Watchmen pt 1: Action Stories

I remember a TV commercial--it must've been the late 80s--put out by D.C. comics as an effort to drum up readers, and consisting of a young man proclaiming the exciting D.C. line up against the background of a darkened city. I can't find it on youtube, but the one thing I remember distinctly, was his description of something called "Watchmen" as one of D.C.'s "action stories". Being a burgeoning comic-buff, I knew the other titles that he rattled off with the glee of a pitch-man, but I didn't know this Watchmen. It wasn't until years later that I realized how absurd it was to pitch Watchmen to a TV audience as an "action story".

And now we have a gargantuan behemoth of a movie, brought to the screen after (by my count) four directors, two different studios, one lawsuit, and nearly two decades of skepticism, speculation, and incredulity that this action story could become a feature film. At this point, it has superceded its own content to become a cultural event, like the moon landing--so huge and impossible that it's kind of awesome that it's even here at all.

But what about the content that (supposedly) brought it here? Does it carry itself from the page to the screen? I'll leave that for others to judge. I liked it. Some parts I didn't like, some parts I loved. But really, even if you knew nothing about it, about its significance for comics as a genre, about the endless wrangling over ownership and the problems of adaptation; even if you knew none of that, you've been seeing commercials, trailers, posters, and god-knows-whatelse for the last six months. You can throw down your eight dollars and develop an opinion as easily as me.

But here I am, the next day, and I woke up being so unsettled by my reaction to it that I started writing these lines, and when I came out the other side, I had written pages and pages. I am left with questions that I can't answer, because the answers seem to be only more questions--about authenticity, the modern world, and what it is I like about comic books, or if I even like comic books at all. I will mercifully edit them down into smaller chunks and post them over the next few days, in an effort to try and pin down why I enjoyed the movie, even as I felt hollowed out by it.