Who Still Watches Watchmen?

As Zack Snyder settles into his Netflix tenure making whatever he wants to lesser and lesser success (at least critically), I find myself more drawn to his previous work, especially Watchmen (though I’ll keep watching everything he does, since I’m a fan and truly want to like his work). I loved the film at the time, and as my superhero fatigue grows worse each year, the movie seems even more relevant. It’s a nice diversion from time to time since it’s so self-contained. And since it’s been fifteen years since I wrote anything about it, I thought it was time to revisit why I still watch Watchmen.

Adapting Pre-Existing Worlds

Since his split with DC, Snyder has made three original films, Army of the Dead and the two Rebel Moon movies. All three have been critical failures, and I personally have found them either just okay or disappointing. Upon rewatching some of his previous, and more popular, work, it occurred to me that Snyder works best when adapting existing work. Even though the three films he’s made are extremely derivative of other works (the zombie genre, Star Wars, etc.), they are technically original meaning he has to work with a blank slate.

I love films like Watchmen, 300, and the DC stuff because Snyder is able to work with an existing visual story and bring it to a new medium. He doesn’t have to focus on creating anything, leaving all his attention to building the atmosphere of a world a built-in fanbase is already aware of. I’ve always been a bigger fan of Snyder’s style over his substance, and Watchmen is the best example of this. 

The world of Watchmen is so slavishly recreated here that I often revisit it because I want to experience the setting. It makes for nice, though often disturbing, background noise. Snyder was criticized at the time for being too concerned with recreating the comic book rather than actually adapting it, but that’s what I like about it. 

The score, the looks of all the characters, especially Dr. Manhattan, and the city make this a rewatchable film for me. Using all the visual elements of the book, Snyder was able to simply bring the locations to life. I enjoy getting lost in a graphic novel like Watchmen, and the movie, for better or worse, recreated that world.

There are certainly plenty of differences from the source material, and re-reading the graphic novel is something I enjoy doing, but it’s a lot faster to just turn the film on to get a quick fix of the Watchmen world.

That is what saddens me about this Netflix phase of his career. He’s been given free reign, and now he’s suddenly more worried with trying to come up with semi-original concepts rather than finding an existing property to adapt. He’s still working with huge budgets for this stuff, so it would be so much better if he could pick a graphic novel or more obscure comic book series and have Netflix buy the rights. I’ll watch whatever he makes, but I hope the next film is an adaptation, because he seems to work better within the limits of a pre-existing world.

Having Your Cake

Another criticism of the film is that it’s too much like a standard comic book movie with its focus on heightened violence while it’s supposed to be a satire of the genre. This isn’t entirely Snyder’s problem; it exists in the book. Sure, there aren’t as many gruesome close-ups, but there is plenty of blood in the book. Perhaps the movie goes too far at times, but overall I’m okay with it, because the result of violence is important. You see bones and blood, and it’s horrifying. Yes, part of me will always be a thirteen-year-old gleefully saying, “Oh, shit!” when I see stuff like that. But the movie fan in me currently suffering from severe Marvel fatigue appreciates the consequences of the violence. 

In Watchmen, every scene of violence is extreme. But in something like, say, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (which was a bit of a breaking point for me), there’s a moment during a fight in which one of the fighters gets seriously injured, and everyone stops like they had been play-fighting and someone had taken it too far. These are supposed to be superhumans fighting to the death, and when someone gets hurt, they call timeout? I get that Disney is worried about the kids or whatever, but I’ll take brutality over that weak shit every time.

When violence becomes so bland and commonplace that no one ever seems to get truly hurt, it loses its impact. I find the Marvel treatment of violence to be much more damaging to young eyes than Watchmen’s (not that I’m showing this to my kids anytime soon). At least in Watchmen, violence is horrific. And sure, the wrong audience (and wrong part of my brain) will find it awesome at times, but for the most part I’ll have the correct response and find it repulsive and disturbing. I would rather an audience be disturbed by violence than be numbed by it.

Which Cut?

Zack Snyder is getting up there with Ridley Scott when it comes to director’s cuts, and Watchmen is a perfect example of that. I saw the nearly three-hour theatrical cut a couple times in the theater, then bought the slightly over three hours director’s cut, and finally ended up with the three and a half hour Ultimate Cut, which is just the director’s cut with all the Tales of the Black Freighter stuff added. So when I revisit it, I have to make a choice.

As a lazy man, I tend to rewatch Watchmen on Max instead of getting out my blu-ray copy. But even with Max, there’s more than one option. If you just play the movie, you get the theatrical cut, but if you go to the extras section, the Ultimate Cut is available. I actually prefer the director’s cut, but I sold that copy after buying the Ultimate Cut, not realizing that the Ultimate Cut didn’t also include the director’s cut (physical media was very complex fifteen years ago). So I typically go with the indulgent Ultimate Cut when I revisit the film.

Since it’s essentially the director’s cut, if I’m giving the film my full attention, I’ll scan through the Black Freighter stuff as I watch. It’s not that I don’t like that stuff (it’s always nice to hear Gerard Butler using his normal accent), I just find it too jarring. In the comic, it’s not a big deal to go from a comic panel to a different type of comic panel. But for this film to go from this cinematic world to an animated pirate story just takes me out of it. 

As for the director’s cut, there are quite a few moments that I love that have been added. Dr. Manhattan transporting the entire TV studio is better than in the theatrical cut in which he transports from there to Mars. And the original Nite Owl’s death scene is one of the best moments in the entire film. For those two moments alone, I’ll always go with the cut that includes them.

But director’s cuts can take away some things, too. I already liked the theatrical cut, so a couple small things got changed that bother me every time I watch it. First, there’s a transition in the theatrical cut from Rorschach looking at the Minutemen picture in Comedian’s closet to the same picture in the original Nite Owl’s apartment. In the director’s cut, the scene in Comedian’s apartment needlessly continues as Rorschach fights a cop. It just adds a little more unnecessary action and takes out a good transition. 

The second issue I have is with the intro of the Comedian in Vietnam. In the theatrical cut, we first see him in the close up of him lighting his cigar with the flamethrower. In the director’s cut, he’s shown firing a gun from the helicopter, landing, and walking, in slow motion, of course, before we get the close up cigar lighting. 

These might seem like minor quibbles, but when you see something the first time and like it, it’s hard not to find the new version a little lesser. I suppose this is what all the original trilogy people feel like when they see the Star Wars Special Editions. 

But the good outweighs the bad, and with streaming now (or blu-rays that include every cut), I have the option to watch whatever I want. It’s not like it’s changed forever. 

Random Thoughts

That fucking Nixon nose…

The older I get the more I’m like the Comedian at the beginning of this: skipping over news and trendy shit and enjoying something nostalgic, or in this case, literal Nostalgia. I still want to watch as many new movies as I can, but I equally enjoy rewatching something I love, like this, even when I could be watching something new. I just want to sit back and lose myself in the past.

I will always love the opening credits, especially since I’ve become a much bigger Dylan fan since this first came out, but the Batman shot has always bothered me. So the implication in the first shot is that the original Nite Owl is thwarting the robbery that would have created Batman outside the Gotham opera house. But Nite Owl is in New York City…and there are Batman posters in the scene. I know I’m dissecting this too much, but I think this is a case of not having enough faith in the audience to put together what this scene is meant to represent, so Snyder tacked on the posters to hit you over the head with it. But come on, Snyder, we all see those fucking pearls on Martha’s neck; we get it.

I never understood the “Good luck, Mr. Gorsky,” line when Manhattan is filming Neil Armstrong on the moon. I assumed Gorsky was the name of a cosmonaut or something, but it turns out there’s an urban legend that when Armstrong was a kid he hit a baseball into his neighbors’ house, the Gorskys. While retrieving the ball, he heard Mrs. Gorsky yell, “Oral Sex?! You’ll get oral sex when the kid next door walks on the moon!” First off, how the fuck did anyone ever believe such a story? Secondly, what a weird thing to say in response to a blowjob request. Anyway, it’s bullshit.

Dr. Manhattan is handled perfectly in this. I imagine even haters of this movie enjoy his origin sequence, at least.

And Crudup deserves a lot of credit for it, too. His voicework is great when being gentle and sad, and even better when he finally loses it.

A lot of needle drops catch shit in this movie, but I love the use of “99 Luftballons” and to this day I think of Watchmen when I hear it.

I am not as big a fan of the use of “The Sound of Silence.”

“Mother, it’s two in the afternoon.” Am I just a drunk, or does that not seem like such a crazy time to be drinking? If it was ten in the morning, then maybe the line would work for me.

“I’m sixty-seven years old.” That line always makes me laugh. It is from the book (though it’s sixty-five there), but it’s just focused on so strangely in the film. And it’s not that vital of a line from the book, so why include it?

Same goes for “What happened to the American dream?” Yes, it’s from the book, but it’s not framed in the same way as the film, it comes across as more conversational. Some lines from books, especially comic books, just don’t work in film.

“I said, ‘Leave me alone!’” Gets me every time. Moments like that make me forget my minor issues with the film.

And then seeing Nixon’s nose brings me right back out of it. I just don’t understand why he’s featured so prominently in this. In the book, they keep him in the shadows or off-page, but when he is shown, it’s a realistic aging of him, they damn sure don’t double the size of his nose.

The attempted assassination of Veidt is one moment of extreme violence I don’t agree with, but it’s mainly because of Snyder’s now-famous love of slow motion. Instead of showing the scene in full speed, which would convey the famed speed of Veidt, it’s shown in slow motion, so we can see all the grisly details. Once again, I’m all for splattering blood all over the audience to hammer home the shock of violence, but this moment relishes in it too much.

Lee Iacocca taking a bullet between the eyes always amuses me, mainly because I found out later that he had no idea about it until a reporter contacted him for a quote. Imagine getting that call, “How do you feel about being shot in the head in the new comic book movie coming out this weekend?”

There’s no way a prison cafeteria has ever been set up with the fryers that close to the inmates, right?

I remember “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen catching the most crap when this first came out, and while I understand why such a song during a sex scene is groan-inducing, it was actually the first time I had ever heard the song.

There’s plenty of cheesy stuff in this film that is directly from the comic, and the Archie flame/cum shot is the worst of them all.  

Is the revelation of the newsstand guy and comic book reader having the same name (Bernard) the origin for Snyder’s Martha moment in Batman v Superman? If so, he didn’t listen to the comic book Bernard, who says, “Not big a deal. There’s lots of people called Bernard.”

And while I love the weirdness of the giant space squid in the book, I do think changing it to a supposed Dr. Manhattan attack is the better choice.

Veidt is watching The Road Warrior, Marvin the Martian, “Addicted to Love,” some porno, the “1984” Apple commercial, his own Nostalgia commercial, Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie, Fail-Safe, The 300 Spartans, Rambo: First Blood Part Two, This Island Earth (which you also see a poster for in the book), the MTV intro, the “Where’s the beef?” commercial, and some other stuff I didn’t recognize or couldn’t figure out from the credits.