Mind of Bryan

I’ve been watching through the Director’s cut of The Watchmen, and exactly why the ending didn’t work has really just made itself clear to me. I saw it twice in the theatre, and put off really criticizing it until I saw this edition, since I knew the theatrical release was only part of a larger film, which was only part of an expansive graphic novel. I wanted to give it it’s due, which is not easy to do, considering Alan Moore’s campaign against the film of his own book. I should also mention that The Watchmen is one of the best examples I can find of fractal storytelling, with its repetition of themes and events in different places and moments in the plot.

Now, a few things about films of books, before I get into the nitty gritty. I don’t think there’s any story that can’t be told on film, with all deference to Alan Moore and J.D. Salinger. Any claims to the contrary are author’s egotism or control freak natures. Prose, comics, and film are all storytelling mediums, each has strengths and weaknesses, and each have their own structures, conventions and creative vocabularies. Changing mediums is an act of translation, and in any act of translation, some parts translate better than others. The translation lets another person, with all that other person’s sensibilities into the creative process, and so there’s an interpretation that goes on in the process. To be fair, to shoot The Watchmen, you’d need eight hours of movie, and some way of putting in some text-heavy exposition. On the other hand, it does kind of look like Zack Snyder held up a copy of the comic, and told each actor to change their posture until it matched the comic exactly. It would have been long and complete.

I mention this because this interpretation, and this translation is what made Zack Snyder choose bombs over tentacles.
But we should start at the comic, recount the story, and then look at what this all means, and then compare the movie, and see if we can come to some conclusions. In the comic, the machine Dr. Manhattan has been working on transplants a gigantic being from another dimension to downtown Manhattan, and it is the Godzilla of transdimensional tentacle beasts, destroying blocks of the city, and killing thousands, causing great psychological harm to the psychics of the world. The creature immediately dies in the Earth’s atmosphere, leaving us all to wonder what the hell just happened. The net result of John leaving for parts of the galaxy unknown is played the same, but his reasoning is quite different.

The tentacle represents something beyond humanity, something that has caused such great harm, and which may strike again any time anywhere. All comparisons to terrorism aside, it is a unifying terror. Terrorism has failed to do this to us because terrorists are, by and large, humans. This is something we’ve been looking for proof of for millenia, the tentacle is alien. This is first contact, the game changer. In light of this, Dr. Manhattan can stop defending humans, he can leave us to our own means, because our means are now unified against a proven universal problem. We are left knowing little about the wheres and whys of the inexplicable appearance of the tentacles,and exactly what kind of danger it represents, but we do know there is something beyond our meager struggles.

This leads us to Dr. Manhattan. In the comic, this event liberates the man in blue. He has been freed of the burden of being defender of the earth for the cause of American justice and freedom, such as he can provide while Tricky Dick is in power. Dr. Manhattan started off as a scientist, with a sense of curiosity which had been interrupted by his accident. With the appearance of the tentacle, and as abhorrent as the plan was, it did work as we are led to believe, and with his tremendous powers from the accident, Dr. Manhattan could finally do what no other man in history (and for a long time into the future) could do, visit the stars, find other civilizations, and satisfy his curiosity. The mixed ethics of the root cause of his freedom were something he chose to live with as it solved his struggle, the ends had justified the means. Adrian Veidt had taken the ethical step he couldn’t take himself. His job was done.

It should be noted that in the Watchmen, everything is masterfully nuanced, and so Dr. Manhattan’s notion of freedom is probably a conflicted notion in his head. He was isolated by the military and government into doing their dirty work in pursuit of their version of freedom, which as we know in the world of the Watchmen, is anything but free even as far as we understand freedom. At the same time, he had his own notion of freedom that refused to be brainwashed out of him.
In the movie, Adrian Veidt made a device that destroyed blocks of many cities all over the world, and made it obvious that Dr. Manhattan had built them, and was actually the enemy in the end (though not necessarily all along). The weapons were very similar to existing nuclear technology, and were very obviously man-made weapons. What is more significant is that The weapons were obviously made and detonated by Dr. Manhattan. He was framed, and in the process, chased away from the earth.

Now, this is in many ways, the same thing. The world has been united against a common enemy, Dr. Manhattan and the big blue guy is gone. Problem really is, what happens when you show a technology that can vaporize spheres of earth and city, well, all of a sudden it is the new shiny, and everyone wants one, in particular before anybody else, including two-bit third world dictators like North Korea and Iran. In the movie, Adrian Veidt introduces a new arms race to a world one minute from nuclear war. Great job, world’s smartest man. Way to go.

So I think it is time for me to make a writing comment on Avatar since by now everybody, even impoverished children in Africa have probably seen it. While it was pretty, and the story was epic, it wasn’t without its writing flaws. James Cameron is, I think, the best person in Hollywood for polishing the turd. I think he has had only a couple of original stories (The Abyss and Strange Days), and even those I’m beginning to doubt. He ripped off the Terminator from a Harlan Ellison written Outer Limits storyline. Titanic was based on “A Night to Remember” which I first read in fourth grade. This one was widely known to be a take off on Dances With Wolves, Pocahantas, or any other of 20 or so books. Given how lazy he seems to be in coming up with stories, I’m guessing he didn’t go too deeply into the more obscure of the list. Most of the issues I had were issues of laziness, and I think they are from the laziness of not being hungry. Somebody who isn’t given five years, $300 million and complete control from the outset of filming would have fixed these problems. Let me ruin the movie for you.

Actually, I found the movie tremendously enjoyable, let me start by saying it. The world Cameron created is richly detailed, down to creating a full language and ecosystem. But you’d think if you could come up with such a world, you could come up with a better name for the rock the humans want than “Unobtanium”. This name is a joke from materials scientists and materials users that should never have made it into a movie. You’d think after 5 years of production, you could come up with a better name for a mineral. There were two ways around it. One, come up with a better name, or second, mention “unobtanium TM, I don’t know what it’s made of and I don’t care, I just know it makes money.” The repetition of the name in serious context just made it silly. Another example of this is Pandora. We couldn’t come up with a better name for it than this? Really? Star Wars can do it just fine.

The other issue with the unobtanium is that we don’t know what it does. This entire three hours of this epic tale and epic war was fought over something that so far as we know is a rock, by the looks of it, a piece of pyrite or hematite. At least in Dune (another story parts of Avatar’s plot could have been stolen from) we knew what the spice did. You could say it’s a MacGuffin, but in this case, we deserve more than a MacGuffin. MacGuffins only work when it’s a story about characters, and this is a story about a war. The characters are absolutely secondary to plot. They don’t really have their individuality, much as James Cameron would like you to think. There’s the grizzled military leader, the money-driven company man (last played by Paul Reiser in Aliens, another James Cameron movie), Sigourney Weaver’s native liaison is nothing more than a Jane Goodall without a past. Think about it, what do we know about her, what did she do before coming to Pandora? Where are the telltale tics and tremors of any of these characters? No, not a character piece, and so we have to care about what the pathetically named unobtanium does.

The next issue I have was a reference to a “Daisy Cutter” in reference to a bomb to be used on the natives. If you look up “Daisy Cutter”, it is not a generic term. It is used in reference to a particular weapon of the current U.S. Military, the largest conventional bomb in the world, which fills up the entire cargo bay of a C-130. It is nickname the daisy cutter for the blast pattern it creates. What the future military creates on Pandora is the mother of all cluster bombs, not a single gigantic and comparable conventional bomb. All comparisons aside, when she said, “Fricking daisy Cutter,” it pulled me out of the world of Pandora, and back into the very familiar war-torn world we live in, and that worked counter to all of the work they did in creating the world of Pandora. Eight years of development and execution thrown away in one word. Now, if they had used “cluster bomb”, it would have made plenty of sense, as this is a generic term for a bomb made of many little bombs. It would also have made things that much more horrible, as cluster bombs are now banned by the U.N.

And really, robots that carry guns and knives? What possible utility does that have? I can’t imagine we’d build anything so anthropomorphic as we’d have a device for the knife, a gun with much more design efficiency. Didn’t we see enough of this with the Matrix? Aren’t the robots and weapons of Robotech much more likely than these cheesy things?