Wen 丨 West Parker
In March this year, Zach Schneider's edited version of "Justice League" was unveiled on HBO MAX, ushering in an unprecedented discussion, which critics believe is a film that magnifies Schneider's strengths and weaknesses, and is almost no different from the Joss Whedon edited version of that year in terms of plot, and the language of the camera adds a lot of Schneider's iconic slow-motion and close-ups.
DC fans, on the other hand, continued their own god-making movement, borrowing Shots from Schneider, gazing at the bodies of these robust heroes for a long time, shouting the names of comic book characters who appeared in the super-long Easter eggs. After all, it's the result of three years of every fan's cry on the internet, and in that sense, it's all fans who, along with Schneider, completed the four-hour Justice League. Because of this, "Justice League" was brushed to 8.9 points on Douban, becoming the highest-scoring super British film after "The Dark Knight".
In retrospect, the creation of Zach Schneider actually originated from the 2009 "Watchmen". As Schneider's first superhero film, Watchmen offers an audiovisual feast of 215 minutes (the ultimate cut) with the perfect text of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbs, as well as his own super-visual transformation ability.
For a long time, I have regarded Schneider's version of Watchmen as the ceiling of a superhero adaptation, so gorgeous and so nostalgic, embedding all the elements that fans and fans like into a movie, creating a cultural spectacle.
Watchmen
This movie is also a preview of the later Schneider version of the DCEU universe, superheroes are on the dark side of morality, they can kill people at will, not subject to legal constraints, but at the same time shoulder great responsibility, must always have a sense of responsibility to save the living, is a combination of God and ordinary people.
It wasn't until 2019, when HBO and Damon Lindelof teamed up to launch the episodic version of Watchmen, that I suddenly realized that Schneider's talent was only visual, and that no matter how well his films were made, they could only be a copy of the original comics. And Schneider's conservatism also allowed him to block the path of creating his own classics.
Episodic version of Watchmen
Lindelof's episodes, on the other hand, really eat through the comics, and on the basis of retaining the original settings and characters of the comics, implant their own almost completely original stories into the world of the original comics. While Schneider was busy creating gods with elevation angles and slow motions, Lindelof chose to flatten the camera and tighten the story, telling a new story that could happen in the Watchmen universe in a less visual style.
Set in 2019, more than three decades after the comic book story, the series is set in the original comic rather than The Schneider's film version. Thirty years later, the previous generation of Watchmen is extinct in the world, with no way out, and the new world is not very peaceful. As a result of the discovery of Rorschach's diary, a group of extremists, using Rorschach as their faith, organized the terrorist organization "Seventh Cavalry Regiment".
They embraced white supremacy and launched the "White Nights" terrorist attack against the police, killing a large number of policemen. In order to protect itself while upholding justice, the United States passed the Mask Act, which allows police officers to hide their true identities and wear masks to enforce the law.
After years of silence, the Seventh Cavalry regiment reappeared in the small town of Tulsa, where the chief of police was accidentally killed. The masked cop in charge of investigating all this is Angela, a masked cop nicknamed "The Night Nun", and during the investigation, Angela discovers that all this seems to be inextricably linked to the Tulsa Black Massacre that occurred in 1912...
In order not to let the overly aggressive original comic book take a partial episodic style, The Lindelof version deliberately adopts a detached approach from the original book when dealing with it. Constructing the story with new characters, the audience will not suddenly enter the familiar Moore "Watchmen Universe", but will follow the changes that have taken place in the world over a thirty-year time span, and then slowly discover the familiar elements left in the original Watchmen's original book.
The disadvantage of this is that the first episode or two is much different from the audience's expectations, resulting in the series receiving a lot of bad reviews at the beginning and being abandoned by many impatient viewers. But as the plot deepens, the plot points buried by Lindelof are revealed one by one, and each character is deeply excavated, and we are amazed, this is really a thought-provoking drama!
Looking back now, Lindelof's choice is undoubtedly a big gamble. His adaptation of Watchmen is both fan-oriented and personal, taking on the risk of offending all viewers. First, Lindelof is adapting Moore's original with almost devout respect. All the events in the play strictly follow the details that have already occurred in the comics, and even the film in which Schneider copied the comics so much changed the slightly flavorful ending part of "Alien Octopus", and Lindelof accepted it all, even releasing it as a key point in the finale.
But at the same time, Lindelof's adaptation is extremely willful and personal. The opening scene, without any explanation, throws all the viewers into the strange world of the watchmen for thirty years, whether fans or non-fans, will be confused. In this world, the themes of the doomsday clock in the comics, the Cold War, the U.S.-Soviet confrontation, the global nuclear threat, and even the superhero ethic no longer exist, or are not the focus. We are facing a more realistic and complex real world.
For non-fan audiences, the series was unfriendly from the start, with a large number of characters appearing without antecedents and consequences, and few viewers could immediately recognize and remember each character. And for fans, this is undoubtedly not the "Watchmen" they want to see.
Removing the highly stylized heroic figures, we see a more crude and even rudimentary reality. Many fans have posted on the Internet that the drama version takes the issue of racial discrimination as the main contradiction in the watchmen world in 2019, and it is completely devoid of the grandeur and grandeur of the original Cold War background.
Such a choice made Lindelof suffer a small backlash, "Watchmen" ratings did not meet expectations, the first season ended hastily, and the second season was not renewed. Although Lindelof declared that he only wanted to shoot one season, but between the end of the first season, a large number of story lines did not end, and the characters in the comics did not fully appear, the author is inclined to Lindelof actually did not reject the plan of the second season, but finally chose to give up due to ratings. Fortunately, a year later, the show won the recognition it deserved, and successfully won the Emmy Awards for Best Miniseries, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor and Best Screenplay, becoming the big winner of the year.
In fact, the drama version of "Watchmen" only faces a small audience, that is, the more enlightened fans of the original comics, who are willing to look at the series from a broader and friendlier perspective; and the people who are eager to learn and are willing to make up for the original comics immediately after watching the series. Only after crossing this threshold can the audience truly understand the charm of Lindelof's version of "Watchmen".
Lindelof's Watchmen is no longer an adaptation in the traditional sense, but a fanwork that borrows the shell of a Watcher and injects a lot of personal ambition and style. And the depth of this fandom is not even lost to the original.
Comic fans who abandoned the show in 2019 angrily accused Lindelof of taking racial discrimination as the main line of the series too small. But in 2021, when we look back again, we can't help but find that Lindelof's observations and predictions of social problems are so accurate. Over the past year, the "Black Lives Matter" (BLM) movement has intensified, sweeping across Europe and the United States. It also makes people who have long despised or refused to acknowledge this issue have to admit that anti-racial discrimination is still the most important issue at present, and may not even be one of them.
After the Cold War, the world pattern is no longer dominated by dualistic opposition, so inequality and discrimination within the same country naturally become the center of contradiction.
In the series, Lindelof advances the origins of the first generation of militias among the Watchmen to 1921, a year in which the infamous Tulsa Massacre against blacks took place in real America. Because a rumor of attacking white girls hit the front page of local newspapers, a large number of white people took to the streets to kill black people, which eventually caused 300 deaths, 8,000 injuries, and 1,200 houses were burned down. Due to the lack of black voice, such a tragedy is rarely shown in film and television dramas.
It wasn't until "Watchmen" that for the first time mainstream audiences noticed America's long-standing racial problems. After the show, the Tulsa Massacre was also presented as a key storyline in another of HBO's hit shows, Devil's Land.
Lindelof's clever setting of the first masked superhero in the Watchmen universe, the Hooded Judge, as a holocaust survivor is a clever extension of the original comic book. In the comics, the true identity of the hooded judge is never clearly stated (only hinting that he may be a German Hercules, not confirmed), and when all the militiamen and watchmen are calling each other by their names, only the hooded judge never says his name. After much deliberation, Lindelof argues that in the 1930s and 1940s in the United States, what drove a hero not to reveal his identity could only be because he was black.
It can be said that Lindelof almost grasped the only point in moore's comic that can be extended and made a big article. In the sixth episode of the series, "Extraordinary Existence", we explore her grandfather's past through the perspective of the Nun of the Night, and in a period of black and white montage, two generations of black cops/superheroes contrast with each other, which can be described as a historical trace. In the American Hero Story, a play similar to American Horror Story, the hooded judge is portrayed as a handsome gay white hero, and the suffering of this character as a black person is forever forgotten in the long river of history.
The adaptation of Dr. Manhattan is another big finishing touch for Lindelof, who not only turned this classic character into a black person very naturally, but even perfectly interpreted his superpowers, which completely surpassed Schneider's version.
Dr. Manhattan is probably the most capable and complex character in a Marvel. As a being close to God. Dr. Manhattan is free to modify the molecular composition of everything (including himself) and control all the forces of the universe. At the same time, he is also a transcendent being, time has no meaning to him, everything happens simultaneously under his perception, without any causal logic, the past and the future are both present for him. He knew anything at all times, and the cause and effect didn't matter, which made him stop trying to make any changes.
In both the comics and the Schneider film version, a montage about Dr. Manhattan's past is used to show off his superpowers, and Dr. Manhattan's narration is used to explain everything, but there is no actual use of this ability. By the time of the episodic version, Lindelof has undoubtedly delved into Dr. Manhattan's psychology, using his abilities to plant a large number of dramatic conflicts.
In the eighth episode of the series, "A God Goes to the Bar", Dr. Manhattan "debuts" and accosts the Night Nuns in a bar in Vietnam. Tell her who she is and say that for the next decade, the two will fall in love and end in tragedy. Dr. Manhattan is shown to be romantic and convincing, saying that "all love ends in tragedy in the end". What really attracted him was the "tunnel of love" formed by the unknown of the two people's ten years together.
He knew how to start and how to end, but somehow the course of the decade was ambiguous. Dr. Manhattan knows everything, and it is this little bit of unknown that makes him willing to give up his superpowers and identity to hide in the small town of Tulsa and live a life of ordinary black middle class. And under the premise that he knew that he would die in ten years, he still had no remorse.
God became mortal in order to feel love, which is the romance that belongs only to Dr. Manhattan. After all, in the comics, Dr. Manhattan is a character who believes that every human being is a miracle. In the series, giving up these responsibilities and abilities that he does not value for love is obviously in line with his personality.
In the final episode of the series, Dr. Manhattan utters a line at a critical juncture when he says "This is the moment." The Night Nun asked "what moment" to Manhattan, "You asked me when I fell in love with you." That's the moment." It dawns on us that Dr. Manhattan actually chose to fall in love with The Night Nun ten years later because of this moment ten years later. Isn't that the most romantic interpretation of Manhattan's superpowers? Because a love that has not yet happened can make him give everything.
In the finale, the Nuns of the Night use Dr. Manhattan's superpowers that exist in both the past and the present to pass on the message through the mouth of Manhattan, which eventually leads to the events in the first episode and completes a circle.
However, the Manhattan appearance was turned into black, which was unacceptable to many fans. The author can only say that Dr. Manhattan's perspective on the problem has long been higher than that of mortals, and the skin color of the flesh and mortal fetus will obviously not bother him in the slightest. Borrowing a black version of Manhattan, Lindelof has achieved his own bold innovation and exploration in a reasonable situation. It's actually a really powerful affirmative manifesto, where differences in skin color only exist if you care, and for Dr. Manhattan and Lindelof, everyone is equal regardless of appearance.
In addition to these main characters, Lindelof has also honed all the characters that appear in the comics or are completely original. Old characters, such as Pharaoh, are more conceited, more cruel, and have even faded the hypocrisy of mourning for all the people he killed in the comics and becoming a purer "wicked" anti-hero. New characters, such as The Sister of the Night and the Mirror Man, face the great pain caused by the historical events in the comics, and continue to live in fear, trying to find a new way out.
The United States won the Vietnam War, turned Vietnam into a state, and Robert Redford was president of the United States for thirty years, these are new historical settings that are different from our history. It is the same as the parallel universe of Nixon's unlimited re-election in the comics.
In fact, Schneider's film version is a nostalgic drama of the 80s, a tribute to the director's childhood love, a reliving of a story that comic book fans have heard about themselves, and what they want is what they get, with almost no realistic reference. The Lindelof version is trying exactly like Alan Moore in the '80s, trying to write a truly realistic superhero epic in a contemporary context. He also finally did, creating a parallel reality that was different in detail but just as bad as our world.
The emergence of superheroes does not make reality better, people are still empty, and this is not something that any hero or god can change. The problems of real society are too big to fall, and power, discrimination, violence, and chaos are full of chaos. In the comics, Pharaoh ends the Cold War with a lie, but does not create a utopia. In the episode, Dr. Manhattan tries to create a utopia that ends up being nothing more than a huge prison littered with corpses. Dr. Manhattan sacrificed himself to save someone he loved, and that's all a hero can do in real-world circumstances.
Disillusionment with the hero is the theme shared by the original comic book and the series. And this, Schneider, who is good at looking up and slowly showing the flesh and divinity, may never understand.