DANGEROUS DAYS

30 Days of Night (2007)
Vampire Horror; USA
113 minutes

Book of Eli (2010)
Post-Apocalyptic/Action; USA

Watchmen

Not another damn 'Watchmen' review

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Like many of you, I was squirming in my seat this weekend trying desperately to make it through the final twenty minutes of "Watchmen" without experiencing complete bladder failure. To me, it says a lot about the quality of a film if I'm willing to risk the embarrassment of self urination because I simply can't bring myself to walk out and possibly miss something awesome.

Part of what made "Watchmen" so successful in my eyes, despite the fact that it’s really long and doesn't flow in the way we've come to expect from conventional filmmaking, was the complete and utter devotion to bringing the world to life. It's something that happens very rarely in the age of quick turnarounds and bare minimum effort, but when it does happen, it's something truly magnificent to behold. Zach Snyder's obsessive desire to do justice to his source material rivals that of the great genre filmmakers of the past. James Cameron and Ridley Scott come to mind when I look at the attention given to even the most minute details of the film and that's a pretty damn good category to be in.

It's really hard to find fault with that kind of dedication. In fact, if I had one major complaint about "Watchmen" it wouldn't have anything to do with the actual film, but rather the fact that it wasn't Zach Snyder's own original creation. I've stated before in previous episodes of Dangerous Days that I have a real problem with the lack of creativity in Hollywood at the moment. The constant reliance on remakes, sequels and adaptations of already successful franchises has spawned a slew of lazy, uninspired pseudo-blockbusters that are generally more successful as trailers than they are as films. In part, the reason these movies fail so frequently is because the people behind them simply don't care all that much either way about the films they're creating. It's about making the returns, not about making a piece of art. But then something like "Watchmen" comes along and does it right and still, I can't help but wonder why we can't see this kind of dedicated filmmaking tied to an original concept.

Before I actually saw the movie, the reviews I'd been reading were all starting to sound strangely familiar. Critics threw out terms like: soulless, boring, long, meandering, all style-no substance...all things that people originally said about Ridley Scott's "Bladerunner" when it first came out. I'm not going to compare the two films because they don't have all that much in common, but from a directorial standpoint, there are many similarities between the obsessive eye behind "Bladerunner" and "Watchmen". I think that like Scott's film, "Watchmen" will gain appreciation when taken out of the popcorn-eating theater context and eventually people will hail it as the great achievement it is when they have the ability to pause and relieve their bladders at will, but can an adaptation of a graphic novel truly reach the level of being deemed a "masterpiece" the way "Bladerunner" has in recent years? Does the fact that it's a very literal translation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's comic hold it back from true greatness as a film?

Put the fact that "Bladerunner" is based (albeit a bit loosely) on a Philip K. Dick story to the side for a moment because adapting a book is much different than adapting a graphic novel. With a novel or story, there is only the written word and the imagination to draw from and there is a lot of room for interpretation, but with something like "Watchmen" you're adapting something that could easily act as your film's storyboards - word for word, image for image. Though I truly enjoyed the film, I'm starting to really understand Alan Moore's point of view. The graphic novel already exists and it's great - why do we need to make it a movie? In that respect, the only real purpose it serves is to flex artistic muscles and perhaps act as an extended commercial for the comic to those that might not otherwise find it. The book is a masterpiece, for sure, and the movie recreates the book extremely well, but just because you paint a flawless copy of the “Mona Lisa” doesn’t mean you’re DaVinci.

Looking back at some of my favorite sci-fi films, "Alien" and "Aliens", "Terminator", "The Abyss", "2046", "The Thing"...they all share something in common. Even if they are adaptations or sequels, the worlds they depict exist only in those films. John Carpenter's "The Thing" is of course a remake of "The Thing From Outer Space", but you can't just pop in a copy of the 50s original and get the same effect. If you're itching to watch "Aliens", there is no substitute. You can't just go pick up another movie, even the first one, and expect to get the same experience. They are true films - the experience is fleeting, it sucks you in and when it's over, it's over, never to be regained again except from repeat viewings. With "Watchmen", however, I don't know if that is going to be the case. You can't really separate the film from the comic, which in a way acts to lower the impact of both pieces.

I guess what I’m saying is, we’ve seen Zach Snyder reinvent other people’s art to great effect three times now. He’s proven that he can deliver a solid film if his source material is strong enough, but are we ever going to get a true cinematic masterpiece out of him? He’s obviously got the chops. Will we see his obsessive eye focus on his own pet project or is James Cameron’s “Avatar” the only original piece of American sci-fi filmmaking we can expect to see in the near future? As much as I love Jim and Ridley, it would be nice to see a successor to their throne come out of this new generation of filmmakers so we don’t always have to rely on the old timers to see some worthwhile sci-fi.