The "Watchmen" Movie: Too Reverent
You sometimes hear people say they liked the book better than the movie. But what if the book ... is a COMIC book? A movie out next Friday poses THAT very question for our David Edelstein:
One name you won't find in the credits of "Watchmen" is Alan Moore, the cranky Englishman who wrote the landmark comic. He hates film adaptations and had nothing to do with it; he even gave his rights money to illustrator Dave Gibbons.
That's integrity. Or perversity.
It's too bad he has no faith in cinema, because Moore enlarged our view of comics; in works like the classic "Batman: The Killing Joke," he was among the first to show the dark side of our fantasies of omnipotence, to give superheroes morbid compulsions and crises of belief.
But who can blame him for hating 2003's film of "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," which took his cheeky deconstruction of Victorian heroism and sanitized and computer-generated the life out of it.
Moore is an anarchist and loathes authoritarian government, so 2005's "V for Vendetta" was especially personal. I found the movie's subversive imagery a blast, but Moore thought his work was politically neutered.
As a guest on "The Simpsons," a cartoon Moore parodied his curmudgeonly image, only it's not much of a parody. He says he really feels that way.
Moore says he won't see "Watchmen," which is ironic: It's the most reverent adaptation of a graphic novel ever.
Zack Snyder must have directed on his knees. The aging outlaw superheroes who reunite to solve the murder of one of their own appear to have leapt from the page; the twisty story is unchanged.
What's fun is the range of superheroes, from the caped idealist to the paramilitary sociopath to the curvy femme. Melancholy mutant Dr. Manhattan is the one superhero the U.S. government has use for - as a weapon.
The comic was conceived at the height of the doomsday scenarios of the 1980s, and its ending - which the movie keeps - now seems both insanely pessimistic and insanely naïve. The comic gets by with that ending - just - but the movie doesn't. So much is lost in translation.
Reading "Watchmen" makes you delirious: Your eyes dart around while your brain labors to synthesize the data. Moore pushes their medium to its limit, but the filmmakers work so literal-mindedly to reproduce the comic that the movie has no spirit of its own.
Disregarded or worshipped, Moore can't win! This is the kind of reverence that kills what it seeks to preserve. "Watchmen" is embalmed.