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How to Watch Watchmen
Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
Watchmen, which hits theaters on Friday, is poised to be this year's biggest superhero blockbuster. Based on a legendary comic book series and starring some of Hollywood's hottest leading men (Billy Crudup, Patrick Wilson), the film version almost didn't take flight. Douglas Wolk breaks down everything you need to know about it.
Sometimes a film comes along that is so highly anticipated that everyone wants to get their hands on it—Watchmen is one of those films. Comic obsessives everywhere have been waiting for the adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' landmark 1987 graphic novel for over two decades, and until January, it seemed they would have to keep waiting. Warner Brothers and Fox engaged in a dirty public battle over distribution rights to the film, a tooth-and-nail court brawl that was finally settled at the last minute. Warner will get to release the film solo, but had to pay Fox between $5-10 million in development fees (FOX originally optioned the book in the late '80s). Still, fans got a real release date—March 6—and have already started sleeping outside box offices to nab tickets.
The conventional wisdom, for many years, was that Watchmen was unfilmable.
If you’re not one of those people who spent hours in the comic book store as a child (or even now), the fervor may not make much sense…yet. So here is a brief guide to everything you need to know about one of 2009’s biggest films—it’s at least enough to get you through a nerdy cocktail party unscathed.
SO WHAT'S THE BIG DEAL WITH WATCHMEN?
When Watchmen was initially serialized as a comic book in 1986-87, it turned the clichés of mainstream comics inside out, and irrevocably changed the landscape for superhero stories that came after it. Dark, gripping and immaculately constructed, it's been a fixture on the graphic-novel bestseller list ever since, and it was the sole graphic novel on Time magazine's list of the 100 greatest modern novels. New comics allude to it all the time; fans can quote its dialogue by heart, and still debate its characters' morality and hash out its tiniest subtleties. Its dramatization of the clash between utopianism and geopolitical catastrophe becomes more potent with every passing year. And it made the British writer Alan Moore arguably the biggest name in English-language comics.
WAIT—WHO IS THIS ALAN MOORE GUY?
Moore wrote (and Dave Gibbons drew) the graphic novel on which Watchmen is based; several of his other graphic novels, including V for Vendetta and From Hell, have also been adapted into movies. But Moore's name appears nowhere in Watchmen-the-movie's publicity materials: following a lawsuit over the atrocious 2003 adaptation of his and Kevin O'Neill's terrific graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, he has famously refused to have anything to do with Hollywood, and says he'd "rather not know" about the Watchmen movie. He isn't even accepting royalties from it.
SO WHAT EXACTLY IS WATCHMEN ABOUT?
On a pure plot level, it's pretty straightforward: as the world teeters on the precipice of an apocalyptic war, an amoral superhero known as the Comedian has been murdered, and his old associates come out of retirement to find out who killed him. Thematically, though, there's a lot of other stuff going on. Watchmen-the-book is a story about nuclear terror: one of its recurring images, a clock's hands set at a few minutes to midnight, alludes to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Doomsday Clock. Moore's story is also an elaborate extended metaphor for the history of the comics medium and the bizarrely limited but powerfully resonant genre, superhero adventures, that's come to dominate it. And it's about the intricate clockwork of human existence, and the interconnectedness of the systems that make up the world. The more you think about Watchmen, in fact, the tougher it is to summarize.
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Jackie Earle Haley will make this a must see for us!
The sheer awesomeness of the plot, character development, and underlying motives for everything that happens should make this a must-see for everyone.
As gushing and great a summary as this, the original work is so awesome (literal meaning) that the movie can at best only be a great movie. This director has a knack for seamlessly adapting comic visuals to the screen based on 300 and the Watchman trailers. The real irony here is that few comics are better suited to serve as a shot for shot storyboard for a film, so Alan Moore may actually get what he has wanted in the past, a solid and meaningful adaptation of his work. It might not have the additional flavor an artist like Terry Gilliam would have brought to the project, but that might be the best thing for the comic geeks (like myself) that have waited so long for this, or (like myself) didn't necessarily want to see it done at all.
Hi Doug, love the fact that Warners finally paid Fox for their IP rights but as a nerd must take small issue when you write "Warner will get to release the film solo..." since Warners only has domestic (US and Canada) distribution rights, Paramount is distributing it internationally.
Thank you, Mr. Wolk, for your adept contextualization of the Watchmen as a bona fide pop culture phenomenon. If some interest in graphic print media comes from lucid commentary such as this, so much the better.
This will either be the greatest comic-based movie of all time, or the worst - one bad enough to kill the genre for a very long time. When I first heard the Watchmen movie was finally happening, I was very against the idea. As a full-blown comic nerd I've seen enough of the characters I've loved destroyed by cinema in the past several years.
This is the single greatest work in comics history. We comic fans hold it very dear. If they ruin this, if the story conforms to the Hollywood norm and abandons what makes it great to have a wider audience appeal, I guarentee you will see the largest riot involving people wearing Starfleet unifroms, Stormtrooper helmets, and homemade Wolverine suits in history.
http://thefishshow.com/Archive/WM%20UM.htm
I am working on a theory that Alan Moore's WATCHMEN is actually a veiled account of the deformation of society that occurred in the wake of the JFK assassination and cover-up, occasioned in Moore by the Lennon shooting in 1980.
You may know that Moore's book was extremely prescient about 9-11, I believe because it is a description of the impact on society of Deep Events.
I can offer no further empirical proof of this at this time than these two points:
- in 'From Hell', Moore's first work written in the wake of Watchmen, he depicts Jack the Ripper as a high-ranking Mason performing black magic rituals in order to affect the course of History.
I believe that Watchmen is essentially the same story.
- Every male character in Watchmen, depicted after the year 1963, wears Beatle Boots, a fad footwear popular with British youth in 1963 because of their association with John Lennon, et al.
It's like he's kicking you in the face with it on almost every page.
Still, I think what I HAVE found raises the questions that make this a valid hypothesis.
EXCERPT:
"Adrian Veidt created a completely new, highly complex and sensitive form of life from the brain of a (presumably murdered) psychic,
then killed it, turning its corpse into history's most gargantuan effigy of Moloch, and dumped the corpses of several million people at its feet as a sacrifice .
In Veidt's New World, United and Pacified, Communism will be a thing of the past,
and there will be no obstacle to Veidt's huge interlocking network of corporations from acquiring control of the entire World's territory and resources.
And Adrian Veidt will rule the Earth.
Just like Alexander."
AvengingWorld, you're kind of the personification of the reason that many aficionados of graphic novels are regarded as marginal at best, or outright freaks at worst. Kindly refrain from opining, in future, about how prophetic a COMIC BOOK is.
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@ Spasticula: What a droll straw man you have constructed. Men throughout history have had such hobbies. In terms of comics, good ones are no worse than the Illiad, Ulysses, Macbeth, or Raymond Chandler novels; the worse are no worse than Aeschylus, limericks, Zane Grey, and pulp novels. Action figures are no more trifling than coin collections, books collections, taxidermy collections, or other pursuits of a bygone era. I fail to see teeth in your observation unless you are saying that humans have always had needs for these inane distractions (yes, women have them too cf. Sex & the City, fashion, shoes, etc.).
No, the problem with this country is a bunch of prattling dolts that pretend to know what a good argument is, but when the light of reason is cast upon them, they evaporate like dew in the sunlight. Either that or unbridled corporatism, take your pick ;)
The graphic novel was super mediocre and over-rated in the 80s. the film is almost three hours long! SO I would expect the worst. (see V for Vendetta)... fortuneately, the directors previous film "300" was a so-bad-its-good ... SO maybe the film will be an amusing attrocity.
After 2 undeniably terrible adaptations of Moore's work, and the empty headed nothingness of Snyder's ridiculously silly homo-erotic gore fest "300" I'm not holding my breath for anything that remotely comes close to Moore's original vision... that said, I'll probably rent it when the DVD comes out.
"every image and every line of dialogue serves a narrative and structural function"--oh, get over it. It's a mediocre graphic novel at best, buoyed by 20 years of flabby mama's boys spanking off on their own faces about it.
GM is under $2 bucks, citibank under a dollar and the studios are spewing millions. I wish somebody WOULD drop a giant fucking squid with a beak right on the premiere of this fucking turd.
Who watches the watchmen? your mama.
Exactly Colonel, who wants enjoyable diversions, especially ones that have the potential to be both enjoyable and thought provoking?
Living in South Korea, I was able to see the movie before it came out in other parts of the world.
The good points of the movie were that I didn't fall asleep, and the movie actually made me want to read the book. Other than that, I have to say that the movie was two hours and forty minutes of torture. Yes things looked cool, but there were some poor choices in the frequent use of sound track from the eighties. Though individually those songs are great, and would be great in that particular order on an ipod, the lack of charecter development in favor for tiring, stylistic camera swoops set to 99 red balloons (among others) really frustrated this viewer.
Things seem to improve as the movie climaxes, but by the time the charecters dawn their full outfits they start to look like cheap action figures and any seriousnes to what they say is disolved by expectations that Rorshak's narrative voice may at any moment cut through the melodrama to mention that the "artie battlecopter," is sold seperately.
I recomend seeing it, just to see how bad it is, and to test one's endurence. The film requires patience.
I am mystified by the plaudits heaped on Watchmen (the graphic novel). It was clever compared to the average comic book available at the time it was published; now it is hopelessly dated. The art form has moved on. I suspect that the people who find Watchmen brilliant haven't read more substantial literature - and so they think there is something uniquely insightful in Moore's adolescent nihilism and self-justification.
From reviews and the testimony of samgyupsal, above, I gather that the film is a debacle. What a waste of talent (not Snyder, but the hundreds of people who worked on the production) and money.
As for myself, I still might have gone to see it if it were shorter, but at 2 hours plus, that is more of an investment than I'm willing to make.
@ SantafromtheNorth: Spasticula is right, and you missed the point. Women and girls have hobbies, but they don't go around pretending that "shoes" (stereotype much?) have cosmic significance. It takes a special kind of egotism - perfected by fanboys - to proclaim that what is at best a few hours of diversion is instead High Art.
Thank you.
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