Warner Bros.
It’s been nearly twenty years since the comic Watchmen was first recommended to me. I was blown away by its storytelling and artistic style.
Since the comic was published, Hollywood has repeatedly tried to adapt Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ groundbreaking comic for film and or TV. It has been mostly a mixed bag of success.
How do you film a comic that was intentionally made to be nigh unfilmable? The Answer: you animate it.
Watchmen: Chapter 1 is a great adaptation of the Watchmen comic, better by far than the 2009 live-action film from Zack Snyder.
Although Snyder’s film seemed almost to be a shot-for-shot remake of the original comic book, it only captured the surface layer of what Moore and Gibbons had to offer. In other words, like all Snyder projects, it was all style and no substance.
The animated Watchmen:Chapter 1 is closer to the spirit of the comic book.
Moore and Gibbons set out to tell a story that was unique to the comic format. For them it was more about the way the story is told than the actual story itself. In comics, everything included in the panel is planned. Every component down to the smallest detail has been thought out. If Dave Gibbons bothered to draw it, then it was meant to be there. Live-action films rarely have that level of detail. However, animation is the perfect hybrid between the drawn comic and live-action film.
Watchmen:Chapter 1 has the same obsessive level of consideration as the comic with all flash of the live action.
Writer J. Michael Straczynski, known for creating Babylon 5 and scripting various corporate and creator owned comic books, did a lean adaptation of the comic to screenplay. You don’t need to have read Watchmen to follow the film. However, he doesn’t spoon feed you the story. Straczynski expects his viewer to be smart. However, it may take more than one viewing to pick up all of the little nuances peppered in each scene throughout the film.
Watchmen:Chapter 1 is the first film in what will be a 2-part series.
In an alternate reality to ours, what starts out as a straightforward murder of a man, practically ignored by the NYC police investigations, becomes something bigger when the former vigilante Rorschach takes on the investigation. Rorschach discovers that the murdered man is a former government-sanctioned costumed vigilante, The Comedian.
Superheroes have been banned by the president. Rorschach believes there is a conspiracy at work putting targets on all costumed heroes. He warns his former colleagues of this threat. But as Rorschach gets closer to the truth, he is set up and blamed for the murder of a former villain that has turned stool pigeon by the person pulling the strings of the larger mystery. All of this takes place as tensions rise on the world stage between the United States and Russia. All out war looms over everything.
Watchmen:Chapter 1 ends with Rorschach imprisoned, and his former partner Dan Dreiberg (Nite Owl) and Laurie Juspeczyk (Silk Spectre) team up in trying to unravel the mystery.
Like the comic, much of the story telling is non-linear. Some of it is through flashbacks, tying in the storylines of the first run of costumed heroes.
Some of it is illustrating how Dr. Manhattan, the only truesuper-powered hero in the series, can exist in multiple timelines all at once. Told alongside our main heroes’ story is a seemingly unrelated story of a comic book that one of the background characters is reading called Tales of the Black Freighter. This is one of those important details that Moore and Gibbons added into their comic to add another layer to the main Watchmen story.
I was delighted to see the Watchmen:Chapter 1 team included the Black Freighter in their own version. Unlike the theatrical release of Snyder’s version. Having to wait for his “ultimate cut” in order to finally see it re-incorporated back into the movie.
The Watchmen: Chapter 1 director Brandon Vietti leans into making the story cinematic, showcasing a gritty, noir feel that invokes the old time detective stories that the original source material alludes to.
Similar to the way Moore and Gibbons pushed the comic format to tell their story, Watchmen: Chapter 1 tries to take advantage of everything animation has to offer. Every background is filled with important details to help further the story (or give you sneak peeks of where the story is going). By being animated, you are never taken out of the world by special effects because the creative team is handicapped by little things like gravity or physics.
Dr. Manhattan never looks out of place whether he’s towering over the field of Vietnam or creating multiple versions of himself to multitask. Everything always looks like it belongs.
My only disappointment is I wish the style of animation for this film was more expressive. It could have been a style choice by the filmmakers, but with the composition of the cinematography and the editing being so dynamic, I wish the actual animation was more fluid and emotive.
The cast is spot on. It has a nice mix of voice acting veterans that if you watch a lot of animated films/television or play a good amount of video games, you’re sure to recognize a few people. It’s fun to hear Troy Baker (The Last of Us videogame) take on the more refined Ozymandias when he is more known for gruffer characters like Joel Miller or Booker DeWitt. I also feel the creative team even played with subverting the viewer’s expectations in the casting by having Jeffery Combs play the former villain Molach instead of casting him as Rorschach. Combs had voiced the Question for DC’s Justice League Unlimited animated series. In the original Watchmen comic book, Rorschach was based on the character The Question. It would have been a great “nod nod, wink wink” to DC fans.
Titus Welliver deftly brings a roughness to this version of Rorschach that works well with the direction that Watchmen:Chapter 1 took. Also delivering solid performances were Matthew Rhys as Nite Owl, Rick D. Wasserman as The Comedian, Katee Sackoff as Silk Spectre and pop culture icon Adrienne Barbeau as her mother, the original Silk Spectre.
Extras include a featurette on co-creator Dave Gibbons and the other featurette focuses on adapting the story to animation.
I will probably watch Watchmen: Chapter 1 at least 5 more times before Watchmen:Chapter 2 is released 2025 so I can soak up all the storytelling bits.
Whether you are a longtime fan or new to the story, check Watchmen:Chapter 1 out.
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