drwex | Quis Custodiet?

This Saturday DrKaren agreed to kid-sit for us so we could go out and have a civilized dinner and watch a movie. Which we did. Also, it's great to have babysitters who remind our kids just how nice Mom and Dad are...

We went to dinner at Taipei Tokyo, a Chinese-Japanese place that's just opened near Woburn Center. There have always been cheap and hole-in-the-wall Chinese places, and there was a sushi place. This is trying to bring some of the best of both, and aiming at a mid-scale clientele. No liquor license yet, but you can BYO and some people are doing that. The sushi is decent and I got a spicy shrimp dish that was - lo and behold - actually spicy without my having to make a big fuss about it.

And then there was Watchmen. I've been nervous about seeing this movie since it was first announced. It would have been so easy to botch it, to put out another League of Extraordinary Gentlemen flick that would have totally missed what the comic was about. It didn't help that the two critic reviews I heard before going were both negative.

In order to make a large complex story into a movie it's necessary to streamline things, usually by dropping sub-plots or even chunks of the main plot. And usually a movie needs to have a single focus; this book is full of sub-plots and has several overlapping focus ideas.

So the movie dropped some sub-plots (one of which is available as a separate animated short) and simplified several things. They dropped the whole notion of deconstructing the superhero mythology in favor of focusing on the "what does it mean to be human" question. Most of Watchmen's characters are inhuman to some degree, ranging from Comedian's government-sanctioned sociopathy to Rorschach's outlaw misanthropy to Dr Manhattan's overt uberman status. And yet the story is about their humanity and their connection to humankind. I think the movie did well to focus on this and did a pretty good job of it.

Far and away the two best characters were Jackie Haley as Rorschach and Jeffrey Morgan as The Comedian. Each makes their character understandable, if not actually sympathetic. Rorschach as the ultimate uncompromising zealot, and the Comedian as the guy who thinks he 'gets it' and is going to go out laughing. Rorschach is something of the film's narrator and getting us to understand his point of view, even if we don't like him, is a great trick. The ever-changing Rorschach mask is one of the best bits of tech gimmickry in the film and the way that Haley remains Rorschach even without the mask drew me in.

Billy Crudup also does a good job as Dr Full Frontal Male Nudity... err, excuse me, Dr Manhattan. Yes, it's right that Dr Manhattan doesn't wear clothes but the director still chooses far more full frontal shots than are necessary. In particular, much of the plot revolves around the question of whether Dr Manhattan still feels any connection to humanity. To judge that, it helps to be able to see his face, but we get not nearly enough close-ups. Still, we get to know a guy who has become something utterly Other and yet is still human enough to be "disappointed" or to be moved by the tears of a woman he no longer knows how to love.

One of the key places where the movie cut from the original badly was in Manhattan's final scenes on Mars with Laurie. He makes an analogy between microcosmic events and the plot events that finally bring him back to Earth. But for some reason the speech is cut short in the movie so it feels kind of out of left field, to me.

Likewise I think both Malin Akerman as Laurie Jupiter and Patrick Wilson as Nite Owl are ill-served by the script. Laurie's central conflict is that she's a star-groupie type who falls for older guys and has something secret about her past. But we see almost none of her hatred for the Comedian, which TOTALLY robs the climactic revelation of its power. The prison fight scene is pretty gratuitous, and her sex scene is made into a travesty with a joke ending.

Wilson's Nite Owl is a nebbish guy who does good anyway and is trapped in things he just can't cope with. He's also put in those unfortunate fight and sex scenes, plus the director seems determined to duplicate almost frame-for-frame many of the shots of Nite Owl from the graphic novel. There doesn't seem to be any room for the actor to bring his character to life.

And speaking of life, probably the biggest loser of the pack is Matthew Goode as Ozymandias. One of the really key things about Ozymandias is that he has incredible charisma. He's able to convince people of things, understands human psychology at a deep level, and has an incredible public personality. Goode has none of that. He's a skinny guy with a slightly odd accent and we're just supposed to accept that he can do all these incredible scientific and physical things. His deep evil is that he believes that ends justify means and when he says he has "made himself feel every death" he has caused that has to mean something. The way it's delivered in this movie, it doesn't.

I also have some complaints about costuming and make-up details. Malin simply doesn't have big boobs, and we get to see them unclothed, which makes the push-up costume all the worse. She's a former figure skater and dancer who really doesn't need fake enhancements to look good. And, really, Nixon's nose was not that big.

With all this working against the movie, I can see why the critics didn't like it. However, there are a number of good things going on here. They dropped the whole subplot about the news-stand and its minor characters, simplified out the story of the psychologist Rorschach works with, and dropped the movie-monster subplot. The maguffin they replaced it with works very well in my opinion. The story they focus on is kept strong without being over-simplistic.

They also captured the look and feel of the times in which the story elements are set. Resisting the temptation to "update" it was a wise move. Movies don't need to be set in the present day to be relevant.

Also, critics have complained about the amount of "backstory" in the film. I think that misses the point. Watchmen is a highly interwoven and non-linear narrative. When Ozymandias tells Rorschach and Nite Owl that he's already done what he's telling them about it perfectly ties in to what the movie has been doing all along. We've been watching things that happen because things already happened. And we're tied back into Dr Manhattan's idea of viewing time as something other than a simple linear sequence.

In the end there's more good than bad and they did not flub this one badly. It's not the epic it could have been, but that's not hugely surprising. It's still Hollywood, after all.