The Last Movie I Saw

Throughout my teen years I was a big comic book fan, and even for awhile into my twenties I continued to follow a few favorite series (for example the Spirit reprints from Kitchen Sink Press, and Harvey Pekar's American Splendor), even as I drifted away from the mainstream of the hobby, which is to say the costumed superheroes. One of the last full series that I remember reading was the Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons miniseries The Watchmen, which turned such genre fare on its head and for me exemplified how limited the concept of superheroes ultimately was (since that seemed in part to be Moore's intent-- to demonstrate how it could be done). I'm not suggesting that nothing of worth of that type has appeared since, only that the timing was such in terms of my own interests as to signal an endpoint, as my own tastes moved away from the fantastic to the more realistic. I still like the comic strip/book art form, but prefer when its used in the service of human scaled drama or character study rather than cataclysmic battles between guys in capes (and I'm aware that is an oversimplification-- I'm just trying to establish some context for my reaction to the movie).

Anyway, the movie of Watchmen has now appeared, and I was looking forward to seeing it, partly to see if it too could turn what has become a staple movie genre on its head. I'm sorry to say it doesn't even come close. There's little that is truly challenging about the film, certainly nothing on the scale of what the original comics set out to do in raising questions about the nature of these fantasies and the way they lend themselves to certain social and even political impulses that have consequences in real life. The often spectacular visual effects of the film ultimately overwhelm any such message that may be intended by the plot (a factor further exacerbated by the absence of strong actors in key roles, with the notable exception of Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach); everything looks good, but that is ultimately a distraction and not an embellishment to the story or ideas that you'd think would be the point. Compare that to the measured approach taken by Dave Gibbons in creating the art for the original books, which adheres to a strict format that allows for the measured development of both character and narrative. Here's an example (and a nice explanation of its effectiveness can be found here):

There is no room in the movie for anything as low-keyed as this two-paged sequence; virtually every element has been blown up (literally and figuratively by "visionary" director Zack Snyder). In the end, and despite any legitimate pretensions it might have harbored as a result of its source material, Watchmen the movie is just another comic book flick, perhaps a bit more dazzling visually than most, but hardly demonstrating any connection to human-scaled themes that were in many respects the whole point of the comic book. So my advice, if you're at all interested in the Watchmen, is to seek out the graphic novel and recognize the movie as an inferior imitation at best.