Watchmen: Chapter 1, 2024.
Directed by Brandon Vietti.
Featuring the voice talents of Kelly Hu, Katee Sackhoff, Adrienne Barbeau, Grey Griffin, Titus Welliver, Matthew Rhys, Troy Baker, Jeffrey Combs, Yuri Lowenthal, Kari Wahlgren, Phil LaMarr, Dwight Schultz, Geoff Pierson, Michael Cerveris, Corey Burton, Jason Spisak, John Marshall Jones, Rick D. Wasserman, and Max Koch.
SYNOPSIS:
Warner Bros. Animation has debuted Watchmen: Chapter 1, a highly anticipated animated adaptation of the iconic comic book series by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. The trailer released during San Diego Comic Con piqued a lot of people’s interest, and the short version of my review is: “It’s a very faithful, if a bit rushed, adaptation of the source material.” Read on for the long version.
Watchmen creator and writer Alan Moore has always insisted that his 12-issue comic book series is impossible to turn into a movie, due to the specific ways it uses the medium to achieve its storytelling goals. He’s not wrong, and I would encourage any fan of Zack Snyder’s 2009 film adaptation to read the series, if they haven’t, but I don’t have a problem with anyone tackling the material for an adaptation.
Snyder’s film wasn’t perfect, but, like Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, it does a great job of capturing the spirit of the source material. One of the trickiest parts of Watchmen to adapt to film is the inclusion of the Tales of the Black Freighter comic book story, which acts as a kind of Greek chorus for the main plot.
The 215-minute Ultimate Cut of Snyder’s movie, which I’ve always appreciated just because I love the comic book so much, incorporates Tales of the Black Freighter as a series of animated vignettes that cut to the kid reading the comic while sitting next to a newsstand.
In contrast, this new Watchmen: Chapter 1 adaptation from Warner Bros. Animation presents Tales of the Black Freighter as comic book panels on the screen, with a voice-over reading the narration. The kid is shown reading the comic, but this version also cuts to other moments in the story as the narration continues, thus highlighting the connection between that story and the main plot in a better way.
My only quibble about the way Tales of the Black Freighter is handled here concerns a few moments when multiple panels and their narrative captions are shown, but the action cuts away too quickly to read all of them. The other narrative captions then appear again over the next scene, but the “Wait, I didn’t get a chance to read that — oh, now it’s appearing again” effect is a bit jarring.
In general, this is a very faithful adaptation of the comic book, with an animation style that hews closely to artist Dave Gibbons’ well-regarded depictions of the characters and the alternate 1985 timeline they inhabit. Unlike the movie, it opens the way the comic book does, with the scene of the two detectives investigating the Comedian’s death, but like the movie, it recreates many of Gibbons’ panels. And all of the characters sound the way you probably expect them to.
My only other issue with Watchmen: Chapter 1 is that it runs just 78 minutes before the closing credits, which makes the storyline feel rushed as it seems to race from one plot point to the next. There aren’t many moments for the viewer to catch their breath before moving on to the next thing. Maybe the inclusion of some of the excerpts from Under the Hood, Hollis Mason’s biography that provides closing material for many of the issues of the comic book series, could have been used to that effect.
The story will conclude with Watchmen: Chapter 2, so I wonder if it will feature the same relatively short running time. If so, we’ll end up with an animated version of Watchmen that’s roughly on par with Snyder’s theatrical cut of his live action adaptation. That seems like a missed opportunity, since I would have thought an animated adaptation of Watchmen would have the luxury of fully exploring the story and its world.
Warner Bros. Animation provided me with a preview of this digital release of Watchmen: Chapter 1. A physical media edition will arrive on August 27th, and we’ll update with that review. Stay tuned.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★★★★ / Movie: ★★★★
Brad Cook
Originally published August 13, 2024. Updated August 19, 2024.
