With Bated Breath

Anybody with even half an ear to the ground in the musty backwaters of spurned comic novels and little known super heroes, will no doubt be aware of the feverish anticipation which is being generated by every droplet of information which appears in relation to the movie version of Alan Moore and Davie Gibbons’ seminal graphic novel Watchmen. To the uninitiated this excitement may seem odd – comic book adaptations are in abundance these days, from the already well established (Batman, Spiderman, Hulk, Iron Man, Fantastic Four and so forth) to the obscure (Ghost Rider, Hellboy, BPRD).

But Watchmen really is different; an incredibly emotionally and politically complex work, which refuses to paint its world in terms of crude morality, but rather keeps a studied distance from the world it portrays, never shirking from the consequences of its characters’ belief systems, adored, rightly, by those who’ve read it, and regarded in some quarters as one of the peaks of late twentieth century literature. This is a complicated, multi-tiered mystery set in an alternate 1985 America where costumed crime fighters are part of the fabric of everyday society, and the “Doomsday Clock” - which charts the American tension with the Soviet Union - is permanently set at five minutes to midnight. When one of his former c is murdered, the washed-up but no less determined masked vigilante Rorschach sets out to uncover a plot to kill and discredit all past and present superheroes. As he reconnects with his former crime-fighting legion–a ragtag group of retired superheroes, only one of whom has true powers–Rorschach glimpses a wide-ranging and disturbing conspiracy with links to their shared past and catastrophic consequences for the future. Their mission is to watch over humanity…but then he realizes that nobody has watched over the Watchmen?



I can't help but be pretty excited and also slightly terrified that they will muck up the genius of the book. Because the book's straight-up apocalyptic darkness is what makes it a work of genius. And a beauty of a novel like V for Vendetta (again from Alan Moore) had to be hollywoodized with a hair-brained romance thrown in, which results in the mindless waif like Natalie Portman turning in to a strong, proud Vivien-Leighish heroine. The entire sequence ends up creating more holes than it deems to accomplish. Then there are the hurdles of intricate plot layering and the fluidity of time and space to conquer. Let's just say that I will be disappointed to the point of rage if it comes out all Fantastic Four-y.

It should be interesting to see where Zack Snyder (of directing 300 fame) translates the testosterone into superhero adrenaline rush for the Watchmen. Until then, we’ll have to pray every night that, coming out of the cinema, we’ll be glancing to each other, and saying, with relieved smiles, ‘Well, it could have been worse’.