After a short wait, the second and final installment of the Watchmen animated movies is here. Watchmen: Chapter I was released this past August, so there wasn’t even much of a wait for the conclusion. Chapter I covered the first five issues of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ 1986 graphic novel while Chapter II adapts the next seven. They could have easily called these “Part 1” and “Part 2” as the word “chapter” doesn’t correspond to anything specifically.
The last movie ended with the police apprehending Rorschach, and this one begins with the scientists and creatives working on a secret project. Much of the first movie was Rorschach narrating and guiding the story, but here we have Dan and Laurie (formerly Nite Owl and Silk Spectre) contemplating their lives until deciding to go into action. Once again, this movie is very faithful to the graphic novel and often goes nearly word for word in depicting its scenes and dialogue, trimming only a little bit and even picking up the pace somewhat to get to the finale. The biggest change is the medium itself, and going from something that is read to something that is watched does alter the way the audience experiences the story.
I talked about this in my review of Chapter I, but the first change I noticed was the color scheme. The colors of the comic were brighter and at the mercy of 1980’s coloring technology, but the movie tones everything down, from clothing to backgrounds. It makes for a better contrast, and scenes like Nite Owl and Silk Spectre saving people at night from a blazing fire and the blue Doctor Manhattan constructing a palace on the red Mars is easier on the eyes.
I was a real fan of the film’s score. The music isn’t too distracting, and it serves to heighten the tension and mystery. When things ramp up, this 80’s-sounding New Wave synth kicks in, and it’s really cool and unique. It’s just too bad they couldn’t use some of the real songs the graphic novel did. Given the memorable moments that happen to Billie Holiday’s “You’re My Thrill” and “All Along the Watchtower” by Bob Dylan, their absences were notable.
The voice cast remains strong. In the first movie, Titus Welliver as
Rorschach was the standout. That was mostly helped by his narration. This time, I was really impressed by Troy Baker’s Adrian Veidt and Katee Sackhoff’s Laurie Juzpeczyk. Veidt sort of takes over the narration/exposition from Rorschach, and he has some strong moments that Baker pulled off perfectly. Laurie gets the most emotional scenes, and Sackhoff makes them work.
This movie covers a lot of payoffs set up in previous chapters, and some work but some fall short because of how fast the plot moves. In prison, Rorschach has to talk to a counselor. The counselor is slowly sucked into Rorschach’s world, which has an adverse effect on his life. We don’t see any of this in the movie, and him accidentally saying “Rorschach” rather than “Walter” or “Kovacs” happens too abruptly in the movie to make a real impact. Nite Owl and Rorschach’s investigation is quite brief (to the point an entire bar scene is missing), and Dan ends up hearing about Hollis Mason’s death on the radio. That moment isn’t given the time or weight it needed. The layered narrative and parallel stories is one of the graphic novel’s greatest strengths, but the movie doesn’t hit the same way.
Watching the movie unfold gives a definitive timing to the way things happen rather than leave the pace of the story up to the reader. When a character catches a bullet, I always pictured that moment to happen in slow motion, but it happens as fast as an actual gunshot. That’s not to say timing always works against the movie. When Laurie realizes who her real father is, she is bombarded by thoughts and memories, and the viewer feels as overwhelmed as she is. When Doctor Manhattan’s perceptions are altered, he slips into something he will say in ten seconds, and it is exactly ten seconds until we get to that moment. That was a nice touch.
There are a handful of famous lines from Watchmen, and many of them are from the issues this film covers. I’m glad that most of them have made it into the film, but I am disappointed about a slight change. Like in the 2009 Zack Snyder film, the phrase “Republic Serial villain” is changed to “Comic book villain”. I don’t like how that phrase is too aware of its audience. Superhero comics never took off in the Watchmen universe, so that wouldn’t be a reference the characters would make.
The previous film made me aware of just how much the directing guides the audience to certain things happening on screen (rather than the reader seeing the whole picture and focusing on something on a personal level). This is an advantage in favor of the movie for certain scenes. When Walter Kovacs looks at inkblots, he lies about what he sees, and we see quick flashes of the horrific images that appear in his mind. It’s even more effective in movie format given how fast it goes by. Hollis Mason’s unfortunate fight with the Top Knots is peppered with shots of him back when he was the original Nite Owl. The contrast is really amazing. I appreciate the use of the Tales of the Black Freighter comic interspersed with the main plot, and it’s a rare experience having that as part of an animated film. In the graphic novel, you’re just reading a comic book inside a comic book. Here, comic
book pages slowly move across the screen while the narration is read. There really are two different mediums interacting with each other.
I wouldn’t recommend watching this (and part I) instead of or before reading the graphic novel. There’s a reason Watchmen is held up as the standard of what a graphic novel can be, and some of that is lost in the translation to animation. Having said that, the animated movies are much more faithful adaptations than the 2009 movie, and I believe they did a much better job sticking to the spirit and themes of the graphic novel. So I’d say Watchmen Chapters I and II make for great companion pieces to the original work.
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