This is a short video that I originally ran in this space almost exactly fifteen years ago. It was recently brought to my attention that the link and embed code has been dead for probably fourteen of those years. So here it is again, with a rewritten explanation below.

You may have already seen this, but it’s pretty darned funny and very clever. It’s the opening sequence from the 1980s Watchmen cartoon, which never really existed. Produced by Happy Harry Productions, I thought the PopCult crowd might enjoy it, plus it gave me an excuse to briefly share my thoughts on the movie, now with those thoughts updated some fifteen years later. 

When I finally got around to seeing “The Watchmen” I was both disappointed and impressed. I felt that it was nearly the best they could possibly do in turning the comic book into a movie. It’s still far inferior to the experience of reading the comic, but at the time I thought they did an admirable, if seriously flawed, job. I had my mind blown by the comic book when it was published in 1986, so this was something I looked to with a mixture of anticipation and trepidation. That’s what I thought back then, anyway. Subsequent attempts at re-watching it over the years have greatly diminished my opinion.  I thought the art direction was great, but the movie direction is sort of brainless and plodding. The director, Zack Snyder, went on to wrong-headedly mishandle the DC universe, and with hindsight, you can see how ill-suited he was for that job when you watch this movie.

The casting, with one exception, was amazing. Most of the actors looked exactly like Dave Gibbons’ drawings come to life. And the dialogue was almost all directly lifted from Alan Moore’s original script.  It takes more than that to create a good movie.

They had to cut big chunks out of the comic book series to keep the movie from running six hours.  As it is, it still clocks in at over two-and-a-half hours.  At first, I thought that one major change–the ending–worked better for film than the original ending would have, but I have since come to the conclusion that changing it the way they did just proved that it never should have been adapted in the first place.

The denouement seemed tacked on and confusing and further reinforces my opinion that the director lost his footing and was in over his head.  In the comic book, the scheme by the character Ozymandias to achieve world peace through fear involves a fake alien invasion and a giant monster cloned from the brain of a dead psychic.  That would take too long to set up in a movie, so they changed it to a fake attack by Dr. Manhattan, the blue atomic-powered superhero. This sort of torpedoed the complex relationships between the characters in the comic and lowers the IQ of the finished film dramatically.

The real problem is the scene after that, where Silk Spectre II and Owlman go to see her mother, the original Silk Spectre, in the comic, they are in disguise, in hiding after the manufactured crisis.  In the movie, they just barge in with no attempt to hide who they are, which is even more bizarre because the dialogue is lifted straight from the comic, and doesn’t really make sense in this new context. In retrospect, much of the movie is pretty senseless.

Another problem with the movie is the casting and general treatment of the character Ozymandias. In the comic book this character is a big, brawny super-hero Adonis-type, who seems above suspicion, so it’s a shock when it turns out that he’s the one behind the killings and the outrageous plot at the end. In the comic, it’s a major twist. In the movie, it’s obvious from the first moment you see him that he’s the villain.  The casting here was off the mark, too. In the book, he’s a muscle-man. In the movie, they hired an actor who looks remarkably like Macauley Culkin.  About as menacing, too. That they cut the back story of Ozymandias to the bone doesn’t help either.

At first blush, it seemed like a decent adaptation, but it does not hold up at all.  About 65% of the original comic book is in there. Melanie told me me it was confusing to someone who hasn’t read the book, and it dragged in places for her, but considering how bad the adaptation of Moore’s “V For Vendetta” was, this was as much as we could expect. I think my initial, more favorable, reaction was due to “V For Vedetta” being so awful. I was grading on a curve.

Still, this little parody is funny.