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Watching the Watchmen
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I have a theory about great works. As a rule, great works are worthwhile because they take advnatage of the strentgths of their medium; this means that as a rule, cross-adaptation is bound to be disappointing -- especially for those that appreciated the original, but even for those who come into the derivation fresh, the sense of compromise will always be present.
Once in a while, as with Lord of the Rings, you get a win; however, again, one of the strengths of the origninal volumes was the fantastic mental imagery that the language brings into the reader; the poetic language is deliberate in how much the creatures of Middle Earth are described, and in the omission of detail, you are given an immense amount of freedom in imagining your own demons and heros. For instance, while the setting is European, there is little to prevent a reader from another culture from reimagining the content in their own culture and humanistic frame of reference. Now that the books have been rendered out in cinema, that option only exists for those who deliberately choose the written form before exposing themselves to the movie.
Comics (graphic novels, whatever) are, after all, printed material -- the audience controls the pace, and chooses whether to focus on the text or the images. The scale of the frames to each other is one of the design choices available to the creator, and they are allowed a wider suspension of disbelief because they tell stories that are largely, iconic -- closer to greek myths than Russian literature. The advantages of the media is that there is no limit to what can be drawn; a dinosaur doesn't require any more effort to render than a bus stop. Finally there is a lot of graphic expressives ("Pow! Baf!") that really have no analog in any other media. And, as a rule, the visual elements of the heroes IS the primary impression they deliver. Superman IS a titan in blue tights and a red cape; in fact, neither Superman nor Batman even have any identifiable pattern of speech or accent, and other than a few phrases ("Up up and away!") almost anything "fits" in their dialog. Other than Frank Miller's "Dark Night" series, which gave the two heroes a much more distinct narrative, these classic comic book characters simply don't have an inner life: their characters like those of most action heroes are simply reactive to their enemies -- whose personalities are generally much more fleshed out!
Comics have evolved from drawing and illustration. The Japanese traditional illustration comes very close to the modern comic book. Movies on the other hand are extensions of theatre: they are constructed (mostly) using real people. Real people do not go "Paf". They do not explain out loud obvious things like "My God, I've been shot!" As such, Comics have some of the highest barriers to transition into cinematic form -- not only in the fantastic visuals, but in the nature of dialog that is often not meant to be read aloud, or designed with the flow of theater or cinema.
I have to say that the cast of Watchmen did a noble job of trying to realize Adam Moore's work. And the original work did a lot towards bringing the narrative flow of the comic away from the fantastic and at times, childishly simplistic declaratives of the classic four-colors, and towards the naturalistic language of modern drama.
In comics, all the dialog is a "Baf!". It fights for attention with some of the most engaging, dynamic graphic art in the modern world this side of video games. As such each line must have an epic quality, or the audience simply stops reading the copy. That is not natural dialog. If someone spoke "Baf!" lines all the time, you would probably want to punch them. So when you take that narrative out of the visual dimension and put it into a sound track, its bound to sound overworked and over-glorified.
If you compare The Watchmen to Sin City, where most of the dialog is truly embarrassingly unnatural, you can see why The Watchmen seems like a much richer fodder for a movie. However, "Richer" does not mean "Appropriate" or "Ideal." Rorsharch specifically just comes across as wrong; I think they were shooting for Clint Eastwood, but the results are just extremely artificial -- or to be blunt, bad acting.
But enough on the dialog. The visuals are nearly perfect, and there are a lot of them. I saw it on a midnight showing of IMAX and I would highly recommend the IMAX version if you can make it. The fights are 85% Matrix, 15% Adam West. And the retro imagery is pretty damn sweet -- Ron Frassler's Koppel was so good I actually thought they must have cast Koppel himself. And beyond the dramatics of the plot, the film is really, really fun. As an action movie, it has a lot going for it ... except that the dialog, in trying to be significant, kind of drags at the simple fun of punks getting what they deserve.
So in my opinion, The Watchmen (the comic) is best viewed in its original form. The Watchem (the movie) is at best, a pretty good movie trying too hard to be as great in its own medium as the comic was as a comic. In some ways, it is the closest analog to Heroes as exists in the comic world; and on TV, bracketed by the white noise of ads, Heroes with its longer run time does much better at capturing what the Watchmen wants to be than the movie does.
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