Tuesday Testimonial: Watchmen - Greatest Comic Movie Ever

Hey gang and welcome back to the Tuesday Testimonial. This week I want to talk about something near and dear to my heart, comic books. Actually I want to talk about comic book movies, one in particular. Watchmen. To put a point on it I would like to submit that Watchmen is the greatest comic book adaptation ever. 

The Action 

Comic books are typically about the fantastic, which is not easily translated into film. Special effects, even the slightest, can make or beak a film. Special effects are also very expensive to boot. Put the two together with the kind of story that comic book movies are trying to tell and what you get is a recipe for disaster. The reasoning behind this I think is that the powers and abilities of the various characters take on a role of their own, and have to be rendered respectfully. Most comic book movies don’t render the action very well, they come close but ultimately fall short.

The Spider-Man films are a good example of action that is not respectful of the original content. The job is respectable but they don’t really sell the fact that Spidey is fast enough to dodge bullets. There is just something unsatisfying about the action because of that. On the other hand the Watchmen is the ideal story to make the transition with the action completely intact.

Unlike the Batman movies, the hand to hand combat in Watchmen is on par with the best action films, which says a lot about the filmmaker's attention to detail. What I appreciated was the idea that these people could train themselves or be of such a mental disposition that they are almost super human, and the action represented that to a tee.

Necessary Changes 

The other thing about comic book movies is the idea that they easily translate from the page to the screen. Certain things need to change in order for a story to work cinematically. The process of deciding what to cut has got to be very difficult if you think about it and the people who edited and re-wrote Watchmen did an admirable job and likely made the difference in the movie.

By now you’ve hopefully seen the movie or read the book and know that the major climactic moment in the film is severely different from the climactic moment in the book. This was a vital change that was a make or break point in the movie. Had the movie stuck to the script you would have suddenly had a new element added to the film that the audience would have to have explained to them. In other words, the movie would almost be interrupted by itself, instead of flowing toward like it does now. I mean really, where did the space alien come from?