Tom Salinsky

I thought I’d break from my musings on screenwriting and storytelling and give you a review of Watchmen from the point of view of someone who is familiar with the original graphic novel, but is neither an insane proselytizing zealot, nor someone who regards still pictures plus dialogue as beneath him (whereas moving pictures plus dialogue is high art).

This review is basically spoiler-free, but if you want to know nothing about the movie before you see it, then read this – and any review – when you get back from the cinema.

In 1985, Watchmen was an extraordinary achievement from writer Alan Moore, artist Dave Gibbons and comics company DC who let them tell this story. The premise was very simple: what would America look like today if in the 1940s, maverick crime-fighters actually had started running around in spandex tights, instead of this merely being depicted in what were fairly simplistic comic books for children? From this basic premise, Moore and Gibbons spun a tale which not only included its own roster of memorable “super” heroes (almost none of them has superpowers, only fancy costumes and tenacity) but which added to that mix a glowing blue godlike man, a terrifying form of detente, a pirate tale-within-a-tale and of course an gigantic alien psychic squid.

The comic was a sensation, and in the wake of the success of Tim Burton’s Batman, a movie was swiftly mooted. But it’s taken 25 years and a revolving door of directors and screenwriters before Zack Snyder’s movie version has finally made it to our screens, basically fairly faithfully, with some easy-to-swallow compressions and elisions, some minor updates and the substitution of the original’s most outré (and tentacled) element with something rather more mundane in conception, but equally devastating in effect.

But the world has also changed in the last 25 years. In some ways, this is immensely to Watchmen’s benefit. Can you imagine how hokey a 1987 version of Dr Manhattan would have looked, perhaps played by Charlie Sheen, slathered with blue make-up and covered with hand-drawn rotoscoped sparkles? We had a lucky escape there.

But superhero movies have also changed. It’s a cliché to say that directors like Zach Snyder use the original comic as a storyboard, and here it’s clearly untrue in the strictest sense, since one of the comic’s most notable features is that almost every page is divided into nine tall-and-skinny frames, none of which would be suitable storyboard illustrations for a 2.35:1 widescreen movie. But while the individual compositions may have vanished, it’s impossible to watch the movie and then read the book without each reflecting the other very strongly. Snyder takes his lead from Gibbons again and again and again, in terms of pacing, angles, lighting and even the expressions and hairstyles of the actors.

However, Snyder adds to this his own CGI environments and impossible tracking shots, speed ramps, fast cutting and explicit gore. The Watchmen of the comic are highly realistic and grounded compared to other comic-book heroes of the day – but the crimefighters depicted in Snyder’s film are every bit as preternaturally fast, sturdy, hyperaware and impervious to pain as the most ludicrous of their modern day cinematic brethren. And so this is the second change which the twenty-five year gap has wrought – we know what comic book movies are supposed to look like now. After the twin false starts of Superman and Batman, an established cinematic style has been established for this kind of movie – never mind that Watchmen was never intended to be this kind of movie!

And this lack of real-world grounding is added to by the fact that this is now a period piece. This, the third gift of the quarter century gap, is the one that neither Snyder nor Gibbons nor Moore could really do anything about. When the comic was published, Moore was writing about an alternate now, but the movie is a period piece set 25 years in the past. So everyone looks weird, because they’re wearing old fashioned clothes and hairstyles, and even those don’t look quite right because it’s an alternate 1985 of course, and so it’s much less of a jolt when people start putting on costumes. The sporadically funny, but ultimately badly flawed Mystery Men actually does a better job of showing you what putting on a costume and fighting crime would actually mean today.

This stylisation in design, costume, lighting, camera and so on is all just part-and-parcel of the comic book movie of course, putting off mainstream critics like The Observer’s Jason Solomons, who took one look at the trailer and made Xan Brooks go and see it for him. It’s interesting to note how stiff and CGI-ish Dr Manhattan looks compared to the different ages of Benjamin Button. If anything, replacing Billy Crudup with an entirely computer-generated character is an easier challenge than affixing a CGI puppet Brad Pitt head on to the shoulders of a clutch of differently-sized stand-in bodies – but Benjamin Button can’t afford a second of less than total photorealism, whereas nothing in Watchmen looks remotely real to begin with.

So – the opportunity to make a real Watchmen for a new audience has gone, but what does Snyder’s film leave us with? Well, actually quite a lot. Once I gave up any expectations that I’d be seeing anything remotely resembling the real world, or anyone who remotely resembled a real person, and gave myself over to the movie, I quickly got caught up in it. I deliberately didn’t reread the comic until after seeing the movie again, and while I recalled the rough outline of the story, much of the detail I failed to remember. And it is a very faithful retelling of the tale, which is where it really succeeds. All the actors, but particularly Patrick Wilson and Jackie Earle Haley, work hard to chisel out their own little pieces of humanity from inside the whirling, kinetic visuals, and Alan Moore’s story, darting nimbly back-and-forward in time, never abandons its narrative drive, and delivers the viewer to its shocking yet inevitable conclusion.

Moore, by now playing the mad genius role to the demented hilt, has had his name taken off the movie, leaving the bizarre credit “Based on the comic book co-created and illustrated by Dave Gibbons”, which is an intense pity. Because to the extent that Watchmen works, and for all my carping, that’s a great extent, it’s largely due to his controlled imagination, expert storytelling and crisp dialogue, which has been lifted almost wholesale for the movie version. Whether or not you’ve read or intend to read Watchmen in comic form, if you like the movie, tip your hat to Alan Moore.

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Comparing different gurus who tackle the same subject-matter is always fascinating. Robert McKee, for example, appears to know almost nothing about reincorporation. He briefly mentions foreshadowing, but completely fails to spot that good structure is not just about timing sub-plots and breaking down long stories into smaller acts, it is also about “planting” what you need early to reincorporate it later.

Keith Johnstone, on the other hand, who sees reincorporation as the primary technique for structuring stories, is very weak when it comes to creating characters. The best he can offer is a super-objective persued by different means and to remind us that characters need to be affected by what happens to them. Unhappily, we are given no guidance as to how to combine the two. His work on status, which doesn’t appear to be about character, is much more useful.

McKee is much stronger on creating characters and on how to assemble a cast of characters which will work well together. Rambo, he tells us (or I paraphrase him, at any rate) is a less successful and less interesting character than James Bond because Rambo is entirely consistent. Rambo looks like a killer and behaves like a killer. Bond looks like a playboy and behaves like a killer. With contradiction comes fascination. 

Having designed a central character with lots of contradictory elements, you can then round out your cast by having characters likely to bring out their different qualities. When Bond is with M, he behaves like a loyal footsoldier. When Bond is with the villain, he behaves like an assassin. When Bond is with the girl, he behaves like a lothario.

So, it’s not surprising that a great many heroes who have been given exciting skills, or even superpowers, such that they can legitimately achieve what the plot demands of them are also given fatal flaws. This not only allows the possibility of failure, but also makes them more interesting.

But it’s not as simple as creating a character who – let’s say – can run very fast and then giving them a lisp. You can’t just give with one hand and take with another. Even if the lisp turns out to be a vital plot point, preserving narrative cause-and-effect (he can’t make a voice-activated gadget work at a crucial moment!?) we still don’t feel like we buy in. There is no way in which we perceive a lisp as being the cost at which his amazing running was bought. There is no cause-and-effect.

Consider on the other hand, one of literature’s first and most successful superheroes: Sherlock Holmes. Is Holmes’ lonely existence, lack of empathy and opium addiction just colour? Are these arbitrary choices to lend dimension and enticing contradiction to a bland character? No, they also *justify* his amazing powers of deduction. Only because he has devoted his life to learning botany, chemistry, mythology and heaven knows what else, can he solve the crimes he does – but this has come at a price: he has cut himself off from human contact, and now seeks solace in the chilly beauty of classic music and the impersonal intoxication of opium.

The original Superman – Kal El / Clark Kent – is an even more interesting case study. His allergy to Kryptonite is simply a plot point, like Achilles Heel. It tells us nothing whatsoever about his character. The price he pays for his awesome powers is that he can’t connect with Lois Lane. His social failures as Clark Kent does far more to make us accept his astonishing powers than any scientifully vacuous blather about yellow suns.

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If you want me or one of the other Script Surgeons to read your script and send you a detailed report on what works and what doesn’t then we are currently offering this service for just £50 with a guaranteed seven-day turnaround. Send your script in today.