguity of the superhero paradigm to its logical conclusion.
If his introduction was impressive, though, the footage he showed was, honestly, mixed. The three scenes comprised the opening sequence that sees an aged Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) attacked in his home by a masked intruder, before segueing into the opening credits. After that came a quieter moment detailing the backstory of Dr Manhattan (Billy Crudup) with a sense of quiet and graceful poetry; before finally there was a straight up action scene in which Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson) and Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman) kick some ass while busting Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley channelling Christian Bale) out of jail (“superhero foreplay”, said Snyder, only half-joking; it looks like the film isn’t going to shy away from the sexual issues inherent in anybody who dresses up in fetish gear and assumes a ‘secret identity’).
The overarching mood of Watchmen is darkness. And if that’s making you roll your eyes already, then don’t be fooled. This isn’t the family friendly ‘darkness’ of, say, The Revenge of the Sith, but an actual sense that the boundaries of acceptable behaviour in comic book movies have been fundamentally shifted. When Dr Manhattan goes to war, he doesn’t fuck around. Rorschach doesn’t just arrest people, he brutalises them. And again, it’s not like in Batman, where much of the real horror is implied – it’s all there on screen in ugly, occasionally horrific Technicolor.
What remains in doubt, however, is the question of integrity. Not in the sense of whether Snyder has been faithful to Moore’s source material (he genuinely seems to have gone to great lengths to get this right – apparently everyone on set had the novel open at all times, and often they’d just shoot dialogue direct from it) but in the sense that Watchmen is such a peculiarly slanted world – our world, but not; real but imaginary – that unless the spell can be held for every second of the two-and-a-half-hour running time (with a three hours plus DVD to follow) the whole edifice will crumble. Watchmen must be relentlessly – recklessly – unconventional, but some of the scenes here, especially the fight scenes, were anything but, using over familiar choreography and typically over-produced sound effects to imply larger-than-life action.
One thing that was faultless, though, in fact bordering on total genius, was the credits sequence, scored to Dylan’s The Times They Are A’Changing, that captures four decades of Watchmen history with stunning economy and glorious skill. It really is a mesmerising five or six minute sequence that introduces you to the tone of the film – violent, uncompromising and often genuinely shocking. Several of the images here had me doing an actual, comical intake of breath. Amazing, amazing stuff, which I don’t want to spoil too much, but I’ll be back for the full show just to watch this again. Dave Gibbons, also present for the Q&A, agreed that this was some of his favourite material.
This preview certainly hasn’t allayed my doubts – the special effects weren’t all finished, but Dr Manhattan fitted unevenly into the world around him, and some of the individual moments seemed mishandled. But it has planted a seed of doubt: Snyder might just (maybe, perhaps) have pulled it off.
One last thing, mad respect to the foreign journalist who told Snyder that he was pleased with the footage because he wasn’t sure that it would be any good “after what you did to 300.” You, sir, are a credit to the profession.
