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Watchmen Chapter I, a review

What can I say about Watchmen that hasn’t already been said… is what I would say if DC hadn’t just released the first part of an animated two part adaptation of what is considered one of the finest comic books of all time. But let’s talk about the comic book first.

Released as a 12-issue limited series in 1986 and rendered into a trade paperback combining all twelve issues in 1987, the creation of writer Alan Moore, artist Dave Gibbons, and colored by John Higgins, Watchmen was a critical and commercial success and has remained so since its release. It would win a Hugo Award in 1988 and be added to Time Magazine’s 100 All-Time Best Novels list.

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For more details regarding the Watchmen comics, please refer to the Wikipedia entry.

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Zack Snyder’s 2009 adaptation was something of a critical success, but in no way a commercial one. On a $150 million dollar budget it only pulled in $187 million at the box office, or in other words a commercial flop. A Director’s Cut would be released later in 2009, but that would only increase the film’s appreciation amongst critics and would not contribute to the studio’s bottom line in any significant way. A decade later, HBO would release Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen TV series which would, like the comics, receive wide critical praise and commercial success and currently has a 96% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. However the show would differ significantly from the comics taking place thirty four years after the events in the comic books and focusing on racist violence in modern-day Tulsa, Oklahoma, the location of the tragic Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921.

DC’s struggle with feature films

DC is not known for making good live action adaptations of their comic book characters, aside from the Batman movies. I won’t go into details, but I’ll list a few: Steel, Catwoman, Constantine, Superman Returns, Jonah Hex, Green Lantern, Man of Steel, Suicide Squad, Justice League, Shazam!, Black Adam, The Flash, and Blue Beetle are most of their releases in the DC Extended Universe (DCEU), and none of them performed well when compared to Marvel’s blockbuster run. There is, however, one medium in which DC has excelled and Marvel has not; animation. Their animated films, generally referred to as the DC Animated Universe, or DCAU, are produced by Warner Bros. Animation studio.

For a complete list of all DCAU animated films released, check the Wikipedia entry.

From 1993’s Batman: Mask of the Phantasm to the just released Watchmen Chapter I, DC has floated a literal armada of top-notch animated features. Sure, there have been duds like the unfortunate adaptation of the already unpopular comicbook, Batman: The Killing Joke, the 2nd and 3rd installments of the three part Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths film trilogy, and Superman/Batman: Apocalypse but there have been a lot more highly rated outings like Batman: Under the Red Hood, Justice League: Doom, the sublime Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Parts 1 & 2, and Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox. There are many, many more out of the near 60 films so don’t feel bad if I’m leaving off one of your favorites. I’ve already listed a lot of films, so let’s just move on to Watchmen Chapter I.

Editor’s Note: While DC has had an enormously successful run of animated features, the medium of animation in America has been relegated to the juvenile markets. There are pockets of successful adult animation, like Family Guy and other animated sit-coms and sci-fi like Scavengers Reign, but on the whole, animation isn’t taken seriously in the US.

The breakdown

Now, normally for a review of an animated film, television show, or short I would not go through the history that lead up to that property’s release, but Watchmen is different. Since it hit comic book shop shelves in 1986 and hasn’t been developed into a continuing franchise of any significance. I suspect a lot of our younger folk born since 2000 may not be as familiar with the comics as with older readers and an overview is helpful to understand the significance of Watchmen in relation to our history. So, let’s take a quick look at the spoiler-free Wikipedia synopsis:

Watchmen is set in an alternate reality that closely mirrors the contemporary world of the 1980s. The primary difference is the presence of superheroes. The point of divergence occurs in the year 1938. Their existence in this version of the United States is shown to have dramatically affected and altered the outcomes of real-world events such as the Vietnam War and the presidency of Richard Nixon. In keeping with the realism of the series, although the costumed crimefighters of Watchmen are commonly called “superheroes”, only one, named Doctor Manhattan, possesses any superhuman abilities. The war in Vietnam ends with an American victory in 1971 and Nixon is still president as of October 1985 upon the repeal of term limits and the Watergate scandal not coming to pass. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan occurs approximately six years later than in real life.

When the story begins, the existence of Doctor Manhattan has given the U.S. a strategic advantage over the Soviet Union, which has dramatically increased Cold War tensions. Eventually, by 1977, superheroes grow unpopular among the police and the public, leading them to be outlawed with the passage of the Keene Act. While many of the heroes retired, Doctor Manhattan and another superhero, known as The Comedian, operate as government-sanctioned agents. Another named Rorschach continues to operate outside the law. [SOURCE]

The fundamentals

The film lines up quite neatly with the comics. Chapter I covers the first five books of the twelve book series and the opening scene is almost a shot-for-shot, word-for-word adaptation of the opening pages. In fact, without having had the trade paperback in front of me while watching I could still tell that much of Alan Moore’s gritty dialog and story beats are translated almost directly from the comics to the screen with some streamlining by screenwriter J. Michael Straczynski (Babylon 5, World War Z, The Amazing Spider-Man). Watchmen is very character-driven, so a lot of time is spent with a focus on said characters. However, it is the comic’s more fleshed out dialog in which we get a larger sense of the world of Watchmen that appears to have been trimmed. A simple truth illustrating the differences between the comic and animation mediums is that what we do get in terms of texture and detail is often lost in the flow of the motion picture as we are unable to linger on panels and soak in the additional context that the comics allow.

Documenting all the little changes would take me a lot more time than I am willing to invest. Suffice it to say that the changes do not, as of yet, necessarily detract from the story and help to frame the necessary pacing for the motion-based medium versus the static page while maintaining the overall story arc of the first five issues.

Character design is, due mostly to the 3D CGI, smoother and slightly less textured than the meticulous art of Dave Gibbons (illustration and lettering) and John Higgins (colorist). The positives, however, are that there are no speech bubbles to obfuscate the visuals, the view is wider than in the comic panels, and we can see the body language of characters in motion. One early illustration of the differences is when Dan Dreiberg (Nite Owl II, voice acted by Matthew Rhys) comes home to find Rorschach (Walter Kovacs, voice acted by Titus Welliver) has broken into his front door and is eating cold beans straight from cans in his kitchen. Rorschach’s iconic pattern shifting mask is pulled up above his nose revealing the lower half of his face. In the comics, he clearly hasn’t shaved in days and has baked bean sauce on his chin where in the film he’s clean-shaven, as shown in the comparison below. This is a nitpick, but it’s indicative of some of the visual sanitization of the adaptation, likely for budget reasons and/or time constraints. For now, however, that remains speculation.

The comics are laid out by Gibbons in a perfect grid of three by three rectangular panels, only deviating to group into larger panels or , less often, divide them even further into smaller ones, but always maintaining the pureness of 90º angles. I find that this helps define the pacing of the comics, like driving with a steady beat to the ultimate climax of the tale. For the film, overall shot composition, set design, and world building are moderately strong, but is somewhat lacking in the ticking urgency in comparison to the source material. The Doomsday Clock plays a major role in the comics. The panel layout helps to subtly sell the slowly encroaching time, and I feel that is lost in this first chapter, though I can honestly say I don’t know how they’d fix that. The strategically placed shots of period newspapers, however, help to sell the stakes. If you can are able to see them in time.

There are many things to like about the animation. Color, lighting, and atmospherics are strong. The colors are vibrant and clean while still delivering that dark, foreboding, dismal feeling of experiencing a time on the edge. While the animation technique used is cel-shading it feels very mature, like many strides have been made in technique since 2004’s Appleseed, so it helps to deliver the appearance of the comics coming out of the pages. The one character that really jumped out at me, however, is Dr. Manhattan, and I think that this is mostly due to the fact that his radiation glow eliminates the need for cel-shading.

Character movement does suffer a bit from 3D figure rigging, but it’s clear they attempted to put a lot of care into trying to make characters look organic and their body language look natural. The end result, however, is that despite that effort, it’s not always successful. As has become common with Western 3D animation the characters are animated on the “twos”, which means they are moved every other frame, a technique from traditional animation due to the extreme cost of animation on the “ones”, or every frame. Unfortunately, there are a number of scenes where movement, such as walking, appears stiff. I am glad, however, that they didn’t go with motion capture.

The Ups

One of my favorite parts of Watchmen Chapter I is the flawless handling of the dismally depressing Tales of the Black Freighter that appears as a comic inside both the comic books and the film.

I also very much like the application of textures throughout which work very well with the lighting and color work.

The application of depth of field is also excellent which makes me suspect that a cinematographer was involved in production.

There are also some truly beautiful shots in the film.

The Downs

I’m not sure I’d call it an animation error, per se, but during Dr. Manhattan’s Mars monologue where he reflects on the accident that changed him, there is a scene where two characters meet and walk away and one of their shoes appears to pass through a rock. It just seems to me that they should have put the rock somewhere else, but it really stood out to me.

The 84 minute run-time does not work in the film’s favor, mostly because there is only one more part to be released. Unless Chapter II is significantly longer, they won’t be able to fully adapt all twelve issues of the comics.

Some of the ugly language from the comics is trimmed from the film. While I don’t like the words used, they aren’t applied gratuitously and have a sharp, cutting point that should have been maintained to illustrate the cultural and sociological undercurrents of division and fear that pervaded the US in the 80’s when the Cold War was intense and AIDS put people on edge.

Conclusions

Out of all of DC’s Warner Bros. Animation’s works Watchmen Chapter I sits near the top as one of the best, and not because it’s their first “R” rated film. It is clear that the production team took the adaptation seriously, though were likely saddled with some constraints as illustrated by the short run-time, that there will only be one more part to complete the adaptation, and that quite a lot of contextual dialog was removed in translation.

What I would really like to see from DC, however, is a real commitment to their animation works teams of writers and animators. I would see that as an increase in budgets for their animated features and to use their writers for their live-action films to increase the script quality well over their current efforts that have plodded onto the big screen.

TKN’s Nothing Score™

This is my first go at a rating system, so bear with me. I’m a nerd. I give Watchmen Chapter 1 three and a half Macs, mostly for story and accuracy and detract points for not going all the way with the animation. Being such an important work from the 1980’s, I believe it deserved a lot more attention and care.

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