RobKirkpatrick.com

I saw Zack Snyder’s adaptation of Watchmen on its first night of release. I rarely care about seeing a movie on its first night; I tell people: “I’m pretty sure they’ll show the same movie tomorrow night.” But knowing and loving the source book as I did, and knowing that studios had been trying - unsuccessfully - to produce a film of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s classic graphic novel since soon after its release as a 12-part DC comic book series running from September 1986 to October 1987, I didn’t want to miss this premiere. For nearly two decades, it had seemed like a day that would never come.

I was introduced to Watchmen back in the spring of 1988 by Tom DeHaven in his American Studies course at Rutgers University. (DeHaven now teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University and is also an acclaimed writer of such novels as Funny Papers and, his most recent, It’s Superman!). His course at Rutgers was a fun and eye-opening look at the whole history of American comic strips and books in the 20th century, and reading Watchmen for the first time was a revelation. It’s a brilliant, postmodern tale, deep with subtext and rich in meaning – so much so that Time magazine named it one of the 100 best books of the year, period. And in retrospect, even that seems like faint praise.

One of the achievements of Moore and Gibbons’s Watchmen was the ways in which it approached the history of the comic-book superhero in American popular culture. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster forever established the archetype of the superhero with their creation of Superman, who first appeared in the June 1938 debut issue of Action Comics. Last week, the Associated Press reported that a copy of Action Comics #1, of which “only about 100 copies” are known to exist, sold for $317,200 in an action. 

I’ve always thought the concept of superheroes was, well, corny. But seeing Watchmen and revisiting its story has had me thinking about the history of comic-book superheroes and how they are instrinsically American. In fact, they arose directly out of the concept of the American Dream. Both Siegel and Shuster were the sons of Jewish immigrants (Siegel born in Cleveland and Shuster in Toronto). Not coincidentally, Superman himself was an
“immigrant,” a displaced resident of an alien planet. Not only does he assimilate into American culture, he both protects and champions it. Nietzsche’s theories of the Übermensch in the 19th century gave us an early concept of the “super man”…and perhaps the philosophical precursor to Hitler’s visions for an Aryan master race. Just two years before Superman’s debut, Jesse Owens had struck a blow to Hitler’s Aryan mythology at the 1936 Summer Olympic in Berlin. In Superman, America’s immigrants could take pride in Siegel and Shuster’s answer to Hitler, a “Jewish-born” man of unearthly might who fought for the downtrodden. The character of Superman was initially a New Deal superhero of sorts, a left-leaning social activist who fought capitalist greed and corruption. During World War II, though, he became a superpatriot as he and comic-book colleagues Wonder Woman and Captain America helped the Allies defeat the Axis Powers. Following the war, as film noir challenged clean-cut notions of Good vs. Evil, superhero comics would decline in popularity. But they’ve made comebacks again and again as new generations of superheroes and new reimaginations of older ones like Superman and Batman have reflected changing moods and values in American society.

After searching local theaters on moviefone.com the morning of March 6, I found tickets for Watchmen at the Clearview Chelsea Cinemas on West 23rd in New York. I was transfixed as I watched the opening montage – set to Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” – which introduces the alternate-world history of the graphic novel, one in which superheroes really do exist. In this great segment, we watch a progression of superhero history from before World War II to the present day, one that closely mimics the history of comic-book superheroes (and American society as a whole) in our own world: from their role in WW2 as manifestations of American Exceptionalism to Cold War paranoia to fragmentation and deconstruction during the ’60s and ’70s. Watchmen is set in 1985 and follows the second generation of heroes, after the Keane Act that has outlawed them as vigilantes.

I rarely see movies that are based on comic books. I’m not a fan of the Batman films, never had a serious urge to see any of the Spiderman movies, and forget about The Hulk. I think there’s an inherent problem in trying to make a movie out of a comic book. As DeHaven observed in his course, by the very nature of a comic strip or book, each panel is frozen in time – the action takes place in between the panels. So it strikes me that in making a film out of a comic, you kill it at the same time. But the Watchmen trailer had me looking forward to the film; it sure looked like they had gotten it right.

Since watching the movie, I’ve been astounded by some of the bad reviews. The Washington Post declared, “Watchmen is a bore.” New York Magazine went one further: “The movie is embalmed.” The Hollywood Reporter smugly quipped, “Looks like we have the first real flop of 2009.”

Watchmen is not a perfect movie, but neither is it a bore.  As a film, not to mention one that took on the most acclaimed graphic novel of all time, it’s a remarkable achievement. And at a length of 2:43, only at the end does the film seem to drag at all. Actually, Snyder (Dawn of the Dead, 300) somewhat drops the ball at the end, failing to fully represent the acopalyptic ending of the book. On the other hand, the depiction of Dr. Manhattan (the godlike character created by an accident at a nuclear research center) is one of the biggest triumphs in modern computer imaging in film. Malin Akerman is stunning and sexy as Silk Spectre II – the mutual love interest of Dr. Manhattan and Nite Owl II (a close cousin to our Batman, played by Patrick Wilson), and Jackie Earle Harley – Kelly in the original Bad News Bears movies - is great as the enigmatic Rorschach.

Ironically, I’ve read that people who had read the book liked the movie more than those who didn’t; one would expect those who brought high expectations to be the film’s harshest critics. But speaking as a fan of the book, I have to admire what Snyder did with his adaptation.

Four out of five stars.

-Rob