Billy Cor Knows The Score: The Watchmen Trailer
I’ve often been told that what makes Watchmen “unfilmable” is its complexity: this is surely not true. Generally this argument confuses complexity for detail, which nowadays is bread and butter to a sufficiently obsessive director and an audience with frame-by-frame access. And looking at the trailer that’s what the Watchmen film’s got. Yes, the story as a comic contains a lot of flashbacks, but it’s not as if this is a technique unknown to cinema audiences! If you lose the Black Freighter sequence you’ve got a relatively straightforward story, albeit one with a somewhat eyebrow-raising tonal shift at the end.
No, the problem with Watchmen’s filmability, which judging by the trailer is likely to remain a problem, is the question of who the hero is? This is, basically, a superhero story whose protagonists are either ineffectual, inscrutable, or insane. Again, this needn’t be much of an issue - it’s not as if morally murky films with no clear heroes are any great novelty. But the buffer Alan Moore ran into (and admitted as much in interview) is that, despite every attempt to make Rorschach repulsive and pathetic, he ended up as a total bad-ass. OK, he was pathetic in his ’secret identity’, but so’s Superman. And it’s not like he’ll be less of a bad-ass on film. “He’s mentally ill but arguably the most heroic of them all.” as an MTV interviewer puts it to the film’s director. (The trailer suggests balance will be provided by making Nite Owl and Silk Spectre bad-asses too, but it might just be that we’re being shown their more bad-assy moments).
This is the context of Moore’s current round of interviews, in which he’s been expressing concern that - not that he gives a monkeys about the film, you understand - Watchmen’s director also did 300, which glorified militarism and war, and maybe this new film will also glorify bad things. He knows perfectly well, of course, that if he was worried about glorifying bad things he probably shouldn’t have written a scene in which his supercool masked vigilante murders three enemies from behind his cell bars. The message Alan Moore perhaps intended to convey with Watchmen was, superheroes are completely fucked up, let’s not write so much about them pls. The message he ACTUALLY transmitted was, superheroes are completely fucked up, that makes them EVEN COOLER, and so instead of killing the genre he reinvented it and here we are in our brave new world in which the Watchmen film is almost certainly NOT attempting to kill anything at all, it’s meant to fit right in with a superhero movie boom. It’ll be a “dark take” on superheroes, of course, but there’s a world of difference between ‘anti-hero’ and just plain ‘anti’.
So what I’m getting from the trailer - and it’s only one trailer, and I went “wow!” in all the same places most other people did - is sense of a film which is playing off immense faithfulness to the source material from the perspective of visual, panel-by-panel recreation, against a certain (inevitable) faithlessness to the intent of the comic. But without Moore’s doomed botched utopian rage to animate Watchmen, what is it? A fun bit of superhero sci-fi with a dodgy ending? I’ll be very interested to find out.
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FT's Martin Skidmore on July 18th, 2008
I think that last guess is a good one. Also, 20 years on, Watchmen is much, much closer to being a mainstream superhero comic than it was then.
james on July 18th, 2008
isn’t scoring your superhero-movie trailer with a song from the “Batman&Robin” soundtrack pretty much asking for trouble?
o sobek! on July 19th, 2008
yeah the actual message vs. intended message of watchmen is one of art spiegelman’s main gripes w/ it right - that there are possibly unavoidable fascist overtones in any superhero enterprise (esp in the dc mold) and that gestures toward acknowledging or exploring this only tend to make matters worse, like struggling in quicksand. in my experience this was true, i was 12 or so when watchmen hit and at the time while yes yes we knew the ‘this is a commentary upon superheroes’ and esp knew the ‘this is a commentary on our times and america’ (’nixon is still president’ and ‘we won vietnam’ got alot of play at the lunch table, to what end i can’t remember) by far most of the watchmen discussion ended up in a round table ‘who is most badass? batman vs wolverine vs snake-eyes vs rorschach’ w/ maybe a side alley into ‘dr manhattan: has he rendered the superman vs. captain marvel (shazam) argument moot?’. the trailer looks fine. thought 300 was repulsive but ridiculous and in some way ‘fun’ and that nearly all of its flaws but not nearly all of its strengths came from the source material (thought the same of sin city also tbh). if there’s anything about the watchmen movie that disappoints me it’s that it lays low the ‘watchmen: UNFILMABLE’ myth that had been taken as certain since those same lunch table discussions. twenty years later and here it is.
Doctor Casino on July 21st, 2008
I think all the concerns/challenges outlined above are spot-on, but in terms of “unfilmability” (as opposed to “can’t ever do what it’s trying to do, in any medium, b/c it glorifies that which it wants to criticize”), to me the problem is meta-ness. Watchmen is a superhero comic about superhero comics, and other kinds of comics as well for what matter (Black Freighter). To survive the translation it would have to become a superhero movie about superhero movies, which might be harder than it seems…
Pete on July 21st, 2008
But for a superhero film about superhero films (and I don’t mean Superhero Movie) its timing will be spot on. Post over saturation and a few attempts at meta-commentary in Hancock, to a superhero flick which has been as lauded as, well The Dark Knight returns was (use the DK letters clearly when you want to seem grown up).
It will be hard to do a meta critique of superhero films and be a straight recreation of the comic (the one thing films have barely done is team comics and the gold/silver age split), but I will be interested to see the stab at it they are making.
Though I still think I would have liked Paul Greengrass’s version more!
FT's Alan on July 21st, 2008
that visual faithfulness in full
http://www.empireonline.com/trailer/breakdown/watchmen/