Watchmen, Tarkovsky and the Nature of Film

The date of Watchmen's cosmic release on 3.6.09 looms large, almost entirely for me because it is also the day that I present my senior project for the last time. With this project being hypothetically finished in two month's time, I'm trying to think of myself as a legitimate film maker, and have been considering more than ever before the nature of the medium. The Watchmen graphic novel was created with that exact intention: to define and exploit the unique characteristics of the graphic novel as an art form as they never had been before by using meta-narrative, dense history and imagery, unconventional chronology, etc. Ideas such as these are why Alan Moore considers the work unfilmable, but I do not quite agree. A film adaptation could not possibly tell the same story, but if created with the strengths of the new medium in mind it could potentially be a great, pivotal and, most importantly, distinct work.

A glance at Metacritic has it now at 35%. I will hold off judgment until I see it, but at the same time I'll wager that my argument stands based on what I know now. They were caught in the most obvious pitfall of the project: a too strict interpretation, trying to capture the uncapturable while hobbled by reverence and without a true understanding of the current environment. As precise as the visual realization may be, it is the easiest to adapt since they are two visual forms. They can get the dialogue straight off the page and follow the story to the letter, but that is ultimately pointless since those elements already exist in a time tested form. The problem of an adaptation is one of justification. The fanboy yearns for a direct translation and pecks at every misstep, seeing duplication as success. Such, I believe, is Zach Snyder. Subjectivity renders this an impossible task, however, and the joys it brings are fleeting and utterly superficial.

The main problem, however, and ironically the key element of my own aesthetic, is time. To adapt Watchmen, there couldn't possibly be enough. As an experiment I could try to read Watchmen in the total running time of the final cut, but I wouldn't dare. I would let my eyes linger, re-read passages and flip to earlier sections when I felt the desire. Here is a strength of the novel: it can be absorbed at leisure. The finite nature of film, however, is to me its greatest strength; not in terms of the span of time, but the sense of it.

The films of Andrei Tarkovsky speak their own language in the history of film. Meditative, poetic and spiritually enthralling, they crawl glacially across quiet scenes, relish in stillness and the miraculous nature of the moment itself: the one that was captured at that place long ago that would otherwise be lost forever, that you witness and become a part of by seeing it and feeling it. No other medium can accomplish this. It is the Moment that is key to film, a sculpture made from the substances of light, sound and time. Terry Gilliam gave up on Watchmen, insisting that it would have to be a series. I expect the film to rushed since I think every chapter could easily be given an hour.

I hope I'm wrong. I hope Dr. Manhattan sits on Mars, contemplating and reliving every moment of his life, for as long as he is when I read it (fanboy that I am) but it is unlikely that I will give Zach Snyder any credit for filming the "unfilmable."