Watchmen: The Ultimate Cut Review

 About a year ago, I reviewed the theatrical release of Watchmen. It was my first movie review and so, looking back on it, I find it a tad unsophisticated and I have been wanting to revisit it. But it always seemed like a pointless errand to review the same movie twice, especially since I still agree with everything I said in that review. Fortunately, the dark lord does provide and so Paramount didn’t just adapt Alan Moore’s graphic novel, they franchised it. The Watchmen line has expanded to include cartoon featurettes, faux documentaries, a director’s cut and motion comics. And all of that culminates here in Watchmen: The Ultimate Cut. This version is headlined by the director’s cut of the original movie with the Tales of the Black Freighter animated feature edited into the story, but it also includes the Under the Hood fictional documentary, the complete set of motion comics and a digital copy version of the theatrical cut for some unknown reason. In essence, this is the quintessential cinematic Watchmen, the Grand Poobah adaptation of Alan Moore’s book. But is it any better than the original release?

…Kinda.

Let’s get one thing out of the way first. When I reviewed the theatrical release, I decided to look at it from two angles: as an adaptation of the book and as a stand-alone movie. I have since decided this was an invalid approach. When you review a movie, you’re supposed to see what it is trying to be and evaluate how well it becomes that. Well, what Zack Snyder’s movie is trying to be is Watchmen, the graphic novel in cinematic form. The script borrows almost every line from Alan Moore’s text and the direction seems to use the book itself as a storyboard. Therefore the questions of “How faithful is this to the text?” and “How good a movie is it?” are in fact the same question. Examining them separately is redundant.

And it’s a very tricky question to answer because Watchmen (especially this edition) really does try to incorporate every last detail of the graphic novel. But there’s a difference between being true to the letter of a work and being true to its spirit and Snyder’s movie isn’t only true to the letter of Moore’s book, it’s beaten down by it. The movie shifts fairly lifelessly from panel to panel, slavishly trying to capture every shot, every instant, of the book. The result is a rather glum movie of disjointed pieces stitched together inelegantly. Contrast this with a movie like Sin City or even Snyder’s previous effort in 300. Both of these stayed pretty close to the books, copying dialogue, imitating the art style and recreating scenes as best as possible. But both of these movies – Sin City especially – are exciting, dynamic and overflowing with energy; they’re experiences in a way Watchmen just can’t imitate.

So, what is it about Watchmen that makes this once successful approach falter? I think the answer rests in the source material. Sin City and 300 were both action stories where no two pages had the same panel layout. They were fast and frenzied, quick and exciting reads you could easily finish in one sitting. Watchmen was more methodical, much more literary. Several parts of the book were actually standard prose, but even its panel layout was fairly rigid. It was a sort of rigidity that didn’t stand out in the inherently static medium of a graphic novel, but it’s far too obvious in the inherently dynamic medium of film. Sin City had translation errors too (you know those moments where the dialogue just seems wrong and everything feels oddly off-kilter?), but it was going so fast you never had time to focus on any of that. With Watchmen, you have nothing but time. This is a weirdness you can adjust to, but it would have been better if Snyder spent less time faithfully transcribing the book and more time figuring out how to optimize it for a movie. Think of it like translating a poem from English to French; you can do it word-for-word and it will probably make sense, but it loses all sense of artistry.

But Snyder is so keen on maintaining fidelity to the letter of the book that even his soundtrack is composed of songs that it mentions in passing. Sometimes it’s just awkward and other times it’s downright amateurish, such as one scene where Dr. Manhattan stomps through the battlefields of Vietnam to the tune of “Ride of the Valkyries” (mentioned in Hollis Mason’s autobiography). One also has to wonder why some of the songs present aren’t sung by their original artists. Is the movie being intentionally ironic, displaying the absence of creative effort by modern bands as a reflection of itself? Probably not. It’s probably a budget/rights thing. But I suppose they do deserve some credit for saving the worst song (the My Chemical Romance evisceration of “Desolation Row”) for the end credits. I always thought studios wanted people to sit through the end credits, but this stands as strong evidence to the contrary. I have never seen a movie theatre empty so quickly.

There are exceptions, of course, moments of real creativity and ingenuity. The two best examples are the beginning and the ending. The opening credits are set to the tune of “The Times, They Are A-Changin’” (actually sung by the original artist) and they play over a montage of the Minutemen generation of superheroes. This is downright snazzy, absolutely fantastic, and likely the direct result of all the Minutemen stuff being tied into the decidedly less graphic parts of the graphic novel. They were prose sections that required creative reinterpreting to better suit the film and creative reinterpretation is what they got. Kudos! This montage is even better if you watch the Under the Hood documentary first, but more on that later.

The ending received a lot of flack prior to the release of the theatrical version. They dropped the giant squid. For shame! I too liked the squid, but it isn’t relevant here. The Watchmen book was largely a retrospective on the Silver and Golden Ages and aliens were a huge part of that, even in comic lines where they didn’t really belong, so using a fake alien menace as the resolution just seemed to fit. But aliens aren’t as pervasive in superhero movies and by dumping the squid they successfully eliminate the need to include another lengthy prose section that discusses the new history of comics and the missing writers. The new ending still works in largely the same way as the original, but it does so with less build-up. The only thing you can really say against it is that it adds this extra religious dimension that is brought up (perhaps unintentionally) and then left hanging.

In between these two scenes, though, the movie sort of pushes along in fits. I think part of the problem is that Zack Snyder is at heart an action movie director and this isn’t an action story. In my previous review, I said rather clumsily that “the narrative [is] trying to convey a deep and thoughtful drama, while the aesthetic conveys a slick, flashy action movie.” A better way of saying it is that the direction doesn’t suit the script. The script is after all the book, more or less, but the only times any of the characters really seem to come to life and everybody looks comfortable in their roles – director included – is when they all start beating on each other.

Looking around the Interweb, one can discover many analyses and defenses of the violence and gore in this movie. The arguments insist that all of the gore, all of the freeze-frame punches and all of the flashy fight choreography are actually part of an elaborate send-up of superhero violence, that they are all in-keeping with the spirit of the book because they are deconstructing superhero action by showing the violent aftermath. These scenes supposedly drag the superhero fantasy into reality, tear away the whimsy and show us the grim truth.

There are two problems with this belief.

The first concerns the stylized action (the freeze-frames and such). If these techniques are being utilized self-consciously to make a point about violence, then 300 is making that same point because it uses those same techniques in very much the same way. Now, you could say the violence in 300 is actually just a way for the soldiers to sublimate their own homoerotic impulses (because it is), but that has little to do with the slow-motion methods Snyder employs. He doesn’t use any of that stuff in either movie because he’s trying to make a point about the violence; he just wants to emphasize it for shock effect.

And that brings us to the gore, which is problem number two. Moore’s book is itself not devoid of bloodletting and one could argue that it is included specifically for this purpose: to show that violence hurts. But Snyder’s gore is just that: it’s gore, not simple bleeding, but rib cages and entrails and the like. This is excessive regardless of any point and utilized more in a way to appeal to gore fiends, rather than to bring any sense of reality to the violence. One such example is Rorschach’s final confrontation with Big Figure. In the book, he walks into the bathroom and we are left with Nite Owl and Silk Specter having a funny little chat about the logistics of answering nature’s call in costume. In the movie, that chat is removed so we can see the blood of Big Figure seep under a door. There is no reason to do this except to emphasize and showcase violence as a point in itself. In my theatrical review, I cited the unnecessary fight with the Comedian at the beginning as an example. While less gory, it is entirely pointless, completely destroys the pacing of the scene and is clearly there just to throw in another action sequence.

But the greatest evidence against any defense of the violence in this film is in the one scene where Snyder gets notably squeamish. When New York is destroyed in the book, it leaves behind a bloody mess. The first several pages of the last chapter move slowly through silent panels consisting of bloody corpses laying in the street. When Dr. Manhattan and Silk Specter discover this scene, they have a clear and visceral reaction; they are visibly sickened by what they are seeing. In the movie, the destruction of New York is caused through a mechanism that conveniently disintegrates the bodies, removing any possibility for emotional reaction from the audience. Even the characters respond with little more than “Wow, that’s a big hole.”

The reason for this decision is obvious: the filmmakers were worried about possible backlash for the inferences to 9/11. And if it weren’t for the violence in the rest of the film, this would almost be understandable. But if we’re running on the idea that Snyder is using that violence consciously to make a point, this undermines it. If the gore is designed to bring a reality check to superhero action, then the movie shouldn’t have shied away from the most visceral violent act committed by a superhero because this is a scene that would have unsettled the audience, would have conjured memories of real tragedies, would have shaken, disgusted, angered and surprised them. It would have jarred them from action movie complacency because this isn’t play violence like the rest of the movie; this is very real and Snyder doesn’t show it. What does he show? He shows gangster bits hanging from the ceiling, he shows people exploding in a bloody mess of organs and goo, he shows an almost comical amount of blood splatter against a wall as a convict’s associates saw through his arms and he shows broken arms, legs and necks in highly stylized superhero action scenes that differ from other superhero fights only in that these are in an R-rated movie. Alan Moore showed that when you hit someone, they bleed and he used gore to create an emotional response in his readers (flouting the Comics Code Authority). Zack Snyder avoids that emotional response and he uses violence because it looks cool.

And looking cool is really what this movie is all about. The world is computer generated, the fat sloppy heroes of the book are given stylized latex costumes and everything is just so very shiny. It actually looks great. In fact, it looks like a glossy version of the comic and everything – from the grimy streets of New York to a glass palace on Mars – feels cohesive. Like the fight scenes, everything does look cool, but one wonders if it should. The superheroes of Watchmen aren’t supposed to be cool; they’re supposed to be flawed and ungainly. But here they look like they could go toe-to-toe with Batman or Spider-Man and probably come out on top. You could say that this highlights the dichotomy between the person and the superhero. Out of costume, these are normal people with issues and vices, but in costume they shed all of those and become paragons, symbols, untouchable. This is especially the case with Nite Owl, who actually seems to lose a few pounds in his costume.

The problem is two-fold. First is that this is most certainly the case with Rorschach. He has definitely and unambiguously created a subdivision in his psyche that allows him to distinguish between the wants and drives of Walter Kovacs and the uncompromising moral code of Rorschach. So, with that element already in the story, it’s redundant to explore it with every other character. But then that’s the second problem: it doesn’t explore it with any other character. You could certainly argue that this element is there, but it’s vestigial at best because there is too clear a division between costumed and uncostumed personas without the psychosis of Rorschach to give it meaning. The only subdivision is between a drama and an action movie, the latter seemingly placed there to provide fodder for trailers. Moore showed that superheroes were always just people, regardless of what they were wearing. Snyder is showing us a bunch of action scenes with people in snazzy costumes in order to appeal to the “unwashed masses” who just want to see heads explode.

And if you don’t think this movie is talking down to its audience, then let me draw your attention to the flashback scene where Rorschach is investigating the kidnapping of a young girl. The book has this brilliantly subtle way of revealing her fate without actually saying it, but the movie feels the need to add a child’s shoe at the end of the leg bone because it doesn’t trust the audience enough to figure it out on their own. It’s the same issue as having the second generation of heroes directly referring to themselves as Watchmen. This smacks of someone behind the scenes insisting that movie audiences will be too confused by the title if it isn’t explicitly spelled out for them. It’s patronizing, it’s tawdry, it’s facile and it’s completely working against the spirit of Watchmen.

And that’s the problem. No matter how long it is, this movie just isn’t capturing the spirit of the book. I haven’t yet said much about the features exclusive to The Ultimate Cut, mainly because they don’t do anything to resolve these bedrock flaws with the movie; they just make it longer. They offer only more stringent adherence to the book without any consideration to their necessity in this adaptation. The Tales of the Black Freighter epitomizes this. This was filler even in the book, but it was weaved through the story so fluidly and so creatively – with the Mariner’s descent into madness able to mirror any aspect of the main narrative at any time – that it’s impossible to fault it. Here, it doesn’t weave through the story so much as interrupt it at various arbitrary and discreet points. It’s quite obvious that this was originally created as an independent feature that was hurriedly chopped up and distributed randomly throughout the movie, sometimes very awkwardly. It’s never as directly pertinent to the rest of the story as it was in the book and it’s as irrelevant to a cinematic interpretation as the giant squid. It also makes the original movie even more disjointed because now not only does it have to alternate between an action movie and a drama, but a cartoon as well.

It’s fan service, basically, but it’s not too bad. It may be awkward, but it adds a certain stylistic touch that’s hard to hate. I wish it did flow through the story in a closer approximation of the book (because a movie could do this), as it would have at least been an interesting visual move. I also wish the Mariner didn’t have a new zombie buddy to sit there and tell us he’s insane (you know, because it’s patronizing, facile, yadda, yadda, yadda). But unlike the live action parts of the movie, these segments move with purpose, conviction and confidence. Each new sequence is also book-ended by the newsstand segments with the two Bernies. The theatrical cut already found ways to relate the war plot without them, so they are a tad unnecessary, but they do add a touch of resonance to the destruction of New York wholly absent from the theatrical cut. And one does welcome the cartoon interruptions because at the very least, they help this occasionally flaccid recitation feel a bit more animated.

The director’s cut (to which the Black Freighter bits are added) doesn’t change too much from the theatrical cut. Its biggest and smartest addition is the Hollis Mason death scene. It’s actually a very nice scene, cutting back and forth between his surprisingly tasteful fight with the knot tops and his glory days fighting various eccentric supervillains. It boggles the mind how this scene was ever allowed to be cut, just as it boggles the mind why this supposedly “ultimate” package includes a digital copy disc of the only version of this movie without this scene in it. It seems that should have been either the director’s cut or this Ultimate Cut with the Black Freighter segments. Go figure.

The motion comics are basically pointless. These are a twelve-part miniseries that tells the story of the graphic novel, animating the transition between the panels. Each chapter is an episode, but some are noticeably and lazily trimmed down to fit an arbitrary half-hour episode length. They also make no attempt to include each chapter’s primary source document, so you can’t get the whole story through these. One other little issue is that they didn’t hire voice actors for each character, just a single male narrator. He performs brilliantly with the male cast, sometimes so well it’s actually hard to believe it’s one guy. He doesn’t do so well with female characters, however, and listening to his Silk Specter voice takes you right out of the story. Really, the best thing you can say about the motion comics is that they’re a partially complete book on tape that you can’t listen to while driving.

The best addition here is undeniably the Under the Hood documentary. This is a fictional, seemingly seventies-styled series of interviews with several characters from the Minuteman days that establishes the beginnings of this fictional universe, which the book relegated largely to the first three chapters of Hollis Mason’s autobiography, also entitled “Under the Hood.” But this isn’t just about Mason; you also get interviews with Sally Jupiter (the original Silk Specter), her manager/husband and Moloch, the favored supervillain of the old days. The Moloch sections are particularly interesting, giving some insight into the supervillain mindset that the book – and subsequently the movie proper – didn’t really explore. To give it an air of realism, the documentary is also occasionally broken up by commercials, some of which fans of the book might recognize. But sadly, while you do get Nostalgia ads, you never see a commercial for those Watchmen toys.

Other small issues arise. The digitally created “film grain” looks like what it is. There is a big to-do at the end about how Hollis used to have the hots for Sally that proves to be nothing more than a long and winding road toward some heavy-handed foreshadowing of the romance between the younger Nite Owl and Silk Specter. And while they’re busy cruising down that road, they completely forget to mention the fates of the Silhouette and Dollar Bill.

Still this is a nifty little way of establishing the backstory and definitely worth watching right before the movie itself. The one issue is that watching Under the Hood with The Tales of the Black Freighter and the director’s cut – essentially watching the entire Ultimate Cut – tends to bring the run-time up to about four hours. Personally, though, I don’t have a problem with long movies, especially fantasy or sci-fi movies, because it gives the film a chance to really explore and develop its fictional universe or, in this case, it gives the film a chance to squeeze in as much of the fictional universe as it can.

And that brings us back to where we were before. Watchmen is being as true as possible to the letter of the book, but not the spirit. And it is possible to capture this much of the text, encapsulate it into a behemoth of a film and still miss the point entirely. Take The Reader, which was a filmic adaptation of a book about the redeeming power of literacy. No matter how faithful an adaptation it is, the process alone is inherently self-defeating. Watchmen was a comic book about comic books and the history and development of comic books. Snyder’s adaptation is a movie about comic books and the history and development of comic books. It isn’t self-defeating, but it’s certainly not relevant. People talk about how Watchmen is a huge step forward in the superhero genre and it was… twenty-four years ago. Since then, we’ve had Bronze Ages, Modern Ages and an entire filmic subgenre that this movie never talks about.

And that’s the problem: the movie has nothing new to say. When sitting down to adapt the book, it seems nobody ever thought to ask why. Why does this movie need to exist? How can cinema use Watchmen to tell a story a comic book couldn’t? What artistic vision did anyone on the production team have for this premise? Even the Harry Potter movies have some justification in offering a visual spectacle for their audience that can’t be found in the books, but that isn’t a valid motive for adapting a graphic novel. This movie has no motivation except to cash-in on a popular title, nothing to say about its genre except what Alan Moore said about the genre that influenced it. I suppose you could say some of the costumes are tweaked slightly to resemble the fetishized outfits of the Joel Schumacher Batman movies. Great. A fleeting, debatable, twelve-year-old reference to two movies nobody liked. Good job.

Other flimsy attempts to make this film more relevant to today include a bad Bush joke and Ozymandius’ misjudged discussion of the Cold War in the terms of the War on Terror. But really this film has no voice of its own, no reason to justify its making. Some would argue that it’s nice to see an action movie with dramatic weight and thoughtful ideas behind it – and it is – but when none of those ideas came from anyone on the production team, that argument rings hollow. You can’t say Watchmen has upped the ante for the superhero movie genre; it hasn’t. It’s too safe, too patronizing, too modish. It’s too caught up in this latest trend in the superhero film genre of discouraging interpretation and paying lip service to the fans while clinging desperately to the letter of the comics.

This is especially obvious in the reboots and inexplicably popular amongst comic fans. And so the timeless, mordant and exciting world of Tim Burton’s Batman movies is now disregarded in favor of Christopher Nolan’s delusionally topical adaptations of Batman: Year One and The Long Halloween. Ang Lee’s Hulk saw the questions of emotion and identity raised by the title character and actually took time to examine them, but it is widely considered inferior to the recent Incredible Hulk where he actually says “Hulk Smash!”. And the 2004 Punisher movie that strove for the real military styled action and complex characters with motives and moral liminality inherent in the Punisher’s premise is discounted because the gorefest comedy that was Punisher: Warzone has Jigsaw and Soap in it.

It’s not hard to understand why this trend developed. It’s much easier being true to the letter than the spirit because the letter is concrete. It’s, you know, written down. It’s repeatable, quotable and more immediately recognizable. Sometimes the letter is enough. The Reader, for example, is still widely considered to be a good movie, despite its muddled message. But superheroes are, at their most fundamental level, science-fiction and science-fiction has traditionally been a genre about new ideas, about exploring concepts, about looking beyond the obvious to see what’s lurking beneath or above. And this is why I would argue a gothic nightmare world of flawed characters is much more Batman than taking a single graphic novel and adding in some heavy-handed terrorism allegory, that exploration of the deeper psychological atavisms that Hulk can represent is nearer the essence of the character than having him fight Abomination and that leveling the moral playing field between heroes and villains is far truer to Punisher than having him swing upside-down from a chandelier with infinite ammo Uzis.

It’s in this vein that I think the most frustrating thing about Watchmen – whether the cut be ultimate, director’s, theatrical or Smellovision – is its inconsequentiality. Alan Moore’s Watchmen redefined a genre, it elevated superheroes from tights-wearing action heroes with a bit of angst to tragic figures with real emotional depth. Zack Snyder’s Watchmen contributes nothing to its genre, it elevates superhero movies from ninety minutes to four hours. Alan Moore proved that comic books are not the exclusive purview of children’s entertainment, that they are a viable means of artistic expression. Zack Snyder proved that movies are capable of robotically rehashing somebody else’s ideas. The Watchmen graphic novel established the power of comics. The Watchmen film showcased the weaknesses of cinema… or at least those imposed by the industry that controls it.

 It’s not a step forward, but at least it isn’t a step back. Hard work and care clearly went into this movie and it isn’t unenjoyable. Much like The Reader, the framework of the book – built on superhero archetypes that never go away – is strong enough to support it and you can adjust to its flaws quickly enough. There is no reason whatsoever for this movie to exist, but given that this is a Hollywood that gave Fame a High School Musical make-over, that turned Psycho into a mindless slasher movie and that I have no doubt will one day remake Citizen Kane with a cast of ditzy teenaged valley girls, I will concede that it could have been worse.

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