Watchmen

Until the last twenty minutes or so, I really liked this, despite all of the losses from the book. I take the point entirely about Terry Gilliam when he was once upon a time in charge asking Alan Moore 'how would you do the film' and Moore (back before he routinely and openly wanted nothing to do with cinema adaptations of his work) said 'I wouldn't', and I think it's a shame that the film loses whole layers of narrative - some of them, like the newstand man and boy, which are central to the tone of the overall work, are briefly referenced and then given a central image in the conclusion that must make no sense at all to anyone who doesn't know the book, others, like the psychiatrist's story outside of the prison, are removed even though he stays, and others, like the image of knots, disappear completely (which is a real shame for a visual medium, I mean, a nice few knots around in a narrative like this somehow help to tie the narrative down (I give you The Usual Suspects, and not only as a reference to the obvious and clumsy previous phrase). I noticed after about an hour that we were at the end of Issue #2 of 12, and I didn't think that was a good sign for what was to come. So, pirates and knots sorely missed.

I liked the way the opening titles dealt with so much backstory, and I liked so much of the dialogue being lifted straight out of the book so I could talk along with it (something I usually only manage on third or fourth viewing) although I thought as soon as the dialogue left the book it got terribly cheesey. I liked the number of nods that there were to the endpiece music references from the individual issues although it was a shame that, in a piece of writing that provides you with a fairly comprehensive soundtrack, they didn't stick with that more comprehensively. Maybe there were 'issues', although it seems strange that they couldn't be navigated with huge sums of money.

I thought the book was far more effective than the film in being unpleasant, by the usual effective method of leaving it up to you to fill in the details instead of providing them in gory colour as the film did and I agree with several reviews which have described the violence in the film as gratuitous. The film takes something psychologically very unsettling but (or therefore) deeply engaging, like the kidnap story, and makes it gross and offputting, which is a serious failing. Following on with a number of recent classroom discussions, I think Snyder says he wants the film to use realistic violence and ends up instead with entertaining violence, consequential only in a non-realistic comicbook way, which is always problematic, even when you're adapting a comicbook.

I thought the end was wrong in all sorts of ways. It works perfectly in the book - Veidt goes from being pretty much a fringe player to suddenly revealing the level of his arrogance and the conclusion of the book is... well, I think it justifies the narrative layers of the rest of the book, it is thoroughly unexpected and strange and unusual, and it allows Veidt's character to suddenly flesh out in a really satisfying way. In the film Veidt is a little more central to events (in part due to the generally reduced cast of characters and breadth and depth of narrative) and his arrogance is made clear from his earliest appearances - but more than that, the end just doesn't make sense, and the 'agent' of doom at the end is somehow accepted as acting wholly and completely out of character, it simply makes no sense at all, not with the information you have from the film nor with the backstory or breadth you might have from the book, and it meant I left feeling cheated by it all. I understand that closing up a narrative with a devestating attack on New York raises connotations now that weren't there when it was written but Snyder just fudged the issue by spreading the attack around a little and by completely changing what it was and what it meant. There's a line that comes out in cultural studies readings of modern history - 'the holocaust is not a text' - and it's not, but an attack on New York is a narrative device (if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and sounds like a duck...) so why pretend and dissipate with a flash on other targets that are never mentioned again? It's a strangely cowardly approach to the material.

So how do you adapt Watchmen? Maybe you don't. With the range of material in the book, adverts, marketing plans, journals and memoirs, TV specials and theme music, the whole thing would be a good electronic text, web based or CD/DVD-Rom stylee. Gilliam wanted to make it as a TV mini-series and that would have been more effective than a film. It is always an issue with adaptations - Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption is about 80 pages long but the film never feels like it drags in its three hours or so. Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice are even shorter stories that translate into fast paced and action packed films. Maybe film is fundamentally a short story medium. Discuss?

But I did like it, much much more than I expected to - if you'd asked me before the end, around the time the two riders arrived at Karnak, I'd have been very enthusiastic, despite everything that had been necessarily lost in translation. Shame, then.