Watchmen: The Movie

This was always going to be a tricky story to adapt.  Most superhero movie adaptations have a strong advantage in that they are not obligated to keep to a comic book plot.  Batman and Spiderman and The Avengers have been revamped so many times within their own comic medium that when they get to film, their target audience really doesn’t mind a different plot from the ones they’ve grown up with or loved.  They’re just in it for their characters.  It’s the perk of being a franchise.

Watchmen doesn’t have that luxury.  It had its assigned twelve issues and that was it.  Audience expectations are different.  They don't want just their beloved characters on the screen, they're expecting the plot to translate as well, when the structure of Watchmen is episodic and would work better as TV mini-series than a film.

What impressed me was how they fit as much in as they did, and coherently as well (others disagree, but it made sense to me).  My favorite thing about this movie was how they established the Minutemen within the first fifteen minutes.  The Minutemen are all dead or retired by the main events of the story, and yet, those fifteen minutes hold the rest of the movie on their shoulders.  Nothing has any meaning without those small parts put in.

The major improvement the movie made on the book was eliminating the “space monster.”  No matter how caught up I was in the rest of the book, that was the silliest reveal.  It almost knocked me out of the rest of the story.  Turning Ozymandius’s plan into misusing Doctor Manhattan’s powers was downright genius and had a much more global impact for threatening the world.

What bugged me was Richard Nixon.  In the book, he gets maybe two mentions, mostly to establish that this is an alternate-America where Watergate wasn’t a huge deal and Nixon even managed to repeal the two-term amendment and was on his fifth term.  It was onlypart of the backdrop in a world where America won the Vietnam War and the Cold War wasn’t going to end with the Iron Curtain collapsing.

The movie gave Nixon a much larger role; almost fifteen minutes worth of screen-time, if I’m any judge (which I’m probably not but it was still obnoxious how much time I had to spend with him.)  I would rather have just eliminated those sequences entirely.  After all, they cut the New York crowd who made a good quarter to a third of the comics--my favorite parts of the book.  If they cut on that group to save on time and comprehension, why did they then fill that space with the Nixon crap?

Oh well.  I was happy I watched it.  I might even see it again, though not so late at night.