Thread by @Darren_Mooney

#NowWatching Zack Snyder’s “Watchmen: The Ultimate Cut.”

Which is about half the length of the television series starting this weekend.

Snyder’s “Watchmen” has some very serious flaws; some of which are baked into the idea of adapting the comic, and some are down to Snyder’s aesthetic.

But it is a staggering accomplishment of production. It looks beautiful, the result of a lot of care and attention.

At the time, the textured production design on “Watchmen” was a breath of fresh air.

150 sets were built for the film, including an old style New York exterior. It’s lit and shot beautifully.

It has aged well, in an era where so many superhero blockbusters look interchangeable.

The opening credits are amazing, one of my favourite superhero sequences, and the film’s second best sequence.

It’s also notably one of the points at which the film is not especially slavish to the text, and free to elaborate a little.

It is something that is the film’s own.

“Watchmen” is also notable as one of the rare big-budget alternate history films. I’m amazed the genre hasn’t yet made the leap to the screen.

Again, tied to the film’s production design, I have a soft spot for its cartoonish recreation of figures from pop history.

A direct adaptation of “Watchmen” was always a quixotic proposition. And while I *kinda* admire Snyder’s single-mindedness, he doesn’t always help.

From the outset, you have very stylish “slowmo, badass” action scenes that exist at odds with the tone of the source material.

“Watchmen” is about how sad and weird this sort of fetishisation of strong men in silly costumes can be.

Snyder’s camera worships them. They aren’t strange and pathetic. They are badass.

It is an odd dissonance within a film that bends over backwards to be textually faithful.

This ties into the film’s other big problem.

Rorschach’s inner monologue kinda works on the page. But despite valiant efforts from Jackie Earl Haley, it doesn’t work in film.

But Snyder keeps pretty much all of those passages verbatim.

It doesn’t help that a lot of the changes/alterations to the scenes are to add really heavy-handed exposition, such as Doctor Manhattan explaining to Rorschach from the outset why he can’t just sneak a peak at the end of the movie.

This excessive fidelity and the need for exposition around it creates other problems.

The theatrical cut is well over two hours, but cuts out a lot of the human characters who populate Moore and Gibbons’ world, but who are vitally important to it tonally and thematically.

At the same time, I have an entirely sincere admiration for the insanity of trying an adaptation as direct as this.

It is the very definition of insanity, and kinda amazing for that. It would have been very easy to make a more generic, more forgettable in-name-only adaptation.

After all, the comic book movie boom all but made a “Watchmen” movie inevitable. It was always going to happen. There was no way around it.

If it had to happen - and it did - I’m kinda happy it led to something as weird & distinct as this, instead of something bland and generic.

Like, I am currently watching a nearly four-hour cut of the adaptation which includes a complete animated film nested within it, to mirror the use of a pirate comic within the source material.

I am very much awed that this is a thing that actually exists. I’m astounded.

Of course, the comic-within-a-comic idea doesn’t translate to film. The closest analogue would be to treat it as a Saturday morning cartoon or a blockbuster, but that isn’t how it integrates.

Again, jamming it in so directly is a quixotic exercise. And I kinda love that.

And there’s an endearing bluntness to certain aspects of “Watchmen”, like the soundtrack.

It includes a number of very obvious needle-drops, from “The Sound of Silence” to “Boogeyman” relating to the comedian.

It’s heavy handed, but most superhero stories are. They’re pop art.

Some of the film’s clunkiest dialogue is lifted directly from the comic.

Moore’s dialogue is stylised - it’s true of “V for Vendetta”, and “Watchmen” as well.

It’s easier to disguise that on the page than it is delivered by an actor. And I admire the film for leaning into it.

There’s an undeniable element of camp silliness to “Watchmen.” I’d even argue it is present in certain parts of the comic; the book is deliberately silly and playful in parts.

This silliness carries over to the film in a variety of interesting ways. And I think it’s intentional.

There are also moments where “Watchmen” works perfectly. As I alluded earlier, the adaptation of Jon Osterman’s transformation is beautiful.

That extended sequence is better than anything in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And makes up for a lot of the film’s flaws.

I discussed this earlier, but one of the reasons that I think the Osterman-centric sequence works so well is because the fourth issue is essentially a cinematic storyboard.

So the film’s approach really pays off with it.

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Ozymandias arguably suffers most from the clumsy exposition dumps, down to the film’s need to port over background material into actual dialogue.

There’s a lot of monologuing, but little conversing. (The story’s structure isolates him from the rest of the cast, by necessity.)

That said, I have a soft spot for Matthew Goode’s very arch and slightly campy portrayal of Ozymandias as a superheroic “David Bowie.”

It’s as stylised as the film around it, and it works for me.

And there’s admittedly a push-and-pull with Ozymandias.

I really like the film’s decision to dress him like Schumacher-style superhero, as part of the film’s subtle shifting of its heroes’ meta history from page to screen.

He even has nipples on his costume.

That said, this comparison means there’s also something deeply uncomfortable in the film’s insinuation that he is a closeted gay man.

It takes a line from Rorschach in the comics overly literally; Rorschach’s insinuation said more about him than Veidt.

This suggests the film aligns a little too strongly with Rorschach’s perspective, not questioning it as much as it should.

It reminds me of how Sarek’s racist slur in “Journey to Babel” became the defining trait of the Tellarites on “Star Trek.”

It’s interesting that “Watchmen” is getting a HBO miniseries.

The movie’s fidelity to the source material means that it has a very episodic structure.

You could break it down neatly into about six episodes of a miniseries, and it might even work better.

The film’s length and the size of its ensemble (and the structure it is emulating) means that the film goes long stretches between checking in on its primary cast, and then tends to stay with them for twenty or thirty minutes.

It feels like an older style of film making.

This comparison will undoubtedly make a lot of people flinch, but it reminds me a lot of “Once Upon a Time in America.”

Maybe it’s because of that same stately pace, the weighty investment in a hyperreal riff on a pulpy all-American genre.

Here’s where I note that I am not and never really have been that big a fan of “Once Upon a Time in America”, for various reasons.

But I admire its ambitions and its scale, and its desire to blend big ideas with pure pulp.

End of sidebar: In case you want to hear me rattle on a bit about “Once Upon a Time in America”, I discussed it with Andrew on @thetwofifty last year.

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As an aside, I wonder if Patrick Wilson is one of the reasons that I tend to think of “Watchmen” in terms of those seventies and eighties epics.

Wilson always felt like a seventies character actor out of time. It may be why he works so well in the “Conjuring” films.

Wilson gives probably the best performance in “Watchmen”, embodying the weird cocktail of basic decency and patheticness that defines Dan Dreiberg.

He’s awkward, insecure, dysfunctional. But a good guy.

Wilson captures all of that, beautifully.

If “Watchmen” casts Adrian Veidt as the camp, vapid hero of Joel Schumacher films, then it offers Dan Dreiberg as something closer to a Christopher Nolan protagonist.

Dreiberg is one of the two leads who has recognisably human psychology; relatable needs, wants, insecurity.

I know it’s a bit of a punching bag - and maybe deservedly so - but I have always admired the sheer visceral awkwardness of the infamous “Watchmen” sex scene.

It’s a deeply, deeply uncomfortable watch.

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The over-long, hideously-scored sequence feels like a deliberate counterpoint to the gratuitous sexy-but-still-family-friendly superheroine-in-spandex shots the genre has offered over the years.

Playing those creepy scenes to their creepy conclusion.

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Truffaut argued that it is almost impossible to depict an act without glorifying it; all war movies ultimately celebrate war.

The “Watchmen” sex scene somehow makes sex unsexy. Which is fair, given the trappings of the genre with which it is playing.

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The male gaze is deeply engrained in cinema, but especially in superhero films. This gets normalised, to the point that we don’t even notice it.

There’s something to be said for how “Watchmen” foregrounds that sexualisation to emphasise the creepiness of it.

But, again, mileage varies.

It should be noted that “Suckerpunch” has been read as a commentary on - rather than example of - the male gaze.

I am not sure I agree. But I tend to think that discomfort is the point with a lot of Snyder’s film.

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By the way, Carla Gugino is great in “Watchmen” as the original Silk Spectre. It’s a really nuanced and complicated performance that does a lot to flesh out the character.

It’s a shame it took so long for the rest of the world to realise how fantastic Gugino is.

A downside of the film’s faithfulness is that it doesn’t really get to engage with some of the thornier elements of the source material.

The women of “Watchmen” remain disappointingly thinly drawn, despite Gugino’s superb performance.

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((Which does mean acknowledging that, despite the fact that Laurie is the least developed of the comic’s primary characters, Malin Akerman is the weak link in the film’s ensemble.

Laurie would be a tough role for even the best performer. Akerman sadly seems lost.))

To be honest, this is a large part of what excites me about Lindelof’s “Watchmen.”

It foregrounds Laurie, played by Jean Smart. And it comes from a writers’ room largely populated by women and people of colour.

It’s one of the more interesting aspects of Lindelof putting together a diverse writers’ room to interrogate and discuss “Watchmen.”

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It’s interesting how outside context inevitable shifts meaning, even in an adaptation.

Although based on a comic from 1986, it’s impossible to look at the devastated New York in “Watchmen” without thinking of 9/11.

Again, this is a subtle way in which “Watchmen” metatextualises silver screen comic book movies as well as drawing from its source material.

Most superhero movie climaxes replay the horror of 9/11; even “Thor: The Dark World.” But very few actually talk about it.

Released in 2009, the cinematic adaptation of “Watchmen” has witnessed the power of a monstrous attack to temporarily unite the country.

However, also by 2009, it understood that this unity wasn’t permanent. This shades Veidt’s plan, providing a different context than 1986.