Yeah, okay, the “I Watch the Watchmen” joke has probably been made a billion times already.  It’s still funny.

A few nights ago, I finally saved up enough couch-change for a babysitter so my husband and I could get out for a few hours to go finally see this movie.  Now, I will admit, historically comic books make bad movies.  Anyone who thinks otherwise comes from the blessed blessed time of the past ten years or so.  Anyone remember the made-for-tv Spiderman movies?  I watched every one.  Twice.  For every decent adaptation there have been twenty or so valiant efforts that just missed somehow, and another twenty that probably got mercy-killed during production.

So it was with some amount of trepidation that I bought my tickets and we headed into the theatre.

I was, shall we say, plesantly surprised.

Actually, the adaptation is frikkin brilliant.

Now, before the purists flame me out of existence, stay your hand for just a moment, let me explain what I mean.

One of the common issues I find with comic book adaptations is the geek factor.  Every well-know property has it’s cool scenes.  It’s “omygodthey actually did THAT?  Wouldn’t that be so COOL in a movie” moments in the art and story.  A comic like the Watchmen has more than a few of these, and I am absolutley positive that there are more than a few of those that have been cut.  What they did here, rather than a reinvention like we have seen for Batman and Superman of late, was to DISTILL the story.  There was not a single moment in that movie that did not NEED to be in there.  They took out anything and everything, no matter how popular with the fans, that did not contribute to the whole.  This rendition of the story is clean, it is tight, it carries you through without confusion even if you have never read a comic-book in your life.  It is exactly what was needed to turn this into a film that anyone (even the non-comic fan audience) can relate to.  There’s no twenty years of backstory you need to know to get all the in-jokes (guy in the subway singing “Spiderman” anybody?).  It’s all here neatly packaged with just enough sex and gore to give you the feel of the original grittiness of the comic book, but without making those  FX elements the focus of the movie.  They are incidental to the story, and the *story* is everything, not only here, but in the original comic okks as well.

The visuals fit the comic just well enough to set it apart from the gritty realism of the new Batman and the shiny shiny future of the new Superman.  They have given us a new visual metaphor in the cultural canon, we shall see if it sticks.

One particular element I liked that departed somewhat from the book was the nobility of these retired heroes.  Rather than sinking into drugs, drink and total depravity (which was pretty much the norm for
“retired” heroes for a while there), they have gone on with their lives for better or for worse.  They have issues, as everyone does, and they work through them, much like everyone does.  It gives us a chance to connect with them as people, which is essential if we are going to suspend our disbelief and buy-in to the world we are being shown.  They are not “less” human because they are “more” hero.  When the end of the world is coming, that element of them, rather than fostering bitterness and hate for the populace that passed the “no-hero” act, rises to the fore as easily as donning a mask.  Even Rorshach is still a hero, he is still trying to save the world, to do away with the evils he sees and to that end, unable to compromise with the lie of the final, but possibly only, solution, he willingly meets his sticky end.  To preserve what he has been fighting for. 

Really, the end result was frikkin brilliant.  I…  Well, I won’t take my kids to see it now, but when they get older, when they are past the first blush of utopias and brightly-colored spandex and ready for the grittier stuff, I think this will be on my “must show them” list.