Watchmen: Chapter 1 (2024)

Is it possible? I think so. Is it possible that Alan Moore was right about everything? Like that he may be a crank but he was right all along? It seems likely to me that is the case. This movie was completely faithful to the first half of the comics, and Moore still refused to allow his name on it. Moore believed Watchmen was a comic book story and nothing else. He believed the comic book was the only medium for that story, and there were no adaptations or sequels to tell for that reason.

This is a good movie. No lie. But it's MUCH less than the comic. And I'm not sure why. I have some suspicions but I could be wrong.

I read Watchmen for the first time a couple of years ago. For pop culture and Gilda And Meek And The Un-Iverse, I have made a STRONG effort to try and watch and read everything influential on the pop-culture landscape I could. Watchmen was a shock to me. Not because it had adult themes or deconstructed the superhero premise. I mentioned Alan Moore might have been right about everything? Him refusing to think of Watchmen as groundbreaking, and that it was as valid as every other comic book of the time is the right mindset. I didn't find Watchmen the comic particularly mindblowing or revolutionary myself. I got to it way late, so it would be weird if I did.

What I took pleasant notice of, and something the comic doesn't get enough credit for, is the sparkling dialogue. Nobody ever mentions that it's the first comic book EVER that has characters speaking like real people. It's very painful to revisit even the best works of the 1980's in film and television because the dialogue is all arch and overwrought. The dialogue of the comic was the kind of effortless snappy repartee that Joss Whedon got a TON of credit for bringing to TV characters. Watchmen did it first a decade earlier and it was a freaking superhero comic!

The dialogue of the film is good but it's less impressive to hear actors deliver it instead of the shock of reading it on a comic book page. In 2024, good dialogue is not hard to find, so perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of Watchmen doesn't translate to film or animation.

The performances, particularly Rorschach, are properly melodramatic and arch. But I like the fact that the comic let the reader judge a great deal of the value of the story on their own. Even in animation, the film medium, and its dark music, Noirish cinematography, and melodramatic voices, add a value judgment to the story that the reader themselves might not have gotten on their own.

Alan Moore was frustrated by how popular someone as detestable as Rorschach was with readers. Again, I think Moore was right about everything, and when I read the comic I had Moore's disgusted reaction to that fan-favorite character. But the ambiguity and selling point of the comic is that other people saw it differently.

If somebody sees this movie's violent and cruel version of Rorschach and thinks his mission is righteous, that's insanity. And it also shows why film is not a compatible medium for this specific story. I think the film medium is not Rorschach's friend, and while I don't object to the fact that this character I always hated was properly portrayed as loathsome, it probably disturbed his many fans. On some level that would make Moore happy. But on another, seeing that on the screen and how that behavior would work in real life is breaking the magic of the comic challenging the reader's imagination and their own morality. The film medium offers too many easy-to-quantify judgments about him, the Comedian, and Dr. Manhattan. I felt various levels of disdain for each of those characters after reading the comic for different reasons, but the reasons I disliked them felt like my own. The filmmakers are pushing them on me here which is why I think an adaptation of Watchmen just does not work.

There are very few stories I can think of that could ONLY work in the comic book medium. Ironically Gilda And Meek is one of them, which is probably why I took to the Watchmen comic so strongly, despite its downer story being entirely outside of my sensibility of the kinds of fiction I like. Moore is right that it was deep down just another comic book. But I think it was probably special because it could only properly exist as a comic book, which is a VERY rare quality for ANY comic to have, much less one loosely based on alternate Universe iterations of DC superheroes.

One more thing to note about the film: It does not have the pacing issues The Tomorrowverse suffered from. It is actually competently boarded.

The movie is pretty good. But as faithful as it is, it doesn't have the impact of the comic. Mostly because the most impactful things about it used to play more ambiguously, and more as a moral challenge for the reader. And the movie taking a clearer moral stand there makes it lose a LOT of the story's selling points in the translation. 4 stars.