Is it a spoiler to say that instead of Ahab getting the whale, the whale gets him? That Hamlet dies in the last act? That “Rosebud” is a sled? In short, is it a spoiler to reveal details about a book that’s been in print for 23 years?While you ponder that, let’s talk about lazy reviewing.It’s lazy reviewing when the length of a movie becomes a major point. At 241 minutes, Watchmen has been described as “arse numbing” (it was a British reviewer), but that’s only three minutes longer than Gone with the Wind, and of the many criticisms of that movie, its length has never been one. (And… the Watchmen DVD will be even longer.)Another lazy criticism is “the film sticks too closely to the source material.” R-i-g-h-t. Why go with what people liked originally about the source material when you can change it? (Remember how they groused about the ending of the Dimi Moore Scarlet Letter, when Hester and the reverend ride off into the sunset? You can’t have it both ways.)
Watchmen comes to theaters this week. Based on the graphic novel Time magazine selected as one of the 100 best written works of the 20th century, it was long said to be “unfilmable” because of its dense, multi-layered plot, frequent flashbacks and atypical storytelling. (One chapter, "Fearful Symmetry," was presented like a palindrome, the last panel like the first, the second like the next-to-last, and so on.) Director Terry Gilliam (Brazil, 12 Monkeys) felt it could only be done as a miniseries, and he was probably right. But screenwriters David Hayter (X-Men, X-2) and Alex Tse did a good job of to cramming 420 pages of comics into 2.75 hours of film. (I’ve always felt the original was the perfect storyboard for any film adaptation.) And their ending, I think, actually works better than the original’s.That said…Watchmen drags in places, and it’s not just the length of the movie. Some of the dialogue is clunky and some things are downright cheesy, like one of the characters discharging a flame thrower at “the moment” while making love, or like when Rorschach is killed, the blood spatter forms… a Rorschach pattern. (Yes, he dies, he’s been dead since 1987, deal with it.)Watchmen's author, Alan Moore (whose name does not appear in the credits) said the book would never work as a film because there were things done in the original that could only be done in a comic, and he was right. If you haven’t read the graphic novel, you’ll probably enjoy the movie more than someone who has. If you have read the novel, you’ll probably like the movie, but I don’t think you’re gonna love it.
You need to be a member of Blacksciencefictionsociety to add comments!
Replies