Well I'm older and wiser now and thought I'd go back and re-examine the movie with the big blue dong in it. Spoilers and political snarkage ahead.
I'm going to start with the fact that the Watchmen story hasn't exactly aged well from a political standpoint. Published in 1985, Watchmen was a 12-issue comic that was set in an alternate 1985, one in which Richard Nixon was in his fifth term as President and one superman and a bunch of nuts in masks used to run around fighting crime. It told the tale of a group of retired superheroes dealing with a) imminent nuclear Armageddon, and b) the fact that one of their own had just been bumped off. The two plots turn out to be related because the "villain" of the piece is Adrian "Ozymandias" Veidt, who kills half of New York in order to end the Cold War, because there's no other way to do it without turning the planet into a cinder. The "heroes" end up letting him get away with it, except for the comically sociopathic Rorschach, who gets disintegrated instead. The story ends with the notion that this peace might not last, because a) Rorschach's journal made it to a kooky newspaper that might run the story, and b) "RR" is going to run for President in 1988 and the US doesn't need a "cowboy actor" in the White House. ("RR" is Robert Redford. Who did you think it was?)
Now, for those of us who actually stayed awake during the last week of History Class, not long after Watchmen was published, the Cold War ended with the utter collapse of the Soviet Union thanks partly/primarily (delete according to political preference) to a cowboy actor in the White House whose initials happened to be R.R. So to recap: in the fictional Watchmen universe, the smartest man in the world has to resort to murdering a few million Americans, while meanwhile in the real world, the Soviet Union was already on the way out. So, uh, up yours, Alan Moore's political commentary.
Watchmen was then made into a film in 2009, and the ending was changed. Veidt's mutant squid was replaced by Dr. Manhattan-esque bombs, and also the film tries to sell us on the notion that Ronald Reagan would run for President in 1988, despite the non-Hollywood Left insisting that he was senile by that point. Naturally, we don't need a "cowboy" in the White House this time around either. (Note they dropped the word "actor." Gee...)
Now, I can kind of excuse the politicking in the comic. After all, the comic spends a good chunk of its middle "filler" section explaining that the presence of Dr. Manhattan from 1960 on ushered in some pretty fantastic changes to the world... changes that the film largely glosses over. I should point out that I'm reviewing the theatrical release, not the special edition with Curse of the Black Pearl I mean whatever-the-hell-that-pirate-ship-was-called crammed back into the story. My point is that I could just about buy a more belligerent Russia (even if the timing of Afghanistan - no, the 80s Afghanistan conflict - is all wrong) because they're freaked out by Manhattan. (Of course, back in the real world, the Russians simply didn't have the money to keep up with our nuclear program, but nobody in 1985 who didn't work for the government knew that.)
I can't really excuse the politicking in the film. The jabs at Bush date the film something horrible, and, well... look, the Left likes to mock the (extremely mockable) film adaptation(s) of Atlas Shrugged for keeping the train plot, and I kinda want to return the favor, so, LOOK GUYS THE COLD WAR DIDN'T NEED TO END WITH NEW YORK GETTING ROFLSTOMPED.
Speaking of aging the film, they generally do a good job of selling us on this alternate 1985... and then they use shot compositions and camera angles that scream New Millennium. Seriously, compare the general direction of this film with Back to the Future (1985), Aliens (1986), or Star Trek IV (1986). And I'm not talking about the CGI nudity, but rather all of the camerawork is not in the least bit period-authentic and for some reason that bugs me.
Okay time to talk about the things that I like. And there are a lot of things this film does really, really well. Like, for example, the fact that there's a picture of Sally Jupiter (Silk Spectre I) in the Comedian's apartment in the opening scene. This is what we call a "rewatch bonus." There are a couple of other ones in the opening credits, which do a bloody fantastic job of giving us 36 years of alternate history as superheroes rise (1940s), fall (1950s), rise again with a true superman in their midst (1960s) and then fall apart for good (1970s). I have mixed opinions about putting Comedian on the grassy knoll, though. While that, and the quip about "Good to be back on home soil [after 'Nam*]... I haven't had this much fun since Woodward and Bernstein" make it clear that he is Nixon's creature, I didn't really think it was a necessary part of his character. Yes, Nixon's the Republican Republicans won't defend. I'll try not to read too deeply into this.
*Which we won, in this timeline. So there's that.
Onto Rorschach. Rorschach talks the way liberals imagine conservatives talk. Here's an example. It's from the comic; a shorter version made it into the film.
The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout "Save us!"... and I'll look down and whisper "No." They had a choice, all of them. They could have followed in the footsteps of good men like my father or President Truman. Decent men who believed in a day's work for a day's pay. Instead they followed the droppings of lechers and communists and didn't realize that the trail led over a precipice until it was too late. Don't tell me they didn't have a choice. Now the whole world stands on the brink, staring down into bloody Hell, all those liberals and intellectuals and smooth-talkers... and all of a sudden nobody can think of anything to say.
Yeah. So. Also, "this city screams like an abattoir full of retarded children." Actual line. He's kinda our protagonist. (Okay, the actress playing Laurie has top billing, but I'll talk about her in a minute.) He discovers that tonight's murder victim, Edward Blake, was really once a costumed superhero called the Comedian, and the only one other than Dr. Manhattan who was allowed to continue operating after the passage of the Keene Act in 1977. (Among his exploits the comic mentions: rescuing a bunch of hostages from Iran circa 1979.) Two of Rorschach's former colleagues, Dan "Nite Owl II" Dreiberg and Adrian "Ozymandias" Veidt, don't seem all that concerned (because Dreiberg's gone soft and Veidt's the bad guy - cuz his a rich corporate guy, I mean duh! The only good rich corporate guys are Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark).
His attempt to warn Dr. Manhattan doesn't go all that well either. Manhattan's a big blue superman who hangs out naked because he doesn't give a flying fig. Hey, when you're the closest thing to God on this earth, who's gonna tell you what to dress? Really, though, he's naked because he doesn't have all that much humanity left. He's working with Adrian to "solve the energy crisis" (man, we really dodged a bullet by having Reagan as President in 1985, didn't we? Especially those of us who live in New York City). Manhattan can also see into the future, or at least his own future, but only to a point because tachyons - those things from Star Trek that mean there's a cloaked Romulan Warbird nearby - are preventing him from seeing anything after a month or so from now. Probably because there's going to be a nuclear war. Actually because Veidt blows up New York (and a few other cities in this version) then. We don't know that yet, because again, it's supposed to be a plot twist that the rich corporate dude is evil.
Then comes one of the film's many flashbacks. It's Blake's funeral, and Sally Jupiter, Dr. Manhattan, Dan Dreiberg and Adrien Veidt all have flashbacks involving him. Manhattan's flashback involves fighting in Vietnam to the strains of "Ride of the Valkyries," which is odd because in this universe, we won 'Nam, so no filmmaker was going to make a famous movie what had a famous scene in it comparing Air Cav to Nazis.
Now this scene is actually kinda important. After they win the Vietnam War, Comedian and the Doc are hanging in a bar. "Man, losing this war really would have messed us up," Comedian says (paraphrased), totally preserving the fourth wall. Anywho this Vietnamese babymama comes in because something something paternity suit, but Comedian kills her after she slashes his face. Manhattan just watches. He could have stopped the murder(s) any one of a hundred different ways - as Comedian points out - but he's losing his ability to care about us little mortals. This will be important later.
Back in the present, Manhattan can see into his future but can't see that he'll get ambushed at a talk show that he's been invited to for some reason. He has an emotional freakout and relocates to Mars, because a) that was Veidt's plan and Veidt's plan goes off pretty much without a hitch, and b) because there's a smiley-face on Mars and they have to cram the smiley-face in as much as they possibly can.
Then the plot slows down so that every character can explain their backstory. Manhattan got disassembled in a particle beam and then put himself back together as a superman. Basically everyone else is just a psycho in a mask. Dreiberg and Laurie have really awkward sex on a hovercraft, and I'm gonna have to go back and complain about some stuff now.
So when they're hanging out in the Owlcave, Dan shows Laurie these goggles he's got that have fancypants computer displays on them. At the end of the film, when Dan and Rorschach break into Veidt's office - again, Veidt being the smartest man on the planet - he's got a crummy little computer that looks like the one from Aliens. In other words, that's like some random guy having an iPad while Tony Stark is making do with an abacus.
I'm going to skip over the really awkward sex on the hovercraft - because apparently it was supposed to be The Room - level awkward - and talk about the character of Laurie. She's Sally's daughter, she's supposed to be Manhattan's girlfriend, she ends up being the Comedian's daughter and Dan's girlfriend. And as I said, her actress has top billing. So she's the main character, right?
Dead frakking wrong.
So let's discuss exactly who Laurie is and what she accomplishes in the movie. Other than running around in a skintight outfit, that is. At the start of the film she's Manhattan's squeeze. This is pretty explicitly spelled out in the comic: her job is to keep him interested in humanity by spreading her legs. Rorschach has that mask and that attitude, Dan and Adrian have their brains, Doc has superpowers, and Laurie has girl parts.
Hooray!
Then Doc tells her to hook up with Dan because he's too busy working (which is a lie, by the way, because a later scene has him clone himself to have sex with her while he continues working). So it's not even clear that it's her idea, originally, to leave him. Then when they're on Mars and arguing, he says "when you left me, I left Earth." Yeah, when you left me because I told you to leave me. For some reason, I'm doubting the logic of the big blue naked guy. And then she convinces him to return to Earth, but it's too late because Adrian's plan already went off and New York is a crater. So that accomplished, um... nothing. And by "convinces him to return to Earth," I mean, "he forces her to realize that the Comedian was her father and then soliloquizes for a while before deciding to go back to Earth himself." Once they're at Adrian's secret base, she does manage to shoot him, but he just catches the bullet and that's all she wrote.
Hey, let's take a look at the only other named female characters in this story. Don't worry, this won't take long, because there are only two of them: there's Silhouette, a lesbian superhero from the 40s who's dead by the time the credits are over, and Sally, Laurie's mom, who just hangs out in her (retirement?) home reminiscing about that one time she fell in love with a guy who tried to rape her.
So here is a sum total of things that Laurie does in this film: She has a pointless and gratuitous action scene where she (and Dan) save some people from a burning building. 2) she has a pointless and gratuitous sex scene with Dan. 3) She helps Dan break Rorschach out of prison so Rorschach can steal her job as Dan's sidekick for the final act of the story.
That is it.
I'm just going to break off there and let you draw your own conclusions about how I feel about Laurie as a fully developed charactits.
So Our Heroes confront the villain at his lair, the villain reveals that he did it all thirty-five minutes ago, Doc atomizes Rorschach because Rorschach refuses to compromise, and everyone else keeps Adrian's secret and that, aside from the politicking I whined about earlier, is the end of the film.
But the film differs from the comic - sometimes for the better, sometimes for worse - in the way that it ends. Let's go through everything I noticed.
1) In both versions, Adrian offs his staff immediately before Dan and Rorschach show up, because they have those pesky soul things that might make them try to stop him. In the comic, he has three servants, whom he poisons and leaves in a bio-dome that he then opens up so the snow comes in and buries them. In the film, he poisons them inside the same intrinsic field generator he'll try to use on Doc later. Proper foreshadowing. Point: Film.
2) Squid versus Doc Bomb. I have to break up all the differences in Adrian's plan, so let's first of all look at the means by which Adrian decides to kill half of New York. In the comic, Adrian has these scientists and artists creating a mutant squid - somehow - that he's then going to teleport to New York. (Are you kidding me, Blogger, you don't recognize the word "teleport?") The shock of teleportation will kill the creature, causing it to release a psychic wave of energy that kills half of New York City. Um. In the film, Adrian uses the Big Energy Thingy that he and Doc have been working on the whole time. Again, better foreshadowing, less ridiculous. Point: film.
3) Multiple targets. Adrian hits other cities in the film in addition to New York, whereas he only hits New York in the comic. I'm kinda torn about this one, but hitting multiple targets makes it clear that the "alien threat" isn't just anti-capitalist, so point: film. The "I have made myself feel every death" line is just as stupid in both versions, though.
4) I did it thirty-five minutes ago. This is probably the most famous part of the comic (y'know, aside from the big blue dong and the villain's plan). Dan and Rorschach confront Adrian, who happily spills his guts and then tells them that "oh, by the way, I didn't even give you a chance to stop me because I already did it." This is done phenomenally well in the comic. We cut back and forth between Adrian's Antarctic hideout and New York City for a while, so we tend to not notice that Adrian sends the squid out at 11:25, and all the clocks in the background in New York City don't reach 11:25 until the squid shows up. So we're not actually cutting back and forth between two scenes; we're watching one scene taking place 35 minutes ahead of another one. In the film, we see the teleportation flash as Our Heroes approach the hideout... but it turns out that all those multiple strikes were on a delayed timer, for some reason. So Beijing got nuked X minutes before Berlin got nuked X minutes before London got nuked X minutes before New York. For, um, some reason. Point: comic. Very much so.
5) Everyone's reaction. In the comic, everyone except Rorschach accepts what Adrian did, so Doc atomizes Rorschach and Dan and Laurie go off to have sex somewhere inside Adrian's hideout. In the film, Rorschach still does the big splatter, but we get some over-the-top reactions from Dan, who then proceeds to wail on Adrian for a while. I like this change, that Adrian actually gets a little bloody. Then Dan and Laurie leave, scowling at Adrian and leaving him alone to look on his works and despair. Um, okay, I guess. I mean it's not like they lived at Karnak forever afterwards in the comic. And I get that Snyder didn't want to grace us with another sex scene. I'm kinda neutral on that part of it, but overall, Point: film.
So what did I think overall? Well, everyone can act. Yeah, Dan's over the top at the very end, but oh well. As for the story...
...well, the whole thing depends on how well the setting is made. Audiences in 1985 didn't exactly need a lot of help to figure out the whole "nuclear armageddon" threat; the comic's target audience was born around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis and could probably remember a time when man hadn't yet walked on the Moon. So the comic really didn't need to spend a great deal of time selling the nuclear threat - but it did anyway; remember the newstand guy? The film does need to sell the threat, though, because it has a different audience, and in this it fails. There's lip service to the imminent nuclear war at the beginning, and then it's basically ignored in favor of the Mask Killer plot.
So, you have a scenario in which we won Vietnam, the Cuban Missile Crisis isn't mentioned, and we have a freaking superman on our side. Exactly how is the Soviet Union presented as a credible threat? Well, they talk about the USSR a bit, and their nuclear capacity. Aaaaaand that's it. Hey, you guys remember that movie Star Wars? Where the bad guys had this ultimate weapon that Our Heroes had to destroy? No, we didn't need to see that thing destroy a planet or anything to be able to fully comprehend its power or the threat presented by it or anything...
Bottom line: A lot of the superficial changes are good ones. The biggest ones, however, are also the worst ones.
Make of that what you will.
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