Watchmen

I was wrong. I said it would be awful, that there's no way Hollywood would get it right. What cause had I to hope? Director Zack Snyder had previously done a passable but unnecessary remake of Dawn of the Dead and the cartoonishly glandular adaptation of 300. The screenwriters had worked on the X-Men movies and The Scorpion King. Watchmen is literature, and I saw it falling into ham-hands.

With hindsight I make one small note: In his zombie flick Snyder had proven able to capture the end-of-the-world existential dread that also permeates Alan Moore's graphic novel. Three cheers for hidden artistic sensibility.

There is no way to plumb the depths of the book, to convey its juxtapositions of image and text, its visual rhyming or its simultaneous parallel storytelling, not in three hours or six and no sense in trying. Let comics and movies keep to their separate spheres and each do what they do best. That being said, what Snyder has (miraculously) achieved is to make an entertaining Hollywood event movie that retains the major themes of the book and remains true to its texture and spirit.

Now, I'm sure it is nevertheless a bumpy ride for the uninitiated. Although Moore's densely woven plotlines have been harshly trimmed and the character backstories truncated, there is still an entire postwar alternate history to establish, including the rise-and-fall saga of costumed crimefighters, as matrix for the convoluted whodunit. That's a lot to digest, but the film will inspire multiple viewings upon which I expect it to prove coherent. The throwaway details are all there for the fanboys to relish: The snow globe, Gunga Diner, Millennium, Pyramid Deliveries, New Frontiersman, The Outer Limits...someone tell me if you spot The Day the Earth Stood Still on one of Veidt's TVs — I was too transfixed by The Road Warrior. I found myself not missing too terribly the plot threads left out (except the one-man Greek chorus supplied by the newstand vendor, a humane counterpoint to Rorschach's brutal narration) and even admiring the economical retooling of Veidt's master plan. The between-sequence editing is a hasty chop-job, not unlike that in the theatrical release of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, indicating that we can look forward to an extended DVD version with streamlined pacing. The soundtrack is fun if a bit too intrusive at times; Simon & Garfunkel is a fitting joke for the Comedian's funeral.

Oh, the violence! I half expected Warner Bros to lean toward a PG-13 cut. The book's language is not overly profane to begin with, and they could have cut around the gory stuff and naughty bits and insisted that Manhattan keep his underpants on. It would have been crap, but they would have made more money off the younger audience. To my delight Snyder went the other way. If anything the movie is far more gruesome than the book, which does not feature compound fractures, circular saw amputations or a cleavered pederast. The book's most horrific imagery is confined to Tales of the Black Freighter, the comic-within-a-comic, a device Moore uses to divulge the worst of our species' bloodlust without seeming to condone it. Elsewhere Moore consistently presents violent acts with a tone of disgust rather than morbid revelry. Snyder on the other hand revels, in gratuitous close-ups and lingering shots of splatter that are only about themselves. I laughed hard because it was so shockingly unnecessary that it tipped Snyder's hand: His reverence for the source material extends only as far as his love of gross-out effects. If you don't know why spurting Karo syrup is fun, I can't tell you.

So Snyder takes some personal license with the quease factor, but more importantly he respects Watchmen as an adult entertainment. Which is not to say a prurient one. Moore's attitude toward sex is frank and liberated, that sex be treated as a thing perplexing and natural and hopefully fun. Dan and Laurie learn to accept and enjoy the inherent kinkiness of dressing up in leather and latex. Manhattan goes about unclothed because of course he would, and Dan walks around nude after lovemaking because that's what people do. It would be perverse to go to lengths to avoid the fact of genitalia. After all the talk in the last few years about how Batman Begins and The Dark Knight brought psychological depth to the comic book movie and how Sin City and 300 brought R-rated T&A, now with Watchmen the genre is finally mature.

Jackie Earle Haley's comet coming back

Two performances stand out equally, although Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach will get most of the fan love and accolades. Patrick Wilson carries the movie as Dan Dreiberg (Nite Owl II), a sad sack I never cared much about in the book but who emerges on screen as the tender emotional anchor of a pre-apocalyptic world. Wilson brings a likability to the character that is almost entirely in the eyes, fleeting smiles and small gestures that do not come across on the page. I'm reminded of Roger Ebert's assertion that, of all the arts, motion pictures are the greatest empathy machine.

Haley was the badass child star you loved in The Bad News Bears (1976) and Breaking Away (1979) who all but disappeared from the movies for twenty-five years before turning up in Little Children (2006), a wrenching comeback performance that earned an Oscar nomination. Knowing he'd been cast as Rorschach was the only real hope I had for Watchmen, and about that I was right. About every other aspect I'm elated to have been so wrong.