Saturday Morning Watchmen

Teaching Watchmen alongside Jamesonian theory again this week prompts me to revisit this appropriately bizarre take on Alan Moore's classic text.

Watchmen Extras

Since receiving the movie version of Watchmen on Blu-ray, I've been going through the extras slowly but surely. The moderately hyped, ridiculously titled 'Maximum Movie Mode' is pretty nifty, even if it fails to say anything interesting about the movie in three hours of audio-visual commentary, image galleries, text overlays, and picture-in-picture videos. Like the movie, the technique is far more impressive than the ultimately shapeless content it provides.

The second-disc featurettes are unsurprisingly superficial as well. The best one is probably a half-hour documentary-lite titled "The Phenomenon: The Comic that changed Comics," which briefly introduces some of the most obvious points of the book while singing its praises in nonstop hyperbole. This may be considered an easily palatable introduction to the book for people who haven't read it (and honestly: how many people buying this Blu-ray are unfamiliar with the comic book?). But in drawing its commentary on the film from the likes of Malin Akerman, Zack Snyder, Dave Gibbons, and a parade of DC Comics executives, it's not exactly providing the kind of insight that would make this stuff interesting to the fans for whom this was most likely intended. Some of the most cringe-worthy sound bites actually come from Time magazine book critic Lev Grossman, who proudly proclaims that Watchmen showed us the underbelly of superhero archetypes, and that we "loved them all the more fore it" (???). The whole thing suffers badly from the absence, both in body and in spirit, of Alan Moore, whose fundamental authorship is consistently undervalued, while a constant source of annoyance is the frequent use of the god-awful 'motion comic' version of the book (a DVD release that stupidly animates the panels from the book, supplemented by some absolutely terrible voice casting).

Unfortunately, it's all downhill from there, as the 26-minute "Real Superheroes: Real Vigilantes" combines endless scenes from the film with Discovery Channel-type reportage on real-world vigilante, again with commentary from the film's cast and crew, along with pretentious-as-hell Grossman offering this kind of insight: "They didn't really have superpowers; they were just dudes wearing costumes. And it makes you think really, really hard about questions of ethics and morality in a way we're sort of not used to, but Watchmen forced us to." Wow. I guess Richard Schickel isn't the only idiot working as a critic for Time magazine...

Watchmen - A lucky break

Having been lucky enough to know a good friend who was able to sneak me into an early press screening of the long-awaited, much-hyped, and already close-to-tiresome Watchmen adaptation, I'm somewhat relieved to relate here that the title of today's posting refers not only to the fact that I was lucky to catch the flick before the wave of anticipation crests, but also that it's not remotely as bad as I had feared --indeed, assumed-- it would be. My first sneaking suspicion that I may have been a bit over-zealous in my blanket condemnation of all things Zack Snyder-related came upon re-visiting his version of Dawn of the Dead recently on DVD. Because let's face it: that was another contemporary adaptation of a 'classic' text which throngs of devotees and other assorted naysayers had rejected in advance, only to make a quick about-face once it actually saw the light of day.

My own reluctance to embrace the hype came pretty much entirely from the total failure of the atrocious 300, followed by the first Watchmen trailer made up entirely of slow-motion shots that recreate famous panels from the book. Perhaps I should have taken into account the fact that Frank Miller's 300 comic book wasn't perhaps the most compelling source text to start off with anyway, and that the film's version attendant emphasis on macho violence and kitschy homo-erotica could hardly be deemed all that surprising.

But now that I've actually experienced the thing first-hand, I must admit that I can't imagine a film version that is substantially better than the one that looks likely to become an international phenomenon as of next week: it's extremely faithful to the book without entirely mummifying the source text; the casting is fiendishly clever, with Patrick Wilson a particular stand-out; there is plenty of delicious eye candy throughout; there are a few moments when the film's editing comes close to resembling the book's extraordinary use of symmetrical mirroring devices; and its depiction of Rorschach as the story's 'hero' is neither more nor less problematic than it is in the book (although the one moment of applause in this screening occurred when that sociopathic loner deep-fried another inmate and let the others know that they're locked up with him rather than the other way around).