Watchmen

March 6th, 2009 (3-6-9, get it?) is the date when this years films actually take off. Alan Moore's epic satirical, socio-political opus hits the big screen after more than ten years of production hell. Even with the preview out the gate, the legal mishaps with FOX made it seem like we'd never really get to see Watchmen come to life the way it was really meant to. I could go on and on about all the inconsistencies from the graphic novel and all the bits and pieces they left out and switched around, but when it comes down to it, I really did like Watchmen. Quite a bit. Was it perfect? No. Was it worth watching? Of course.

It's been a long hard road from the graphic novel to the big screen for Watchmen. Being passed between studios. Getting the green light only to get almost immediately yanked from the "in production" list. In a way, Robert Rodriguez's almost too faithful (and not in a bad way) adaptation of Frank Miller's Sin City that paved the way for Watchmen's success as a film. Director Zack Snyder's previous engagement (Frank Miller's Spartan swords and sandals epic 300) proved that even without a decent narrative behind it, his visual style was well suited for the comic book movie medium. The adaptation is ultimately faithful to the source material, the only exceptions being the exclusion of a vast amount of subsidiary character material (Rorschach's therapist is a footnote in the film and the newsstand owner and the comic book reading kid are only seen once with no dialog and never expounded upon) and some of the narrative structure at the end is rearranged, I would assume to add more cinematic and dramatic weight (even though the understated subtlety was what sold the finale graphic novel, in my opinion.) Also (spoiler alert) no giant squid monster...

Visually, the movie was gorgeous. With only a slight redesign to some of the outfits (especially Night Owl II's) the characters were spot on, though Patrick Wilson (Hard Candy) could've afforded to add a few more pounds of pudge to his Dan Dreiberg, the rest of his look as the sullen ex-masked vigilante was great. Possibly the most challenging part of Watchmen to sell on the big screen is, of course, Doctor Manhattan. There are only so many ways you can handle a blue, muscle-bound demi-god (one of the earliest casting rumors from the 90's was Arnold Schwarzenegger and thank god that one never happened,) and Snyder and crew opted for a full CG-MoCap paired with the voice of a soft spoken Billy Crudup. His gentle tone conveys both a sense of all-knowing bewilderment and omniscient curiosity. Casting win on that one, for sure.

Really, my only other grievance with the film was Snyder's penchant for this whole slo-mo thing. Don't get me wrong, it has it's time and place (namely in 1999 when The Matrix came out, but that's just me.) For a film that ran over normal run-time expectations outside a rebooted Batman sequel, for the amount of material that was partitioned out of the story, the action sure took it's sweet time. If they'd run them all in real time, I may have been more impressed with it and there might've been an extra 15 minutes or so for those peripheral characters I was talking about a few paragraphs back. While I'm on the subject of the slo-mo... the sex scene was a bit much. It reminded me almost shot for shot of the sex scene between King Leonidas (Gerard Butler) and Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey) in 300. While the scene is a necessary step for the characters in question, what ensued was borderline Cinemax late night material.

All in all, this is the best adaptation of Watchmen that we'll get this decade. They've taken a graphic novel that was described as "unfilmable" (and honestly, some parts of it ARE just that) and kept it as faithful to the source material as a Hollywood superhero vehicle would allow and kudos to Zack Snyder for that one. Then again, there's always the inevitable (and already announced) director's cut sporting an additional 35 minutes and the Tales of the Black Freighter/Under the Hood DVDs on the way.