Attention all comic book nerds, including but not limited to Spencer Ackerman, do not read this post if you do not want Watchmen spoilers.
You've been warned.
Ta-Nehisi writes of comic book films:
It's a great thing when your imagination is matched by the movie. I'm thinking that scene in the first Spiderman when Parker first swings on the webs to catch his Uncle's killer. Or that opening Nightcrawler scene in X2. Or the scene in the first Batman where Bruce Wayne is bumrushed by bats, and stands up and they all fly over him.
I didn't watch Watchmen. Not exactly. I was watching it, but I was really reading Watchmen in my head, breathing the characters as I imagined them into the images on the screen. And that was incredibly satisfying for me. It's not that there aren't strong performances, Rorshach is close to perfectly interpreted, but there's something lost--Watchmen was talking to comic books. It was lecturing them, mocking them, laughing at them--and the movie is a reproduction. Not a cinematic interpretation, a reproduction. So it's still talking to comic books, when it should be talking to comic book movies.
The story is, at it's core, about the terrible danger of unchecked power, and what people who actually believed they were meant to save the world would be like. Reading the Bush administration's declassified OLC memos, one realizes these people do exist. They just don't wear costumes. They teach at Berkeley.They're far more terrifying than the cartoonish Ozymandias, with his impossible and outlandish conspiracies, precisely because they're real.
George W. Bush practically created the comic book movies of the last few years with the images of hooded prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the drowning citizens of New Orleans, and his deceptive case for war in Iraq. In their own way, each of them confronted the administration: The Dark Knight with its unflinching respect for life even in the face of terrorism, Iron Man with its repudiation of American imperialism, The Incredible Hulk with its skepticism of government power. We flocked to these movies because we were desperate to see ourselves as the good guys again, to broach the political conflicts of our time with the comforting knowledge that in the end, we would see ourselves in the hero, and the hero would win. In that sense, Watchmen could have been a devastating rebuke to the comic book films we've used to cope with the ugliness we saw in ourselves, in the way we've used our power. But it wasn't. Watchmen felt like my imagination, the inside of my head, on screen. For me, that was good enough. I can't imagine how it would be for anyone who didn't love the book like I do. The film has other problems, Phoebe noted a few, like the fact that Alan Moore's dialogue simply doesn't translate to the screen--but this is the big one for me.
And to be honest, even I got tossed out of my fanboy trance during a sex scene between Nite Owl and Silk Specter that belonged on Cinemax. Come on. -- A. Serwer
