Despite the best efforts of two decades' worth of talented filmmakers and screenwriters, the plot of the "Watchmen" film adaptation does not seem to indicate any cohesive attempt to corral the episodic narrative of the epoch-defining comic book series into one single movie-length through line. Lots of people call "Watchmen" a graphic novel, but in its original form, it was a series of 12 issues, published over the course of one year. The bliss - the reason why lots of people who should know still call it The Greatest - is that every "episode" feels complete in itself - even when issues end at cliffhangers, some essential finale has been reached. Alan Moore weaves a story spell, so that each issue feels like a tiny circle concentric within the larger narrative cycle; an aesthetic matched by Dave Gibbons' brilliant artwork, which establishes a tiny series of recurring motifs in every issue and larger motifs (happy faces, clocks, ink blots, lovers) that carry over throughout.
"Watchmen" is often described as a mystery - Who Killed the Comedian? - but truthfully, that plot is practically forgotten, or at least set far in the background, after the first couple issues, and although the series is tightly plotted, there's the sense, starting with issue 3 and hitting stride with issue 4, that Moore is doing what he does best - riffing on a concept, like a jazz pianist inflecting an old Beethoven with a modern sensibility, or a rapper moved to rhyme over an old Clash bassline. Issue 4 and issue 6 are pristinely-focused explorations of individual characters - first Dr. Manhattan, then Rorschach - and in their own divergent way, both issues play like "Citizen Kane" fully translated into comic book form.
Both issues have zilch to do with any plot and everything to do with Moore's fascination with digging beneath the surface. If Hemingway saw great literature as the 1/8 of the iceberg that peeks over the surface, it's Moore's lifelong quest to excavate the missing 7/8 - or, more often, to create that missing 7/8, to uncover ideas and notions no one, not even the creators, thought existed. Each of these issues only make sense as individual episodes - Rorschach's story is actually told from the perspective of his psychiatrist, first introduced in issue 6, who only appears once more in the series. Yet both of these issues are dramatically important to understanding "Watchmen."
Zack Snyder understands - really and truly gets and grasps- "Watchmen," probably more than most people, certainly more than anyone could have expected. The fact that he transposes these episodes into the movie is admirable; but the fact that they still function purely as episodes is a disappointment. Dr. Manhattan's Mars reverie plays beautifully onscreen - a fine, if redacted, adaptation of Watchmen #4, with Billy Crudup's haunting, mournful, monotone narration, and the images moving only a little bit more than they did on the page (Zack Snyder loves his slow motion, but in "Watchmen" and "300" it feels less like a tic than a genuine style - he wants you to explore his slow-motion shots from every angle, to freeze time until what you're seeing looks transcendent and silly both at once.) But the sequence is so fascinating, so propulsive, that it sticks out painfully from everything around it - it feels more like a tangent than an essential link in a chain.
Dr. Manhattan's absence after his flashback didn't seem so lengthy in the comics - the issues that followed were about different things. His ensuing absence from the film, though, makes the middle section feel imbalanced. The same is true, in fact, of The Comedian - Jeffrey Dean Morgan plays Eddie Blake so memorably, so perfectly, and so constantly in the first half hour that casual moviegoers would be forgiven if they thought he was the main character in the film... and yet, but for another flashback or two, the Comedian never appears again.
This may just be an indication that "Watchmen" was always meant to be a TV miniseries more than a movie, but Snyder gets so much right that could only be cinematic - Dr. Manhattan's floating city on Mars, and Nite Owl and Silk Spectre's epic airborne sex (hot like something out of an old Sharon Stone movie, that scene also gives both characters depth sorely lacking in the rest of the film), and, most of all, the opening credits sequence. I don't think I've enjoyed anything in a movie as much as I enjoyed the credits sequence - certainly, it's the first time since the ending sequence for "There Will Be Blood" that an American film has so completely captured that feeling of exquisite madness.
Set to Bob Dylan's greatest and most hilariously ambiguous anthem - Times are changing? Jesus Fuck, they've NEVER done THAT before! - the sequence cuts through five decades of bizarro-world history, dramatizing certain segments that Moore had just imagined (a cape caught in revolving doors, a man dressed like a moth being packed into a car by men dressed all in white, JFK shot by someone who's definitely not Lee Harvey Oswald), suggesting that a world with superheroes would be alot like the world without superheroes. Andy Warhol illustrated Nite Owl and Silk Spectre instead of Elvis and Marilyn Monroe, but the thesis of his art - the glorification and denigration of glorious denigrated modernity - was no different. There's so much going on in every single shot of the sequence - in my favorite, you see the streets of New York celebrating the end of World War II, and one heroine, Silhouette, takes a nurse in her arms and kisses her, while a sailer looks on, mighty confused.
Every shot in the sequence is like that - fantastically over-aestheticized (like the whole movie), but also hilariously darkly funny (like only parts of the movie.) It brings you into a big joke (it makes me sad when, twice in the first half hour, one character will say, with all the subtlety of Moses on Mount Sinai, "It's all a big joke.") This credits sequence is, really, one of the few places that "Watchmen" FEELS like a movie, and not just a dress-up re-enactment of scenes from a comic book.
I'm tempted to say that Zack Snyder should have done more of this sort of thing. The changes he made to the Evil Plot of the movie are fascinating - less about the plot itself than a few key details of its intentions - and it actually unifies the endgame much more coherently than the Evil Plot of the comic book. Then again, the addition of massive levels of ultraviolence is occasionally quite silly, and even kind of a crutch - Snyder might film violence more fetishistically than any other commercial filmmaker, so it's strange that his action sequences are so boring. Supposedly, another hour of film awaits us with the DVD. I'm hopeful that hour rescues lots of tiny bits, but I imagine that "Watchmen" the movie will remain as it is - a wandering movie, tonally-perfect but narratively invertebrate, a fascinating curio filled with errant musings and glorious colors and great acting and miserable acting. Put it next to "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," and ponder what wondrous mediocrities the major studios, in the salad days of the mid '00s, were suddenly willing to bankroll.
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