The Oscar Serkis

I'm back, folks!
The move went well and the new house is lovely. Even better, though, is how much time you have when there's no internet! It's incredible - I got absolutely loads done. But now I'm back - wasting my time, and yours, with my reviews and half-baked insights!

My return to the internet handily coincides with the Oscars, so let's talk about that. Specifically, let's talk about Andy Serkis.

Serkis is the genius who brought us the likes of Gollum, King Kong, Captain Haddock, and Caesar from Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Performing each of those roles in a spotty leotard, he's the leading pioneer in the field of motion-capture (or "mocap") - the process by which the movements of an actor are translated into the movements of a digital character. He's not behind the technology, but he's the one actor constantly pushing this technology forward with absolute commitment and amazing performances. He's even set up the UK's first dedicated mocap studio, to drive the medium further.
So good is he in many of those roles (most notably Gollum and Caesar) that many believe he deserved to be nominated for them in the Academy Awards. I, frankly, don't believe he deserved to be nominated - I believe he deserved to win. But this year, once again, Serkis was completely ignored as Gollum - despite being the most memorable character of the year, and the best thing in The Hobbit by a huge margin.
The Academy continually refuses to recognise mocap as true acting, so Serkis has never been, and may never be, nominated. The reason for this has very little to do with the actual acting, and has everything to do with the technical details.

I actually wrote my university dissertation on this subject. It ended up somehow being about "hermeneutic memetics" (a brand new field of semantics that I literally pulled out of my arse), but at its core it was about the Academy’s unwillingness to accept mocap. That essay dealt with the idea that because mocap fundamentally looks more like animation than acting, and because animators do often tweak the digital performance to fix tech errors such as clipping and deforming, it may never be accepted. Even though the performance originally comes from Serkis, the conversion process necessarily involves the input of animators - making this a team effort and rendering him ineligible for individual acting awards.

Until this year, my response has always been, "But that's ridiculous! Actors have won awards wearing prosthetics before - which requires the input of an entire team of makeup artists - and that still counted! Mocap is no different!"
But this year, I had an epiphany. I realised that there is another response. A better response. And that response is, "So what?"

So what if Serkis' performance is a team effort? Why should that be a problem? It's not a problem in any other category.
Films can have multiple directors, and still win awards for their direction. Films can have multiple editors or writers, and still win awards for those disciplines. There's no other category where this would present a problem - only acting.

This is actually really weird, if you think about it, because the acting that appears on screen is always collaborative. The director always has a hand in the performance. The writer has a hand in the performance. The other actors in the scene have a hand in the performance. The cinematographer has a hand in the performance. Even the costume designer and hairstylist have a hand in the performance. And the editor absolutely has a massive hand in the performance.
This is always true. Add one more name to that list - "the cleanup animator has a hand in the performance" - and what difference does that actually make?

The problem, as I see it, is in that word "Actor". It's singular; but, more than that, it describes a person. "Editing" describes a concept. As does "Writing", "Design" or "Cinematography". "Best Director" is an odd one, as multiple people can be nominated and have even won (West Side Story, 1961), though it's certainly rare. Tellingly, though, the Oscars' own website actually calls the award "Directing".
None of these words describe the person doing a task - just the task itself. It doesn't matter how many people do that task, only that they did it and they did it well. Why should acting be any different?

What I propose, in my capacity as some dude on the internet that the Academy has never heard of, is to change the category names. The obvious choice is "Best Acting in a Leading Male Role" (etc.) which is a step in the right direction, but it still brings up awkward arguments about the definition of "acting".
What then? What is the actual concept that we are awarding when we give a gold statue to an actor?

We've actually already answered this. If you look back through this (overlong) blog post, you will see a word that keeps cropping up. It's "Performance".
Now we're getting somewhere. "Best Male Acting" may have been a problem because (arguably) only an actor can provide acting. "Best Male Performance", on the other hand, could be provided by Andy Serkis and the animators at Weta and still be rewarded as a single unified performance. It then doesn't matter who did what, exactly, because you're awarding the performance itself, not the actor. Gollum would be up for "Best Supporting Male Performance", not Serkis. In Avatar, Neytiri would be nominated for "Best Leading Female Performance", not Zoe Saldana.

I can see an argument that this would devalue the award in some way. That Daniel Day-Lewis deserved his Best Actor award because the performance is entirely his. But again I ask how much of that performance is actually down to Spielberg, his director? And how much has Day-Lewis' raw acting been cut down by an editor to provide a more dynamic performance? We'll never know.
It's exactly the same with mocap. How much of Caesar is actually Serkis' raw acting? We'll never know. But the performance is still incredible, and it's the performance that the Oscars are celebrating, even if they don't know it, when they give out Best Actor awards.
Day-Lewis would still be the one on stage, holding the statue, just as Serkis would be the one on stage. Serkis would just have to thank a few extra people - that's all that would be different. I don't see any value lost in that.

This simple word change, as far as I can tell, would sidestep the mocap problem. Is a mocap performance technically acting? It wouldn't matter, because it's still a performance.
But, as an added bonus, this actually blows the acting categories wide open. What's to say the semi-mocapped four-armed Tars Tarkas from John Carter isn't the Best Supporting Male Performance? Or, for that matter, the Hulk? Why can't Pixar's Merida be considered for Best Lead Female Performance?
Looking to a performance from this year that genuinely did receive a great deal of critical acclaim, what about Richard Parker, the Bengal tiger from Life of Pi?

Food for thought...

Wreck-It Ralph Review

Something amazing has happened!
While we weren't looking, mainstream animation has had a growth-spurt, matured and finally decided what it wants to be when it grows up. We've reached the point that Walt Disney always wanted animation to reach: It's no longer just for kids.

Pixar has obviously been leading this charge ever since Toy Story - peaking with Ratatouille, which isn't really for kids at all - but even their credibility took a hit with the less-adult-friendly Cars 2. Dreamworks have always been at the other end of the spectrum, with much more emphasis on fart and poop jokes. The reborn, reinvigorated Disney (Meet the Robinsons onwards) lands somewhere in the middle.
But we suddenly find that each of the big three have delivered true family films - accessible to kids, but just as accessible (if not moreso) to adults.
It finally feels like the industry has figured out that distinction. Even Madagascar 3 is said to have pretty universal appeal (though I still couldn't bring myself to watch it) and, for the first time since Ice Age, Blue Sky seem to be targeting their next film at more than just kids (though the title, Epic, is bland enough to appeal to precisely no-one). That's five - a full-house!

When I say that they appeal to both adults and children, you may think (as the marketing sometimes implied) that Wreck-It Ralph is a kids' film with some gamer-jokes thrown in for parents. But (as Dreamworks have proven time and again) filling a childish movie with adult jokes is a guaranteed way to alienate both camps.
No, this recent animated trio succeed because they are all films with deep, fully-rounded characters, emotional challenges as well as physical ones, moral complexity, real stakes and real danger, and dark villains who reflect what our heroes (or their mothers) might become. They are, in other words, just Good Films. And Wreck-It Ralph is the best of the three.

The titular Ralph is the villain of a Donkey-Kong-alike arcade game called Fix-It Felix Jr. He's a big angry guy who destroys everything he touches - but it's not his fault. He's not bad; he's just programmed that way. When the other characters in his game refuse to see this, Ralph begins jumping between the machines in the arcade, searching for a way to prove his worth.

It's in this early stage that most of the in-jokes and cameos that filled the advertising take place. The first act is a mass of blink-and-you'll-miss it sight-gags and references. There are crowd-scenes that gamers will be pausing to trawl through for years to come! But these are in no way integral, and they don't distract from the story at all. It's strictly background stuff and, while getting these jokes will add another layer to the experience, not getting them won't harm your enjoyment at all (I have no idea what a Q*bert is, for example). Games aren't the subject of the movie or even the theme - they're just the setting.
The potential of that setting is incredible. With so many varied games in the arcade (both real and fictional) and with each one containing its own world and set of rules, there's a sense this film could go literally anywhere. It's all rendered beautifully, too - each game-world is distinct and looks fantastic, and there's some great tics to the animation to more closely mimic games. The movie makes the most of this potential at the start but, after visiting only a couple of worlds, the game-jumping aspect is dropped and the rest of the story plays out in only one game. It may seem like a wasted opportunity, but Wreck-It Ralph is absolutely right to do so, and this would be a much weaker film if it didn't.

It's here, in a candy-themed racing game called Sugar-Rush (where the characters look like Miis and the final level looks suspiciously rainbow-like), that the film settles down and has a chance to breathe. After the manic, frantic excitement of the first act, we're allowed to explore this place organically - meet its characters, learn its rules. And it's here that we meet Vanellope von Schweetz.
Vanellope is a glitchy, broken character who shouldn't really exist. Like Ralph, she is shunned by her peers and longs to be accepted as part of the game.
As well as not existing, Vanellope shouldn't work. By all rights she should be incredibly irritating. She's loud, abrasive, showoffish, childish, selfish and hyper (presumably from all the sugar). She even makes poop-jokes. She could easily have been a disaster but, somehow, she pulls off adorable, sweet and, more than once, completely heartbreaking.

Her friendship with Ralph is the emotional core of the film, as they both slowly grow to trust and confide in someone else for the first time. It's the ups and downs of that friendship that make the film affecting and even powerful. And there really are ups and downs - the movie makes them work for it. When things get really bad it's devastating - but the awful lows just make the highs that much sweeter. Their friendship is handled so brilliantly that there's a moment lifted straight from Monsters Inc. which, while just a throwaway gag in that film, had me blubbing happy tears in this one.

Don't think it's all soppy emotional stuff, though. There are chases and races and flights and fights and many other action-scenes that probably rhyme. That core friendship is wrapped inside a bigger story that threatens both of their worlds and both their lives. We're told early on (by Sonic the Hedgehog, no less) that, though you might normally respawn at home, death outside your native game is permanent. So whenever Ralph is in danger - and there's quite a lot of danger - we know the peril is real. And the fate reserved for glitches like Vanellope is somehow even worse. Throw in a genuinely scary bad-guy, and a final act that escalates into something much bigger and even more affecting, and the stakes do get surprisingly high!

With the emotion, weight and visual polish of Brave, the scale, action and variety of Rise of the Guardians, and a vein of humour and game-culture that's all it's own, Wreck-It Ralph is an almost flawless family film - up there with Dreamworks' finest, if not quite with Pixar's.
Just like Vanellope, the film is loud, showy and hyperactive but, just like Vanellope, those aren't the reasons you'll love it.

Hiatus?

So, February marks one month since I randomly decided to use my barren, empty blog as, y'know, a blog. Not sure why it's turned into a movie blog, exactly, but there you go.

Sadly, February also marks the date my fiancée and I move into our new house (note: house, not flat). Being fairly useless people, we've failed to make any arrangements for phonelines or internet to be installed, so it's unlikely I'll be updating much in the next few weeks. I'm actually posting this with the Blogger app for Android!
I'll try my best to, if nothing else, review Wreck-It Ralph which (FINA-bloody-LLY) comes out in a week's time (almost half a year after the States) - but no promises!

When our internet is set up, I shall return; more powerful than you can possibly imagine. By which I mean there will be more reviews, more weird essay-things, more pictures of wrestlers, at least one Dudey Joe update (at least!) and the start of a new blog-series I'm tentatively calling "Mangaphobia".
Exciting times, I'm sure you'll agree! All that and more, after a brief hiatus; whatever that means.

John Carter and the Threequel Test

I recently watched Andrew Stanton's John Carter for the second time. When I saw it in the cinema I remember enjoying it, but thinking that something was missing, or that the pieces didn't fit together quite right. I knew something was off, at any rate, which kept me from enjoying the film as much as I wanted.
If you'd asked me last week what my issues were, I would have been more specific. I might have been able to point out some of the moments that didn't quite work - notably the stuff with the Therns, and maybe the River Iss sequence - and that John himself is not massively likeable, or even relatable, for much of the movie.
But on my second viewing these problems just melted away and I had an absolute blast! This means that John Carter is what my brother David and I call a Spider-Man; and a strong one at that.

Let's start with the basics: There are Good films and there are Bad films. There are Ok films, too, but that's just a subcategory of Good. You look at most films and you know which kind they are. But there is also a fuzzy grey area in between where movies sometimes get caught. Films you found disappointing but couldn't pin down why - or films you enjoyed but feel guilty about enjoying. Sequels, quite often, that didn't live up to the original's promise.
Usually you'll subconsciously label these movies Bad, because you don't have anywhere else to put them. But do they actually deserve that fate, and how can we tell?

A friend of mine has something she calls the Catwoman Test. Essentially you compare any film to Catwoman - an objectively Bad movie - and, if it's better than that, then it's not truly as bad as you thought. It makes sense, but I've never been a fan of this approach.
My issue is that it's too binary - it assumes "better" and "worse" are quantifiable, when there are so many factors involved in whether or not a film works that it's a difficult thing to judge. Look at something like Prometheus. Compared to Catwoman it's clearly a superior film... but it's not necessarily better. I'm not saying it's worse, either. But it does a few things so horribly wrong, compared to Catwoman's bland failure on all fronts, that it's very hard to tell.
Putting together my Top 5 last year was a nightmare because I was comparing a bunch of films that were all spectacularly good at entirely different things. The same applies when different films get different things wrong, too. Comparing movies is not an easy thing to do, so I don't think it makes a decent yard-stick.

What David and I do instead is to compare films to themselves. I've only just realised how pretentious that sounds - but it works!
It's a phenomenon we first identified in 2007, following the disappointing release of Spider-Man 3, and X-Men 3 the previous year. These were both films that fell into that grey area - disappointing but still enjoyable; not living up to their predecessors, but not necessarily bad on their own terms.
Then we saw them both again.
We were surprised to find that Spider-Man 3 was much better than we remembered! The problems were still there, but they were diminished somehow - they were now just annoying instead of crippling. We were also surprised to find that X-Men 3 was somehow much much worse. The film had been disappointing the first time, but now it was falling apart - the problems were magnified, multiplied, and on fire. When we first sat down for the second viewings we'd have said they were roughly of equal quality, but now that was clearly ridiculous.
We were even more surprised to discover that this effect continued beyond a second viewing. The third time around, Spider-Man 3 was really enjoyable, where X-Men 3 bordered on unwatchable!

The effect isn't isolated to these two films, either. It's common to the vast majority of grey-area movies - we haven't found one yet that doesn't reveal its true nature over time.
Presumably this works because multiple viewings remove expectations and preconceptions - forcing you to accept the film for what it is. Or maybe (as I believe is the case with John Carter) weird narrative choices don't seem so strange the second time, because you already have all the information. Sometimes this can liberate a movie and you'll realise that it's actually pretty damn good; but if it still disappoints you - if it's somehow even worse than you remember - then it must be an awful film indeed.
A film doesn't have to be worse than Catwoman to be truly Bad - it only has to be worse than itself.

This has since become mine and David's standard metric: Is a film a Spider-Man 3 or an X-Men 3? We've never formally named it, but the Threequel Test will do for now, in honour of its two defining movies.
The downside is that it requires watching films that may well be Bad twice, or even more; but chances are, if you can't bring yourself to watch it a second time, then you know already that it's genuinely Bad. Otherwise, for every X-Men Origins: Wolverine that becomes increasingly toxic over time, you might discover an Emperor's New Groove - the strongest Spider-Man of all time - which turns from thudding confusion the first time into purer and purer gold with each viewing.

Emily's example of a film that's often called Bad but which passes the Catwoman Test - Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull - also passes the Threequel Test. It's an easy Spider-Man: much better the second time around.
Looking at another series that's often labelled Bad, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a potent X-Men - truly a Bad film - but Dark of the Moon is actually a decent Spider-Man. The original Transformers is, of course, just an outright Good movie.
More recent grey-area examples include The Dark Knight Rises (a weak Spider-Man) and Prometheus (a solid X-Men).

And I'll begrudgingly admit that my brother's favourite example, GI Joe, is a Spider-Man - just don't tell him I said that.

Essentially, I've just used a thousand words to say "watch films more than once". It seems obvious, but it's all too common to judge a film immediately. I was disappointed, so the film must be Bad. I do it; you do it; but to do it is to miss out on the likes of John Carter. I'd have been apprehensive about recommending it a week ago, but now I can confidently say that it passes the Threequel Test easily and is actually a Good film. Better than that, it's actually kind of brilliant.
The next film I'll be testing is Wanted - an unashamedly stupid film that I got for Christmas and was shocked to discover I really enjoyed. It's sat squarely in the grey-area - an oh-so-guilty pleasure - and I'm really looking forward to discovering what kind of Threequel it is.

Jar Jar Abrams

"JJ Abrams to direct Star Wars film!"

I read that headline last night and, though my reaction wasn't nearly as intense as last time, I did groan slightly. Which is weird, and not at all the reaction I would have expected. So I've spent the last sixteen-or-so hours trying to figure out why.

I actually really like Abrams. I'm not massively familiar with his TV work (though I did watch Lost all the way through to its facepalm of an ending) but his three films so far are all great. Mission: Impossible III and Super 8 are very very good, and Star Trek is just fantastic.
It's pretty obvious Star Trek is the reason he's got this gig. As a lot of people have pointed out, in many ways Star Trek is a better Star Wars movie than at least two of the actual Star Wars movies. It has action; it has daring-do; it has a sense of humour, but not an immature one (ahem). Importantly, it has the narrow focus on a core team of characters that separates Lucas' original trilogy from the prequels. It has melodrama and heightened emotion, but it never devolves from space opera to soap opera.
All this suggests that JJ should be perfect, so why do I still have doubts?

I think the problem is the opposite of the one I have with Snyder. Where Snyder is tonally deaf, Abrams can find the right tone perfectly. Even if he hadn't made the perfect audition-tape in Star Trek, his other films demonstrate this just as well. Super 8 brilliantly captures the tone of ET and The Goonies, and M:I:III (note the heartless abuse of colons) strikes a perfect balance between De Palma's serious, gloomy first film and John Woo's glossy, pulpy (utterly terrible) second.
The problem is that all three of those have one thing in common: they all look like JJ Abrams films. They all have the same style. High contrast; oversaturated; often tinted green or blue; shot hand-held; lots of camera movement; frenetic editing; dutch-angles; and JJ's own unique brand of shakycam. Also lensflares. Lots of them.

Abrams knows and controls his tone in a way that Snyder cannot - but where Snyder excels in capturing the look of his source, Abrams' films always look like Abrams.

Star Wars on the other hand, despite the latter entries being mostly bluescreen affairs, has always been shot traditionally. The camera is fairly static, the editing not too fast, and the colours and lighting always pretty naturalistic. It's weird, but I think I'm worried that it won't look like Star Wars any more.
There's a million arguments against this. A new director should be allowed to leave their mark on a series, as with Harry Potter or Bond. Star Wars probably should be dragged up-to-date, with its silly old-fashioned wipes and irises. JJ has only made three films and never tried to emulate a style before, so suggesting he can't do it is entirely unfair.

Nevertheless, I am still irrationally worried by this news. But, all things considered, I'd much rather a Star Wars film that doesn't look like Star Wars than some other kind of film that does. The substance always outweighs the style.
With that in mind, the franchise is in good hands.

Fake Non-Geeks

Last night the gym had the TV set to wrestling. It was WWE: Raw, apparently. I imagine they call it "raw" because that's the only sound some of these wrestlers seem able to make (except for the one guy who just kept shouting "NO!" over and over for no reason).

I'd never actually seen it before, I realised. All I knew about it was what I'd picked up from others at school, back when it was the WWF.
What I learnt at school was that wrestling was what the cool kids talked about when they weren't laughing at us for liking comics. I learnt that it was what they watched on TV when we were watching cartoons. I learnt that it was incredibly manly and adult and mature, compared to the childish superheroes and stuff that we liked.

So when I saw Raw - watching a bunch of misproportioned musclemen with stupid names perform elaborately choreographed fights in personalised skin-tight costumes; listening to a commentary on their backstories, special techniques and skills; trying to follow a convoluted story which tied into years of tangled continuity - I smiled knowingly. They were even talking about the imminent return of The Rock, in an event I can only assume they're calling the Phoenix Saga.

It's nice to know we're all geeks at heart. Even if some of us don't know it.

Who Watches the Zack Snyder?

"Zack Snyder to direct Star Wars film!"

I read that headline last week and my heart nearly stopped. The walls began closing in. One of my least favourite directors was to work on one of my most beloved properties. The thought made me feel physically ill.
The next day, Snyder and his agents thankfully denied all knowledge (though that itself could be a lie) and I started breathing again. But now he's on my mind, itching in the back of my brain, so I want to share my thoughts:

Snyder is a director who actually gets a lot of love, particularly among the geek community, but who I simply cannot stand. That opinion is born not from his obsessive use of speed-ramping (though that is incredibly annoying) but from his atrocious handling of one film in particular.

The rest of his films are exercises in style-over-substance, with varying degrees of success. They are all undeniably stylish, but also undeniably hollow.
Dawn of the Dead is stupid, but it knows it's stupid and plays along (zombie baby!) which at times is kind of fun. 300 is equally stupid but plays it straight, which turns out to be even more fun. Sucker Punch seems to think it isn't stupid and tries to have some kind of message - but whatever that message is meant to be gets garbled in delivery (and it gives its shock ending away before it's even started). I have to admit to not having seen Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole, but it looks very stylish and (like its title) very stupid.

Which brings us to Watchmen.
For those who don't know, Watchmen is an adaptation of Alan Moore's graphic novel of the same name - often voted the greatest comic of all time. I'd read it when I saw the film, but I wouldn't have called myself a fan. It wasn't until I left the cinema, my blood boiling with rage and loathing, that I realised how much I did appreciate the comic! In its own way, the film convinced me I was a fan of the book.

Whenever I say I don't like Snyder's Watchmen (by which I mean I hate Snyder's Watchmen) the reaction is always the same: "But it looks just like the comic!"
Indeed, it does look like the comic. Snyder captures the look and the style of Dave Gibbons' art perfectly. But that's all he captures. Like everything else he's made, it's an abundance of style at the complete expense of substance. Watchmen looks just like the comic, but it feels completely wrong.
Not since Garth Jennings' unholy violation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has a film so totally misread the tone and messages of its source-material.

To explore this idea, we'll be delving into deep spoilers for both versions.

Before we start, let's make one thing clear: this is not about the squid. Getting rid of the squid is actually the only intelligent change the film makes. Tying the story back into Dr. Manhattan, instead of introducing this extra outside element (not to mention the weird inclusion of psychics), is definitely more concise and a neater ending for a film - not to mention that it's probably a better ending in general. I like that the squid is gone; I just don't like anything else.

Watchmen the comic shocked people, infamously so, because of the way it depicted violence. No-one had ever seen violence like this in a comic before. And Snyder seeks to replicate that shock value for a modern audience, so he ramps the violence up much higher.
What he fails to understand is that Watchmen didn't shock people because of how extreme it was (though that was certainly a factor), but rather how realistic it was. Watchmen's entire point is to ask what superheroes would be like in the real world; so, when they fight, it is real-world violence. Violence in comics had always been stylised and cartoonish ("Whack!" "Clud!" "Zonk!") and suddenly Watchmen appeared, showing actual realistic violence - that's where the shock came from. When Snyder (for example) has Silk Spectre literally kick someone's arm in half, he may be making it more extreme and shocking but he's also undermining that realism. Watchmen the film becomes an over-the-top cartoon again, which is exactly what the comic was pushing against.

The one time Snyder's extreme gore and shock-tactics are appropriate - the one time where the comic does this - is at the very end, where we see the devastation of the book's events. The final issue of the comic opens with pages and pages and pages of blood and mangled corpses. At this point, Watchmen is seeking to shock us - to show us the terrible human cost of what has occurred - so Snyder should be free to go all out. So why does he choose this one moment to discover restraint? Why is all we see a blasted cityscape with a few fires burning? Where is that final gut-punch? Where the comic sought realism, Snyder goes over-the-top; where the comic went over-the-top, Snyder shows us nothing at all!

Similarly intended to be shocking is the moment when Rorschach finally snaps. In the comic, on discovering the child-murderer, Rorschach very calmly cuffs him to a radiator and throws him a hacksaw, then sets the building on fire and says the man can either saw off his own hand or burn to death. Then he strolls outside to watch. No one comes out.
Realising that this was shocking at the time, but wouldn't be remotely shocking to a modern audience who already saw exactly that in Saw, Snyder again seeks to make it more extreme. In the film, Rorschach wordlessly attacks the man's head with a meat-cleaver again and again in a fit of rage.
One of these acts is a cold, calculated murder - the other is a crime of passion. This moment is the birth of Rorschach - this moment entirely defines his character - and the two events portray totally different people. One shows that Rorschach has made a very conscious decision to cross a line, where the other shows that he was overcome by his emotions. The first shows us an actual psychopath; the second shows us a man who lost control for a moment.
Snyder's mistake was not to change the events of the scene (there are other ways Rorschach could have killed him, and still remained chillingly detached) but to change the meaning of the scene. Snyder seems unable to see what the scene is supposed to be saying - only what it looks like and how shocking it is.
In that one moment, Snyder changes who Rorschach is, in relation to the story as well as to himself. But that's nothing compared to what he does to Ozymandias. Which brings us to the crux of the problem - the reason that Watchmen made me reject Zack Snyder so angrily.

Alan Moore's Watchmen does not have a protagonist or an antagonist. It has Rorschach - an unpleasant fascist sociopath - who stumbles upon and tries to stop a conspiracy that endangers thousands; and it has Ozymandias - a much nicer man - who is driven to do something unspeakable to (as he sees it) protect the world. It has characters doing the right thing for completely the wrong reason; it has characters doing the wrong thing for absolutely the right reason. There are no "good" or "bad" guys - there are just the characters, what they do, and whether or not you agree with them. This is what makes Watchmen great. Not the violence, not the style, but the fact it makes you think and weigh up your own values. It's written entirely in shades of grey.
Snyder's Watchmen, on the other hand, has a fairly clear protagonist in Rorschach, and a very clear antagonist in Ozymandias. Ozy is given all the depth of a pantomime villain - sneering, condescending, German - and none of his motivations ring true. Far from doing what he does to save the world, he seems to do it just because he's evil. It's so cut-and-dry that it makes me want to scream.
Snyder doesn't even hide the fact that he's the "villain". There's a point where Ozymandias is attacked by an assassin (that he himself hired) in a room full of civilians. This serves to remove the characters' (and our) suspicions from him, as the unseen bad-guys surely wouldn't try to kill him if he was involved. At least, that would be the point of the scene if Snyder hadn't instead used it to show how evil he is. In the comic Ozymandias singlehandedly tackles the gunman - risking his own life to save civilians, like the superhero he is meant to be. In the film he actually ducks behind the civilians and uses them as meat-shields. This superhero is apparently a massive coward and an uncaring bastard, if not entirely evil. Who's behind all this? wonders the audience. Could it be the guy who just got those innocent people killed?
Maybe Snyder decided to play the scene this way to demonstrate how little Ozymandias values human life, as a precursor to his killing thousands. But that's just it - that's what annoys me so much. When, at the end of the comic, he says, "I've made myself feel every death," he clearly means it. This is the one moment that we see the pain and the weight of his terrible actions. He believes he has done the right thing, but it's cost him his soul.
In the film he says the same line, but it feels like an empty platitude. He delivers it with the same lack of emotion that he gives all his other dialogue. How strange that Snyder decided to make Ozymandias detached in this emotional moment, when he made Rorschach so emotional in the scene we mentioned before. Again, he does not see the purpose of the line - he's oblivious to the depth of the character.

It may seem harsh to pin all this on Snyder, but I truly believe this is all his doing. Nothing in the script is wrong - the words and events are fine - it's in the presentation and delivery that Watchmen falls apart. It's the director who asked Ozymandias to give a Ming the Merciless performance. It's the director who shot the violence as an over-stylised cartoon. It's the director who captured the colours, lighting and angle of actual frames from the comic; and then completely undermined the narrative purpose of those frames. It's Snyder who read the comic and saw only shallow style, base shock-value, and plain black and white.
Watchmen's morality should shift and blur like Rorschach's mask (did Moore do that on purpose?) but Snyder takes it at face value. The result is a hollow, empty, worthless film - but it tucks its parts away and dances in front of the mirror wearing Watchmen's face.

Normally this would not annoy me so much. Normally I would let a poor adaptation slide by and just roll my eyes. But this film constantly makes Best Comic-Book Movie of All Time lists at position two or three. This film is more popular among fans of the comic than those who haven't read it. This film is somehow considered a good adaptation. That's why Watchmen fills me with rage - because this praise makes no sense to me!
There's more to an adaptation than mimicking how something looks. Especially something that is revered for the weighty themes at its heart. But, like all Snyder's work, he pours his attention into the style and lets the substance pass him by. As a result, Watchmen not only fails to address, but completely ignores the message of the book.
Zack Snyder got Watchmen wrong. I don't even consider that an opinion. It's a fact.

If that's how violently my body rejected Watchmen - a property I didn't actually realise I was a fan of - imagine the fallout if Snyder got his hands on Star Wars. I wonder if I'd commit clinical murder or a crime of passion? And would he even notice the difference?