Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, Ltd.

Jen and I have just gotten back from Watchmen. (Currently, she’s looking up actors in the movie to see what else they’ve been in.) In getting ready for watching it, I did something that might seem counter to the normal way of doing things: I did not reread the graphic novel before hand. This is a case where I didn’t want my ideas about the comic to influence too deeply my opinion of the film. I know that sounds counter-intuitive; after all, those of us in the “geek cultures” of things like Lord of the Rings and comic books love to break down the adaptations into their components and compare those to our beloved works. But I wanted to approach this movie as it is and consider the work as an adaptation later. I can never, of course, be one of those for whom this movie is their first exposure to the work, but it’s been long enough since I’ve read Watchmen that I didn’t have every particle of the book in my mind, criticizing the film as I watched it.

By the way, the purpose of this article, as the title says, is just to get a few thoughts down, to sketch my initial impressions of the movie. It might be a while before I see it again (when the DVD is released, perhaps), so I want to jot down a few things before the memory fades.

I also want to follow up this article with a series of posts chronicling my rereading of the graphic novel. I got the idea from a series of blogs on tor.com, in which someone reread Lord of the Rings and chronicled their impressions of it. I think that might be an interesting idea to do for this and other works that I regard as classics, so look forward to that in the (hopefully) near future.

Now onto the sketch.

On this first viewing, I definitely liked the film. With my admittedly murky memory of the original, I thought this film stayed true to the comic’s theme and plot. It didn’t pull any punches in depicting the violence found in the comic; the film was very visceral, and especially gory in places. In fact, the only negatives that I can think of now were 1) the music choices in several places, particularly the sex scene between Dan and Lori in Archimedes, and 2) the length of the aforementioned sex scene. Beyond those two minor quibbles, I enjoyed the film.

Several scenes stand out in my mind. The opening sequence was, I thought, wonderfully done. It did a great job showing the audience the effect that costumed heroes had on the world, how they changed its history from ours. That’s something that I think is often missing from comics, specifically long-running series that have spanned decades. We know that costumed heroes would have affected history in many ways, but series like Spider-Man and X-Men can’t really drastically change history, which does create a distorted timeline (to say nothing of the actual ages of the characters; Peter Parker should be in his 60s). The film does an excellent job showing the changes the world and the characters have gone through.

One final thought. This film, like the graphic novel, is not easy to watch. Its messages about human nature are difficult, not to understand, but to accept. Human beings are shown more often at their worst; for a superhero story, heroes are lacking. That was something that was innovative about the original comic. Somewhat ironically, perhaps, this movie does the same for the superhero film genre that the original did for the superhero comic genre. Hopefully, for those viewers whose primary exposure to superheroes has been movies, this film will have the same effect.

Grouchy-old-geek addendum: the audience we saw the movie with, while on the whole okay, displayed moments of pure stupidity and ignorance. I could tell that this would not be a great audience when the majority of them laughed uproariously at some been-there-done-that comedy movie about stupid people doing stupid things. (I think the title was The Hangover.) Anyways, they sniggered like middle-schoolers during the sex scene, let out comedic interjections at the demise of one of Big Figure’s goons, and totally failed to get the meaning behind playing “99 Luftballoons.” Oh well. Stupid kids… get off my lawn!