Thanks to the new TV show from HBO, Watchmen has been in the popular eye more than ever. The original Watchmen was of course a highly influential graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons that helped popularize grim, gritty takes on superheroes. Now that everyone is writing about Watchmen, I’m going to try and take a different approach. In this article, I’m mainly going to be talking about what makes the original comic one of the best comics ever. I’m also going to try and talk about Zack Snyder’s controversial 2009 Watchmen movie. Although the movie has received a lot of criticism over the years, I really like it. Although there are many problems with it, it very faithfully adapts the source material and manages to really lock into what makes the comic good in the first place, making it a worthwhile viewing experience for any Watchmen fan. Also, I’m not going to try and compare the TV show and the movie and pit them against each other. The TV show is a different story that deserves its own, separate analysis.
Before we dive in, I’d like to get a few acknowledgments out of the way. The first is that Watchmen was an equal creative collaboration between writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons. Too often, Moore is given all the credit when Gibbons is responsible for a lot of the comic’s iconic style and helped collaborate on the plot. Secondly, in a just world there would be no adaptations or continuations of Watchmen, either in comic books or on the screen. DC Comics has continually cheated the Watchmen creators out of the rights to their characters and story, and broke their promises to not adapt Watchmen or use the characters in other comics, which is how we’ve ended up with sequels and prequels like Before Watchmen and Doomsday Clock, all made by other creators without Moore and Gibbons. Lastly, in discussing the Watchmen movie, I am referring to the extended director’s cut, and full spoiler alerts apply.
The original Watchmen is an absolute masterpiece, but not for the reasons a lot of people think. There are actually a lot of flaws in a lot of aspects of the comic. Watchmen is pretty convoluted with some significant jumps in logic required to make sense of the plot. The mystery elements are underdeveloped and ultimately kind of unsatisfying. Ultimately, the plot is really just a vehicle for the exploration of the world, the characters, and their backstories.
Although Watchmen has a lot of meaningful things to say about superheroes and the culture that surrounds them, its commentary on larger political and cultural issues often misses the mark. The idea that the U.S.S.R. would take an alien squid attack on the U.S. as a reason for global unification doesn’t make sense, especially when the world was led to believe that the U.S. Institute for Interspacial Studies was responsible for the squid entering our dimension. The U.S.S.R. was already expanding their military activities because they saw the U.S. as weak without Doctor Manhattan, wouldn’t they just continue to exploit an America that was further weakened by the deaths in New York? With regards to Doctor Manhattan ending the Vietnam War, Lyndon B. Johnson was one of the biggest war hawks the U.S. has ever had as president, escalating the war in Vietnam and sending hundreds of thousands of American troops in. He was definitely not the kind of man who would refuse to send in Doctor Manhattan, like he refuses in Watchmen. Also, in the world of Watchmen, Richard Nixon has abolished term limits and been president for over a decade. Nixon was an easy target for ridicule, in real life and in Watchmen, and it shows a lack of understanding of U.S. politics to think that Nixon, one of the most disliked U.S. presidents of all time, could be popular enough to abolish term limits. The plot and political elements of Watchmen do not stand up in the way the rest of the comic does.
Because the movie is so astoundingly faithful to the comic, there is really only one notable plot difference to discuss: the Space Squid hoax being replaced by the Doctor Manhattan hoax. Rather than generating an alien threat out of nowhere, it makes more sense for Ozymandias’ attack to be blamed on Doctor Manhattan. This makes it easier for the world to come to a unifying concordance about the situation, and attacks happening in multiple cities across the world helps put the countries of the world on level terms, which is what Ozymandias wanted. Although this change makes a lot more sense and is a general improvement, it unfortunately does rob the viewer of the impactful scenes of horrifying death from Watchmen 12.
Despite these plot issues, which are definitely still present in the movie, in many ways Watchmen is a comic without peer in terms of style, craft, and influence. In looking at what makes the comic good, you can see that those masterful aspects are oftentimes aligned with what makes the movie good. The movie succeeds in taking the best parts of the comic and translating them to the screen.
The characters of Watchmen are some of the most developed, multifaceted, interesting characters in any comic book ever, and the movie does them justice. The movie incorporates all the rich backstories Moore and Gibbons created. It takes the best dialogue straight from the comic and maintains the distinct voices of each of the characters. Rorschach’s rambling tirades and prophecies of doom are present in all their glory, as is Doctor Manhattan’s nonlinear narration of his own perception of time. The movie does not try to clean up the comic-book dialogue to make it more mainstream for a big budget movie, instead accepting the style for what it is. Also, Watchmen the movie has some of the best superhero movie performances one could ever ask for. Jackie Earle Haley seems like he jumped straight off the pages of the comic, in terms of looks and the manic rage energy he brings to the part of Rorschach. He makes the violence of Rorschach real and terrifying, and he does it all with a mask covering his face for most of the movie.
In portraying Doctor Manhattan, I think there would be some temptation to make his voice booming, deep, and bombastic to match his omnipotent power. By making Doctor Manhattan’s voice sound like a regular person’s, but just slightly off, the Doctor seems even more unsettling and detached from reality. Billy Crudup’s reserved, scientific performance matches the intentions of the comics perfectly.
Honestly, I think Jeffrey Dean Morgan improves on the character of the Comedian. He perfectly captures the Comedian’s amoral killer nature and the dark sense of nihilist irony and humor that informs his view of the world. The Comedian is the only character in Watchmen who ever truly has fun, and Morgan brings that perverse joy to his performance in spades. I think the movie and Morgan succeed, better than the comic does, in getting the viewer to understand the Comedian in the way they are able to understand the other characters.
Patrick Wilson studied the comic a lot before playing Night Owl, and he really gets the character down, just like he is in the comics. He also improves on the character of Nite Owl in one specific way. In the comic, Silk Spectre and Nite Owl acquiesce to Ozymandias’ request to keep the secret of the attack without much resistance. In fact, they wander off and have sex in Ozymandias’ house ten minutes after becoming complicit in mass murder, while Rorschach is being blown up for refusing to compromise, even in the face of Armageddon. In the movie, Nite Owl does not abandon Rorschach, his friend, and follows him out into the snow and watches Doctor Manhattan murder him. His later lashing-out at Ozymandias provides a modicum of redemption and is indicative of a man with morals forced to make an impossible moral decision, rather than a willing accomplice in Ozymandias’ crime, which is the impression the comic gives off.
I don’t think there are any truly bad characters in Watchmen, and I don’t think there any truly bad performances in the movie. Matthew Goode was kind of put up against a wall as Ozymandias, as the movie does not do a good job of hiding his villainous nature from the viewers. Malin Akerman was… not given a whole lot to work with as Silk Spectre, but like Goode, she does the best she can with the character, and has good chemistry with Wilson. Except in the Leonard Cohen Hallelujah scene. Even as a fan of the movie, there’s no defending that.
One of the major reasons Watchmen was the success it was is because Dave Gibbons is a master comic artist. The art for Watchmen is technically astounding, never falling into the trap of “dark story must have dark artwork.” Watchmen utilizes a full palette of bright colors (something the movie could’ve used more of) and while its heroes differentiate from regular superheroes, the art would be right at home illustrating the adventures of Batman, or Superman, or any number of typical comics. The art of Watchmen never pretends to be anything other than a comic-book, just like the Watchmen movie never pretends to be anything other than a comic book movie,
The main reason Watchmen is upheld as one of the pinnacles of the graphic novel is because of its stylistic innovation and the expert craft that went into it. The specific innovation Watchmen is most often associated with is the nine-panel grid. Almost every page of Watchmen is divided into three rows of three equal sized panels. Moore and Gibbons use this paneling to do a lot of creative things. It allows them to fit in the large amounts of dialogue necessary for a story as complex as Watchmen, and to take a storyboard-type approach to laying out the comic. The grid allows absolute control over the pacing of the comic. The grid can be used to get through a lot of goings-on in one page. It is the only way the comic could’ve contained all the necessary dialogue.It can also be used to slow moments down, going through them second-by-second and acknowledging their importance, such as the unique grid depicting the moment of Ozymandias’ attack that closes out Issue 11.
The grid is also used to for rapid cuts of time and perspective. This is used during the Doctor Manhattan origin story. There are pages where every panel is a jump in time as he experiences different parts of his life nonlinearly from before and after his death as Jon Osterman. It is also used in the Rorschach origin story, when an arrested Walter Kovacs is given a Rorschach test that triggers traumatic memories of his past. The cuts from the ink blots on the page to the horrifying images of Rorschach’s childhood are particularly jarring and memorable. These cuts could still be done with a traditionally paneled comic with four or six panels on the page, but having less panels increases the importance of each panel with regards to driving the plot and places constraints on the purely stylistic choices creators can make. Having more panels allows Watchmen to make frequent use of stylistic cuts without hurting the pacing of the comic or the conveyance of its plot.
When Moore and Gibbons break the nine-panel grid, they do so in deliberate and impactful ways. In order to prevent this post from becoming book-length, I’ll look at only two of those variations right now. There are very few instances of panels breaking through the grid vertically to stretch the height of the whole page. The most notable of these are used to display Doctor Manhattan using his power to grow to enormous size, which helps to symbolize his existence at a higher plane than the rest of humanity.
The first eleven issues of Watchmen contain no splash pages, which is the term for a comic page taken up entirely by one full-page image. Even the covers avoid the typical splash page concept, instead focusing in on some part of the first interior page of the issue. Most comics have at least one splash page in every issue, but in Watchmen there are none until the first few pages of the final issue. In issue 12, the bloody aftermath of the squid attack on New York is depicted in all splash pages, making the horrors of destruction, death, and the carnage in the streets big and in-your-face, making it impossible for the reader to gloss over the impact. Throughout Watchmen, the panel grid is used to depict movement and the passage of time. When the grid is taken away, in that climactic atrocity, time stops, with the millions of dead New Yorkers frozen in time and fixed forever. This grid removal to show a scene without movement is also used to show Doctor Manhattan alone on Mars and how different that environment is from Earth.
The Watchmen movie is one of the rare comic book movies to use panel-like stylings in an effort to be more faithful to the comic-book vibe. The overwhelming majority of the shots in Watchmen are stationary-camera shots, mimicking the fixed nature of a comic panel. The flashback cuts are as plentiful as they are in the comic, and are done expertly in the most emotional (and my favorite) scene in the movie, where a fighting and dying Hollis Mason has sepia-toned flashbacks to his glory days as the first Nite Owl. Snyder’s version of the scene even adapts a first-person perspective that I think increases the poignancy and empathy of the scene.
Interestingly enough, the best example of these comic book stylings is a scene that isn’t even in the comics. In the opening credits montage, which does an excellent job of catching up the reader of the decades of invented history that Moore and Gibbons work in subtly throughout the comic, scenes from across the history of superheroes are presented in super slow-motion, some shots almost devoid of movement entirely. The way director Zack Snyder moves between these single, expertly composed shots is like flipping through the pages of a comic book.
For most superhero movies, especially the Marvel ones, the overall philosophy is to take the comic-book characters and stories and transform them to fit the medium of the movie. The movies use traditional film conventions in the script and the way the movie is shot. That’s not a bad approach, but I have to commend Watchmen for taking a different one. Zack Snyder set out to translate a comic book to the screen while still maintaining the unique storytelling and visual styles of the comic book medium and the advantages that medium affords. Watchmen is not structured like a regular movie. It is almost like a TV miniseries with the episodes glued together. We get an “episode” focused on the Comedian, and one focused on Nite Owl and Silk Spectre, and other “episodes” focused on other characters and settings. This glued-together structure is not Good Film-Making 101, but it does mirror the nature of the Watchmen comic, which is twelve individual issues that combine to tell one larger story. If the best issues of Watchmen, like the Doctor Manhattan on Mars issue, were cut up to fit a more traditional film script structure, they would lose a lot of power Thankfully, Watchmen never animates on-screen comic panels, like the pretty terrible Ang Lee Hulk movie does.
To sum everything up: Watchmen is an incredible comic. Although it is a flawed story, it is made amazing by its characters, setting, art, and unique visual style. The movie, while also flawed, takes the good parts of the comic and translates them faithfully to the screen, while maintaining the comic-book aesthetic in a way most other comic book movies do not. If you are a fan of the comic, I recommend giving the movie a try, and appreciating it for what it sets out to do and what it accomplishes, as well as for some of the great acting performances.
