Watched man

***SPOILER WARNING*** ***THE FOLLOWING CONTAINS SPOILERS***

I saw the Watchmen last week and came away with mixed feelings about it.

The plot of Watchmen is a bit too complicated to explain concisely so I will explain what I think is the main premise: what would it be like to live in a world with real super heroes?

Set in a alternative 1985, Richard Nixon is still in power, the world is near nuclear destruction from the Cold War, and super and non-super heroes exist.

Some of the heroes are little more that masked vigilantes who think violence is the only answer to crime (who are rightly named borderline sociopaths), others use money and technology to develop fight evil, and one other, Dr Manhattan, is a genuine super hero with the power to be (nearly) everywhere at once and control matter on a sub-atomic level.

And guess what? They are all fucked up.

There are two ways to approach reviewing this film. One is to judge it as an adaptation of the original comic. The other is as a film in its own right. For your delight, I shall attempt to do both.

First, as an adaptation: I think director Zack Snider has done a sterling job. Adaptation from one media to another is always difficult, but he's done well to include some of the major themes and ideas from Alan Moores' original comic.

Scenes are faithfully rendered. The imagery is correct. Visually, I can barely fault it at all. There are even some original touches, such as the flower girl putting a flower in the soldier's gun, and the soldier opening fire in a burst of petals.

The best parts of the dialogue is kept, Rorschach's line after flash frying a prisoner's face, Dr Manhattan's thoughts on Mars about saving the world.

Almost nothing is missing. Except the depth, which is part of the problem. I'll reiterate that something is almost always inevitably lost from translating from one medium to another, and so it is here.

In the comic, some back stories have a huge impact. The history of Rorschach, and how he loses his humanity, his upbringing, the cases he's dealt with, cannot be explained in the few minutes on screen we have here. The discussion on politics, the essays on media portrayal, articles on history, all prevalent in the comic: all gone and with it some of the subtext and all important detail.

As a film, I thought Watchmen started off brilliantly, then tailed off with moments of excitement mixed with some extremely naff scenes. I thought the opening with the Comedian was brilliant and set up the whole film with brooding intensity and anticipation. The opening montage played over Bob Dylan's Time Are A-Changing was also an arresting way to show a lot of history (especially on the Minutemen) and ideas very quickly and in an inventive style.

The action and fighting were fast, furious, with every bone break and skull split causing the audience to wince, like we rightly should.

But Snider cannot do serious. Like almost everyone, I thought the softcore porn scene with Nite Owl and Silk Spectre was dreadful, so much so I nearly had to put my head in my hand and miss seeing a pair of breast on the big screen. There are too many scenes of characters looking at the screen and shouting NOOOOO!!!!! (Nite Owl when Rorschach dies; Silk Spectre when she finds out the Comedian is her father on Mars).

Snider can do flippant well, but anything he tries to inject emotion in comes across as a bad joke.

Action kudos goes to Patrick Wilson (Nite Owl), Jackie Earle Haley (Rorschach), Jeffrey Dean Morgan (The Comedian) and Billy Crudup (Dr Manhattan). Extra kudos goes out to Dr Manhattans ghostly blue penis and the computer programmers that made it possible. Nice.

Musical cues were also a sore point. I thought the music would represent the era. Bob Dylan in the 1960s, 99 Red Balloons in the 1980s, but then Snider uses Simon and Garfunkel, Leonard Cohen, and Jimi Hendrix in scenes set in the 1980s, totally ruining the musical feel of the time. You're not allowed to play a song just because it sounds cool, it must fit in with that part of the film.

Why would you play All Along the Watchtower when flying to a secret base in Antarctica?? It's a great song Zack, but why Zack, why? And Hallelujah is not a sexy song Zack, it's a spiritual song. A song about faith and redemption and inspiration. Not about finding your erection in a floating olive shaped spaceship.

But despite my critisisms, I still think it's a good film and one worth watching. It's good because it retains a lot of the big ideas from the original comic, which are worth exploring, and if this is only way you can encounter it, then it's not a bad way to start the conversation.

The film is unwieldy, but is supposed to come across as a mad dream of alternative realities and history. It is worth watching because it is driven by ideas (even more so than character or plot I think) and you won't see another film like it for a while.

What Watchmen is is a angry dangerous grimy B-movie, like you used to see on late night Channel 4, blown up a million times bigger and louder.