Watchmen: Chapter II (2024)

March 2, 2025 1:24 PM

1986! (Again!) Against the looming shadow of nuclear conflict, retired superheroes Nite Owl and Silk Spectre alone try to figure out how to save the world, their one-time compatriots all dead, exiled, or otherwise occupied with chasing glory.
posted by kittens for breakfast (7 comments total)

It's actually 1985. Sorry!
posted by kittens for breakfast at 1:25 PM on March 2

Although I have A LOT OF NOTES, as I'm sure most readers of the book will, I think this is much more successful than the first half, which seemed to struggle much more with the mechanics of adapting the story. Maybe part of why this works better is down to the comic itself, which is less episodic in its second half and may be better suited for conversion to a feature film. I am hesitant to give too much credit to the screenplay, which both leaves a lot of money on the table in terms of failing to adapt some sequences well (or at all), and also introduces new material (mostly in the form of on-the-nose dialogue) that dumbs the story down and fumbles the intent of some scenes.

I could spend all day unpacking what I mean by that, and by the time I was done WB would probably have announced a fourth Watchmen adaptation, complete with a Rorschach and Blot the Dog side series. But rather than be a straight up hater, which I think is unfair to a project that was clearly dear to its creators, I want to champion the animation of this movie -- each character literally looks like it was drawn by Dave Gibbons' own hand. Never once, reading this book, did I ever yearn to see this story in another medium. But if you're going to do it, then at least visually, this is the way.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 1:45 PM on March 2 [2 favorites]

These are fully animated, right? I sort of remember there being a visual novel / animatic version recently, but scrounging around IMDB says that was 15 years ago which is clearly impossible.
posted by Kyol at 6:51 AM on March 3

Yeah, this is animation -- you're thinking of the "motion comic" from a while ago, which was basically a camera zooming around the actual comic book page while actors read the dialogue and captions aloud. Sort of a flashier take on the first Marvel cartoons from the '60s.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 7:50 AM on March 3

I watched this, and my opinion of it syncs up with my opinion of the live-action adaptation: it's mostly just a frame-by-frame imitation of the comic, many of the changes that were made seem pointless or worse than what they replaced, and overall it supports Alan Moore's contention that no adaptation would improve on the original because the graphic novel was created to take advantage of the specific strengths of that medium, and therefore any adaptation in another medium just wouldn't be as good. (Of course, Moore was originally in favor of a movie adaptation around the time of the original publication, and even met with Terry Gilliam to talk about it; his change of mind may have been because of his general alienation from DC Comics which started around that time, although, from what I've heard about the script written by Batman screenwriter Sam Hamm, that may have had something to do with it too.) The adaptation was done here by J. Michael Straczynski, who also worked on DC's pretty awful Before Watchmen project, and none of the changes that he made seemed to be that interesting. (One thing that kind of puzzles me is that this adaptation, as well as the live-action movie, ditched a scene from the comic that's one of my favorites: the police that were investigating Edward Blake's death pay a visit to Dan Dreiberg at his home after he and Laurie take the Owlship out and save some people from a tenement fire, and, without coming right out and telling Dan that they've figured out that he's Nite Owl, tell him to cut that shit out. The unlikelihood of any well-known superhero being able to maintain a secret identity has always been one of the biggest suspensions of disbelief in superhero comics, and it's also something that's been ditched more in recent years, probably because of the MCU doing so.)

Anyway, it was obviously still good enough for me to finish it, but I wouldn't put it anywhere near the sequel series in terms of quality.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:57 AM on March 3 [1 favorite]

Yeah, one of the many changes to the story that I didn't like was giving this scene to Hollis Mason. Sure, it helped remind viewers who Hollis was (we only see him for one or two scenes in the first film; he's a much larger presence in the comic, as the narrator of all the back matter in the first three issues), but there's really no other point to this edit. The change (a) removes a genuinely tense scene in which Dan realizes he's really, really fucked; (b) is dumb, because the stinger is Hollis saying, "If I can figure this out, don't you think the cops can?" which obscures the larger point that Hollis could figure it out because he knows Dan is Nite Owl, a key fact of which the cops are unaware, so that their arrival at Dan's place two minutes later makes no sense whatsoever; and (c) it makes Hollis look like a crafty old dude instead of a borderline senile, benign old dude, and that change completely changes the scene where the Knot Tops murder him, so that it's now a grizzled old hero fighting his last fight instead of the horror and tragedy of a kindly old soul dying for no reason.

As you can tell, I have a lot of issues with the changes to this story. Please don't get me started on removing the scene where Rorschach finds his spare uniform. I think I actually yelled at my TV set.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 8:19 AM on March 3 [1 favorite]

Oh! Oh!!! And let me just add, the kidnapping case...okay. Holy shit, talk about missing the whole ass point. A lot of Rorschach's childhood is elided, but I think we're left just enough that we can maybe see that the rationale for Kovacs becoming a superhero is to address the social injustice he faced as a child. Now, maybe that's high-minded and maybe it's just simple revenge -- I am not necessarily saying that Rorschach's motivation is a noble one, because I think it's important not to romanticize the character, who is dangerously mentally ill. But I do think that, in the final analysis, as it were, Rorschach is a scared little boy inside who is trying to become the champion he needed.

So, when he takes on the kidnapping case, the most important part of his later account is when he says something to the effect of, "Thought of child. Scared. Alone. Hurt. Didn't like it." But he thinks that, as Rorschach, this is something he can fix. He is horribly, horribly wrong. When he realizes he still cannot save the child, who is a mirror for himself, his mission morphs from a mission of guardianship to one of vengeance, and more, he loses the vulnerable part of himself, the part that he knows he still cannot protect.

This is...not clear in the film.

Even though much of Kovacs' narration to his shrink is retained as voice-over, this narration becomes pointless once the key details are removed that explain what exactly changes in him when he realizes that the little girl has been killed and fed to the dogs. He's upset, as anyone would be, but we hardly need a narrator to tell us that. We don't understand how this affects Kovacs in a way that is unique to him. And without this, really, we don't understand the character at all; he's just an ersatz Batman, The Punisher But Kinda Stinky.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 9:21 AM on March 3 [2 favorites]