Under The Hood
Watchmen - The Ultimate Cut
USA 2009+ Directed by Zack Snyder
Warner Brothers/Paramount Pictures
UK Blu Ray
Warning: Lots of spoilers, I’m sure
Watchmen was one of three heavily influential comic books of 1986 which kinda changed the face of comic books thereafter. They were DC’s Watchmen, DC’s The Dark Knight Returns and, to a lesser extent although it’s certainly not a lesser comic, Marvel’s Elektra Assassin. It’s said that because of the two DC titles, comic books finally grew up to reach a new adult audience. Which is actually a bit wrong or, as I would say myself, total nonsense. There were always Adult comics around such as the 1960s Underground Comics and even, of course, the Tijuana Bibles prevalent in the 1920s to 1960s (which are referenced in a neat scene in Watchmen). Not to mention stuff like Metal Hurlant (aka Heavy Metal) and Marvel imprints like Epic and the comic book magazine that it was named after.
So, to be a little more accurate, this was when superhero... or rather... costumed hero orientated comics grew up... at least in the mainstream. Now I was a year or two late to the party and so I read collected editions of these titles and a few other important landmarks during 1987 and 1988, generally perceived, as I said, as also being touch points for the maturation of the ‘four coloured funnies’. So I was also reading stuff like Batman - The Killing Joke, Blood - A Tale and Stray Toasters around this time. The comic was written by the great Alan Moore who, as far as I know, has never seen the movie version and has, like all the other movies based on his comics, had his name taken off the credits. He originally wanted to tell his story with the Charlton Comics characters that DC had, relatively recently at the time, bought but, when the company realised just how dark he was going to go with them, Moore was encouraged to create new heroes instead.
And then Zack Snyder made a Watchmen movie in 2009 and, he did an amazing job with it.
It wasn’t the first time it had been attempted, most famously by Terry Gilliam who, after a while, declared it unfilmable. I’d have to say that Snyder definitely proved the naysayers wrong. It’s an impressive movie and there are just a few changes, other than things which just build on ideas already present in the original 12 issue mini series.
It’s basically a whodunnit, where the group of ‘once costumed heroes’ who are retired in this alternative version of history, due to current president Richard Nixon (still president in the 1980s in the story) making costumed vigilantes illegal (and idea which was also used in The Dark Knight Returns comic from the same year as Watchmen), have to solve a murder of one of their own.
Two generations of costumed heroes are depicted with the main players being... Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley who lobbied for the role and was the only one who’d read the original comic mini series before being cast), Patrick Wilson as the second generation Nite Owl, Carla Gugino as the original Silk Spectre, Malin Akerman as the second generation Silk Spectre, Billy Crudup as Dr. Manhattan, Matthew Goode as Ozymandias, Jeffrey Dean Morgan as The Comedian and Stephen McHattie as the original Nite Owl (who has published a book about the early days of the Minutemen - as the team of first generation heroes was called in the 1940s - called Under The Hood) and a whole host of others. Patrick Wilson is maybe not quite as dumpy as Nite Owl II is supposed to be but, he and all the others do an absolutely terrific job in a film which is absolutely densely packed with details.
The opening credits montage, after the murder of The Comedian, is a wonderful snapshot of the 1940s through to the 1960s and fills the viewer in on some of the themes which will come up. Almost all the heroes are heavily flawed with, absolutely no doubt that the Comedian... who shot a woman carrying a baby in her womb, tried to rape Silk Spectre (and there’s a nice twist in that later in the story) and killed many innocents in both the Vietnam war (which America won in this version, because the US had Doctor Manhattan, walking in a giant sized version of himself and exploding people with his thoughts while Wagner’s Ride Of The Valkyries plays, in a direct reference to Apocalypse Now) and after, certainly deserving to die... but also the only one perceptive enough to see what is coming before it happens... and is killed for his trouble. Although, of course, Dr. Manhattan probably also knows because he doesn’t perceive time linearly like most people.
Like the comic, the film plays as a mystery in terms of who killed The Comedian and... is someone targetting ex-masked heroes or is something else even more world threatening going on? I won’t reveal who is behind everything but the film has a tragic ending in a way, with one of the heroes who gets obliterated by one of two of his allies having the last laugh in terms of a journal he kept and mailed to a newspaper... although if its taken seriously, it could also mean the end of the world!
It’s about corruption and people selling out and, ultimately, people deciding to do the wrong things for the right reasons. It’s very, very dark and is the second greatest superhero movie ever made (I still count Wonder Woman as the greatest). It’s one of the best things Zack Snyder ever did (certainly much better than his modern DC movies) and the Ultimate Cut, which I’d not seen before, brings it even closer to the comic book. While the Under The Hood text story back ups from each issue are not used, the Ultimate cut, which runs for around three and a half hours, puts in the comic book within a comic book, Tales From The Black Freighter, that the kid from the news stand keeps reading in the original source. I was worried these cartoon segments were going to look silly cut into the live action but the director does a really good job and they don’t stick out like a sore thumb unless the edit makes them do that when they’re supposed to. It’s all integrated very nicely. It also captures the tone of an old EC horror comic book from the 1950s really well, although the actual comic cover the kid is reading in the film marks it out as a DC comic.
When the movie initially came out, I was angry that the original ending of a fake tentacle monster invading Earth to unite the nations in peace was replaced by an energy bomb which equally kills millions instead of invading aliens. But, reflecting on this, it might have seemed silly to an audience used to more sophisticated effects and plot mechanisms and I can see why they did it. But it’s a brilliant movie and many of the shots from the comic books (plus alternate pop culture incidents) are lovingly crafted in some of the most beautiful colour palettes and transitions rendered in film history...
The opening shot of the comic, which tracks up from The Comedian’s badge with the drop of his blood on the eye so we can see it laying in the blood from his splattered remains, where his body fell from being pushed from the window, doesn’t appear right at the start of the movie like the comic but it is recreated here later (the badge with the blood splash in the comic would be quickly acquired as a symbol of the Acid movement in 1980s and 90s music culture and I always found it amazing that none of the kids I met who wore the badge had any idea it was related to a comic book).
Like the comic, the film shifts to cross-cutting between various sets of characters, as each issue was used to highlight a character in turn. So you get various characters dealt with in more detail at different points in the movie. My favourite sequence... which was also one of my favourites from the original comic... is where we see the man who became Dr. Manhattan obliterated in a nuclear accident and then gradually, over many months, rebuild himself out of nothing into the being he is now... all set to a couple of needle dropped pieces from the Philip Glass score to Koyaaniqatsi. It’s good stuff.
It’s a film of wonder and horror and, I think, fully deserves the 18 rating the film got in the UK. It’s also one of the great works of art in cinematic history and I’m surprised people aren’t still talking about it. Like the comic it’s based on, though, it’s a very rich, dense text and probably a lot of stuff is missed in a casual viewing of the material. And that’s about as much as I want to say about Watchmen - The Ultimate Cut, I think. I could probably write a lot more, actually but it would end up like a thesis and I don’t want to go down that route, for sure. However, this will be rediscovered and hailed as the classic it is one day, I’m sure, but in the meantime... Who Watches The Watchmen?
