Who Watches the Watchmen?

It was Thursday night, Friday morning.  The TV was on, but silent.  I sat leaning on my table, radiator hot by my side, lamp illuminating the glossy pages of the book.  It was 3:00 AM, and I was more than 3/4 of the way done with Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s Watchmen, excluding the chapter-break excerpts detailing the histories of the book’s characters.  I had a goal, and the goal was to finish the book before seeing the movie, a mere ten or eleven hours away.  I…uh…okay, this isn’t working.

Indeed I read, and I read quite a lot.  I eventually made it to the beginning of chapter 11, when the fatigue became too great, and I decided to get two hours of sleep before going to school that day.  During school, I nearly fell asleep during two different periods.  During the first of those two, the teacher had to wake me up.  Horrible.  But I did get most of the book read, and now I remember a surprising amount of details.  I kind of feel like I stretched my stamina for reading graphic novels.  I mean I read before.  But now I can really read.

I feel like Watchmen didn’t translate well into a movie.  I mean, a lot goes on in the novel.  I got the impression from the movie that the scenes were rushed in order to keep it from being too long.  Some scenes were cut, and some worked around altogether, understandably so for the time-frame needs.  But to me that doesn’t make the movie feeling rushed an understandable outcome, it still makes it worse as a movie.  Then again, maybe I can attribute the feeling to having just stopped reading the novel itself before I saw it.

I did like the movie.  What I really enjoyed was seeing the characters involved in so much action.  In the novel, there are some punches and things like that, and there is enough, but in the movie you really see the characters kick some ass.  Although to me they did seem a bit strong.  I thought they were just people who beefed-up and became superheroes, like a realistic take on it, but kicking someone ten feet through the air, while entertaining and full of awesome, is a little too inhuman.  The fight scene in the beginning of Watchmen involving Edward Blake and his assailant–the one nonexistant in the novel–was excellent!  Brutal, even.  It really was a good way to start off that movie.

Not actually having read the ending in the book, I felt a sense of awe seeing the ending of the movie.  That part  In all, there is no way I would call the Watchmen movie bad, but there is also no way I would call it better than the novel, or even seeing it the same experience as reading the novel.  The novel presents everything better.

I am not finished with Watchmen yet.  Having read most of the book and seen the movie, I must now read the rest of the book, including the background bits between chapters, and the full-paged parts of the sub-comic.