I hear a lot of bandying about of claims that Watchmen is somehow uniquely unadaptable into film. But I don’t see anyone backing up those claims with actual examples or arguments. So I leave it to you dopers to convince me, or to agree with me that Watchmen is no more unadaptable than any other story.
Note that this is not a debate about:
The general unadaptability of print into film. The claims being made will generally admit that books and comics can be made into decent movies, but state that Watchmen was created to specifically take advantage of things that can only be done in graphic novel form and that these things make it non transferable.
Whether this particular adaption is likely to succeed. Assuming Watchmen could be made into a decent film, this isn’t a debate about whether Zak Snyder is ill equipped to do the job as opposed to say Terry Gilliam. For the sake of this debate, assume that Alan Moore himself or whoever could do the job is in charge, and the question then becomes, despite the adequate stewardship, is the graphic novel still unfilmable?
The best argument I’ve been able to find is here and gives these reasons:
It’s about the history of comics. This is true but doesn’t really argue strongly against a film. The point essentially was that if this is a film about super heroes, it should address the history of superheroes in film and tv rather than comics. To some extent this is actually being done, with the present time costumes resembling current super hero film costumes more than comic books ones. But even this isn’t necessary. It’s kind of like saying stories about writers can’t be made into film, only novels.
It’s about experimenting with the comics format. This is the lynchpin argument, I think. Moore says “The problem with taking Watchmen to another medium is that we deliberately set out to establish—hard—some territory for comics. We tried to exploit the things in comics that cannot be done in any other medium.” But I’ve failed to see anyone give good examples of this. more on this later.
Watchmen is of it’s time. So it’s a period piece - so are many films. Even though it’s main time period was contemporary to when it came out (1985), it covered extensively other time periods that weren’t 1985. And 1985 is not unrelatable. Back to the Future’s sequels came out long enough after the first that they were anachronistic and they were able to play around with references to the 80s. Other films like Manchurian Candidate and Charlie Wilson’s War have dealt with the politics of past decades without losing relevance. Plus, even the 1985 of Watchmen was an alternative universe.
The movie will pander to fans. This is kind of a catch-22 isn’t it? If you don’t include the details, then it’s corrupting the original, but if you do include the details then it becomes boring. This is something you could say about any adaption. And many adaptions have succeeded in this regard.
OK, back to the territory of comics issue. Possible examples i can think of:
Visual detail. The artist did include a lot of little visual details like repeating the smiley face symbol is interesting ways - a socket, a crater on mars, a smudge on a window. Or newspaper headlines in the background. Or frames that are similar, such as closeups of characters faces while they are being grabbed by another character. But these are all things that could be done in film. Granted, you might not notice every single one on first viewing but so what? Lots of films include little easter eggs and symbology that aren’t always noticed on the first viewing, but this just makes repeated viewing more rich, it doesn’t take away from the first viewing. Shows like Lost do this too, and it’s lots of fun freeze framing your tivo to find the little details, but you don’t need to do this to follow the story.
The Under the Hood and Tales of Black Freighter stuff. It’s going to be cut for time and put back in for the DVD, but it’s not unfilmable. I recently reread the graphic novel, and while these add some richness to the overall experience, the story is rich enough in it’s main narrative without needing them. And the Freighter stuff in my opinion actually was a little bit distracting in the graphic novel. It was a little hard to keep track of both stories at once. And the parallels between each were not strong enough to enhance the main narrative in a major way.
The Rorschach “reflections” chapter has parallels in the way the frames are set up - the first page mirrors the last page, etc. While this is cool and interesting as a device, most people won’t even notice it if they don’t already know about it. And you could certainly employ some other device on film to accomplish something similar and probably more noticeable.
So there you have it. Watchmen is not inherently more unadaptable than any other print narrative. The things that Moore supposedly did to take advantage of the comic medium either can’t be found or are not really unique to that medium. Show why you agree, or convince me otherwise.
You missed out what is perhaps the most important format thing - no motion. Watchmen dispenses with the idea that each frame is in some way a timeslice of a short period, with motion lines etc. Instead, each frame is a snapshot of an instant. The only way to match that is to have a sequence of still shots, not a movie. To make a movie of it is to overide the one technical thing that distinguishes it from other superhero comics of its time (or since, that I’ve noticed). That’s the main way it’s inherently more unadaptable than a Batman or Spiderman comic, at least (and by design so). So I guess I disagree that the “medium-connectedness” is that trivial.
Still, the argument for me isn’t whether Watchmen is unadaptable, it’s that it might be unadaptable to a quality anywhere near as good for a film as the comic is for a comic. At the moment, I’m agnostic on that, as the trailer wasn’t enough to go on.
But I disagree with you on one thing. The Black Freighter story is significant, and is not distracting, IMO. And it’s not so much about it paralleling the main story as offering moral commentary and counterpoint. It also goes rather deeply into issues of the Comic Code and comics history.
I agree that it’s adaptable. The story is good and powerful and perfectly enough to carry a movie. You will, though, lose a lot of the stuff that makes it such a great comic. Like Moore said, it was “designed to be read a certain way: in an armchair, nice and cozy next to a fire, with a steaming cup of coffee”, so you could flip back and forth, see all the references, mirror images, allusions and so on. So the movie will never be able to keep what made the comic unique, but that doesn’t matter to me. The comic is still there when I want to read it, and if I get a great movie too, I’m all for that.
Will the filmed version be a different experience than the comics? Certainly. It will be a film of the events of the comic, and will lose the visual and layout tricks unique to the medium. It will add the visual and layout tricks unique to moving pictures.
I do not understand the animosity towards the film. The existence of a movie version of the story does not invalidate or somehow cancel out the original.
I understand it when it’s, say, Starship Troopers or something (though why anyone would want a faithful adaptation of that book, I don’t know), where the adaptation veers wildly from the original, meaning that the fans will probably not get a faithful adaptation for ages, if ever. But in this case the naysayers are saying it shouldn’t be filmed at all, which is a valid viewpoint but doesn’t explain the hate. Just don’t watch it.
Oh yes. I just don’t particularly care for stories where the plot lacks a certain… existence. But let’s take this hijack elsewhere or leave it alone, OK?
I see the main difficulty is that the studio, the major producers, have to take a real leap of faith.
It would have to be a ‘comic book movie’ that is rated R, not PG-13.
It does not have well established characters. (superman/batman/spiderman)
It would need a medium to big budget for the right visuals.
It would probably not have bigger stars in it.
In other words, lots of risk, and the prospect of great rewards seems limited.
This is hardly unique to Watchmen, though. Sure, some comics artists and/or writers work around or against the basic language of comics, i.e. a sequence of still images designed to exploit the reader’s almost unconscious inference of movement in the space between frames, and fudge this by using various devices to try to communicate motion within the frame. Many more, though, do not, and fully embrace the “snapshot of an instant” model. Watchmen was neither the first nor the last in this vein.
Re the overall question, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: A film version of Watchmen that tries to communicate the ideas of the original with respect to printed matter would be a likely failure and a waste of time. However, a film version that takes those themes and ideas and translates them to the new medium is entirely valid. As noted in the OP, whereas the book looks at the history of books, the movie can look at the history of movies; whereas the book looks at the relationship of the reader to his fantasy heroes on the page, the movie can look at the relationship of the viewer to his fantasy heroes on the screen; whereas the book can consider the ambiguous morality of the vigilante hero in comics, the movie can consider the ambiguous morality of the vigilante hero in movies; and so on and so forth.
And as I have also said before, none of this is to argue that the filmmakers are attempting to pursue those goals, or that even if they do have that stuff in mind they will have the talent and/or creative gumption to achieve those lofty objectives. It’s merely to argue that the adaptation can be defended in concept.
It may very well be adaptable, but every previous Alan Moore story/character adapted into film has been horribly botched. The best to date, V For Vendetta, highlighted the problem: Things that make an Alan Moore story seem innovative and profound on the printed page come across very differently on the movie screen.
Watchmen broke new ground in 1986 by suggesting that people who dress up in funny costumes ti beat the crap out of criminals do so out of sexual inadequacy/fetishism instead of altruism/public spiritedness. This ground has been pretty thoroughly broken by a lot of other superhero comics and films in the ensuing 22 years and simply may not be shocking enough to sustain a colossally expensive movie.
The tensions of Watchmen meant one thing in the context of Reagan, Thatcher and the Cold War, all still current in 1986. In the context of today, their impact is blunted somewhat.
Fans of the original work may yet be pleasantly surprised, but we feel like we’ve been burned too often.
I think it’s adaptable if everybody involved has the right attitude – the one real problem being length. It should really be a miniseries – but then, that’s true of any full-length, complex novel.
Note: as I recall, the “smiley face” crater on Mars was based on the real thing – Crater Galle in the Argyre Planitia impact basin. Just a bit of serendipitous pareidolia.
I’d love some examples. Not that I doubt they exist, not at all, just so I can take a look at more examples. I’m only dipping my toes into comic-as-medium for the first time (I have Understanding Comics on order).
But anyway, Watchmen is certainly one of the best-known or cited exemplars of the technique, and it was quite a concious decision on the part of its creators, so I still think it feeds into any interpretation of the comic on screen. Frame-by-frame “comic-realistic” movies seem to be an emerging subtype of the genre, but I’d much rather the Watchmen movie was a* Sin City* that a 300, all the same.
It’s adaptable. The first step is to be willing to abandon the comic. Step two, naturally, is to plug your ears against all of the whining that starts.
A good adaptation requires a Kubrick-style willingness to adapt the themes of the book rather than the book directly. Since the themes are tied directly to the form of the comic with Watchmen the movie should be also tied to the form of the superhero movie. It would have be played straight but subvert the genre (and maybe action films in general). It needs to be deconstructionist rather than reconstructing the original.
We might get a decent movie out of the current Watchmen adaptation but I don’t have much hope for for a good adaptation.
One other problem with Watchmen: It doesn’t have a “Hollywood ending.” Expect a different character to be the “Republic Serial villain” and a much more kick-ass fate to befall him.
this thread reminds me very much of the discussions among LOTR aficionados when the Peter Jackson movies were being made. for years people had said Rings was unfilmable.
If the Watchmen falls into good hands (as I think the LOTR movies did) the result will be the same: some fans will love it, some will hate it. some will say the changes were ok, some will be outraged.
In some cases, the medium used is part of the story.
The Anderson Tapes by Lawrence Sanders was written as the transcripts of various clandestine tapings of the characters. The Fan by Bob Randall was written as a series of correspondence between the various characters. Both were made in mediocre movies that just followed the plotlines of the books and ignored the style in which they were written. Ironically, the recent movie Look was able to use a similar idea - the story is told through what is supposedly footage from surveillance cameras.
Sometimes the use of the media is more subtle. Quentin Tarantino, for example, makes movies that are about movies. He consciously chooses actors, settings, props, music, and even cameras settings and angles in order to evoke past films. Pulp Fiction or Kill Bill can’t be directly translated into novels.
Vanity Fair can’t be completely translated from a novel into a film for the same reason. A central aspect of the novel is Thackeray’s constant intruding into the text to comment on how the story is going. This is lost in film adaptations.
Start with some of the later work by Will Eisner, such as A Contract with God. It’s from 1978, eight years before Watchmen. The frozen-frame effect is very clear; by this point in his career Eisner had completely mastered the comic form and knew, consciously or instinctively, how to choose specific images to manipulate the reader’s interpretation of the transition from each to the next in order to convey physical and emotional change from frame to frame. He was exploiting the mechanics of the form long before this, as in The Spirit, but that has fairly pulpy Saturday-morning-serial-adventure roots and feels more cinematic so the effect isn’t as clear to the analytical reader. A Contract with God is simultaneously very simple and very advanced, and its workings are plain on every page.
And yes, read the McCloud carefully when it arrives.