A film needs above all else to have a clear narrative. It is the single most important thing in determining whether a film is a success or a failure. I have read Watchmen. If I hadn't, like my friend Antony who I watched it with hasn't, I would almost certainly have been lost. He's brighter than me, though, so I think he got most of it. My biggest fear with Watchmen was that as an cultural icon it is so big and so influential and so revered that the film-makers would be crippled by fear of a backlash if they left anything out. Zack Snyder doesn't appear to have been crippled by fear, he just treated Moore's book as a storyboard and filmed exactly as it is drawn. Barely anything is removed and nothing whatsoever is added. And so there are moments when things do need clarifying; when a reader would flick back a few pages and check their understanding or refresh their memory or contextualise an event or a comment or check their understanding of who said what and when. That clarity never comes. Which leaves a two hour forty minute live action portrayal of something that was damn near perfect anyway. Would you buy a photograph of a lookalike of the Laughing Cavalier?
It's been said that Watchmen is unfilmable but that's bollocks. It can be done; but with courage and with invention. The worst ways to film this are to take out all of the darkness and malevolence (which this film does to some extent) or to take out all of the backstory but leave in the things which need that context (Snyder's film does that an awful lot). So it's too long, the screenplay is worthless and the direction utterly uninspired- what does that leave? The performances are cartoonish and 2D given by actors and actresses seemingly chosen for their physical resemblance to the drawn character (they could take a lesson from the casting in The Young Victoria there) but in truth they have little to work with- character arcs are only present in the original work when taken in the context of the backstory- other than Malin Akerman who conveys love, joy, fear and pain with the same blank face.
What is lost from the film- and this stuff is so pivotal that it can surely only have been a running length issue- are the dynamics between the characters, the whole story of the Minutemen, much of what happened to bring about and then ultimately to force the end of the Watchmen and the character detail for each of them. What is kept is every single drop of blood, pyrotechnic, punch, kick, insult and firework. I guess Snyder reveals his expectations of his audience right there.
It was a flawed idea from the start this and it could, I suppose, have been more infuriating and disappointing that it is. And the story is ingenious. And this is probably the best use of CGI in a live-action film I've seen. But it's still a 3/10 for me. May even have been less had I never read the book too!
