Whether literally or metaphorically, nostalgia is always for sale. By tapping into your rose-colored memories, companies have you ready to buy anything under the guise of it helping you escape the hardships of the present for even a moment. Doesn’t matter if it’s high-quality or slop, if the nostalgia’s just right, you’ll lap it up and thank them for serving it to you. This is, of course, a massive problem as nostalgia is fiction we create for ourselves by telling us that something from long ago was better than now. In some instances, that can very well be true if someone you held dearly is gone or a delicious and important first is long gone from having been yours; but, in most, nostalgia is a weapon used by others to convince you that you were better, perhaps even four years ago, when, in fact, today is the best you’ve been. This is a core component of the conflict at the heart of limited, 12-issue DC Comics series Watchmen, which first began its run in September 1986. Created by writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons, it’s a satirical look at superheroes through the lens of the socio-political world at that time and is now brought to the animated realm via director Brandon Vietti’s two-part home release adaptation. WB Animation in partnership with Paramount Pictures is releasing the second-half, Watchmen: Chapter II, making as close to a proper adaptation as possible, using the power of the medium to raise its questions once more at a time when they’re needed most.
If you want to get a sense of the first half the story, head to the initial Watchmen: Chapter I home release review. Moving forward, the presumption will be that you’re familiar with the first half of the story.
Edward Blake/The Comedian (voiced by Rick D. Wasserman) is dead, Jonathan Osterman/Dr. Manhattan (voiced by Michael Cerveris) has left Earth, Walter Kovacs/Rorschach (voiced by Titus Welliver) is in prison for murder, and Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias (voiced by Troy Baker) recently survived an assassination attempt, leaving only Dan Dreiberg/Nite Owl (voiced by Matthew Rhys) and Laurie Juspeczyk/Silk Spectre (voiced by Katee Sackhoff) left to consider Rorschach’s theory about a mask killer. Meanwhile, the entire world is on the precipice of war as tensions between countries rise, each one with a finger on a trigger that will kill millions in the name of peace. As the story comes to a close, fragments of truths that were barely whispers before start to combine into a bigger cry from which the world will never be the same.
Second Warning: there are mild spoilers for the conclusion of the film that folks less familiar with the 38-year-old story may want to avoid. If that’s you, perhaps watch Chapter II before reading further.
Compared to the first half with it being more noir, Chapter II is about the remaining characters and laying out their intersections. This matters in order to make the end of the film possess any kind of weight whatsoever and it mostly succeeds. With all the setup gone and familiarity with the characters in place, taking the time to look back on how Kovacs got started, what it means to be a hero for Dan and Laurie, as well as the significance of Manhattan’s disassociation from humanity, doesn’t slow the narrative but propels it. This is a story in which its heroes are neither gods nor monsters, but humans placed in extraordinary situations — an element we’re reminded of as Manhattan, all-powerful being that he is, is not only tricked repeatedly into abandoning Earth but only comes to its rescue when realizing the complexity of humanity via Laurie’s parentage. The possibility of nuclear war doesn’t convince Manhattan to help solve the mystery so much as the notion that he can’t see everything and, therefore, might just have something to learn, which creates the necessary push to get him to reengage with his old vigilante crew. Of course, the truth is that Veidt is behind it all, using his vast resources to manipulate the world into peace, a task he undertakes because he believes that peace can only be found via a common enemy, forgetting that nostalgia will only break people apart as they remember a time before working as one, when it was simpler to focus only on themselves. This is the inevitability that Manhattan speaks of before leaving and what Veidt himself used as the reasoning for his anxiety over societal breakdown — rising depictions of violence and sex on television to combat audience concerns over governmental destabilization, products that promote or promise a life that once was (one fragrance is literally called “Nostalgia”), and a regression into entertainments that prevent engagement with the world. Sounds incredibly familiar and why we in the United States are about to have four more years of a candidate who people have forgotten is responsible for the worst handling of an emerging modern health crisis and the poor economy prior to the Biden administration. But when there’s war still in Ukraine against Russia, the Israeli-Gaza War continues unabated, and a multitude of problems in our own country, people long for a time in which they didn’t have as much to worry about, but that’s likely because they’ve forgotten the period of initial lockdowns only taught people to mistrust science, not mask, and hate vaccines (spurred by individualistic selfishness) instead of the value of working together. (Good job, everyone. Gold stars all around.) In terms of the film, it’s fascinating how Veidt’s own fear of nostalgia didn’t prevent him from falling prey to it as well, a clear statement that none of us are immune to its effects and that the only way to make a better future is to start by improving today, not trying to return it to the past.
Of the things worth mentioning, it’s imperative, as someone who’s read the graphic novel and has seen the adaptations, to mention how thrilling it is to see something that maintains as much integrity of the original work as possible. Adaptations are exactly that, not a recreation of what was, but using the medium to produce a version. That said, there’s something to be said for staying as faithful as possible in order to ensure that the work of Moore and Gibbons remains intact. For instance, while this may seem like splitting hairs, there’s a big difference in characterization between a someone who explicitly kills and one who leaves for dead: in the first, they are a murderer; in the second, they provide even the slimmest of chances of survival. This specifically refers to Rorschach and child kidnapper Gerald Grice whom the comic and animated adaptation show as proclaiming his (Grice’s) innocence and Rorschach leaving him to die in a fire Rorschach starts vs. the Snyder live-action adaptation which sees Grice admit his fault and Rorschach repeatedly hitting the man with a cleaver to the head. Rorschach is not above violence, but this sequence is meant to convey the moment that the uncompromising Rorschach we know took over from what Kovacs first intended as a vigilante. There’s cruelty in the Snyder version that’s absent in the source, adding layers of joy and even satisfaction to Rorschach, whereas the original and newly-animated version is still cold and calculating. The death of Grice is on his hands, but the methodology changes how the character (a) functions within the Watchmen world and (b) is viewed by the audience. This information, provided to us by Kovacs in prison-mandated therapy, shapes the way we see the conspiracy theorist and hardened detective and, by changing his backstory, shifts his tendencies far more right and authoritarian than those of the character from the source material. Secondly, there’s the depiction of the squid that makes up the cataclysm at the end of the story. Frustration for the strange adjustment in the Snyder version aside, Vietti makes a bold call to change the presentation of the attack. This is discussed in the featurette “The Art of Adaptation: Building to the Final Act” so not much will be shared here to preserve the learning experience, but Vietti extends the sequence so that, through the language of cinema, the audience can better understand the attack and its impact on the New York citizenry rather than hiding it. The source material is merely six full-page panels leading to the reveal of the creature and the destruction, but that doesn’t work as well in a film. The resulting choice improves on the page only in the sense that it makes sense for the medium of the story. This doesn’t alter the incident, its intent, or meaning, it’s just executed in a way that makes sense for the execution.
As a fan of physical media and being able to control what one watches and when, fans of Chapter II should be advised that it falls prey to the same issue that Chapter I did — a low bitrate. This film hovers between 40 – 60 Mbps (a 4K UHD is max 128 Mbps), which is the best HD bitrate at this presentation’s lowest for a 4K UHD. The on-disc presentation still looks beautiful with the colors as vibrant as one expects from a 4K UHD presentation, there’s great range of color and lovely detail. It’s just quite odd that the bitrate is so low. Even with approximately 39 minute of bonus features taking up space on the physical disc, there should still be more space for a better visual presentation. This is likely only to bother the more technical-minded audience members, but at least the on-disc presentation won’t suffer from data compression that streaming always does, thereby lowering the quality of video and audio.
In terms of the bonus features, there are three presentations that, like the two included with Chapter I, allow the audience to get a better sense of the work that went into making the film. The first, “Dave Gibbons and Watchmen: Chapters 7-12,” does what “Dave Gibbons and Watchmen: Chapters I-VI” did, just with the second half of the story. This means a walkthrough of the creation of the story from Gibbons’s perspective, alongside commentary from Vietti and other members of the DC Comics team, like Jim Lee (Gen¹³). The second, “The Art of Adaptation: Building to the Final Act,” completes what “The Art of Adaptation: Introducing the Story” started by drilling specifically into the sequence involving the squid and the confrontation with the surviving members of Watchmen. Here, Vietti, in particular, offers his thought process, alongside incomplete storyboards and some CG material, on expanding the attack sequence for Chapter II. Separate from this, there’s a third featurette included, “Designing Watchmen,” which offers insight into the technical process of bridging the physical pages of the comic to the animated world of this adaptation. Some of this is touched on in Chapter I’s featurettes, but it’s given more space and specificity here.
The Watchmen series isn’t perfect. There are elements which can be too easily misread as approval or necessary when the narrative is screaming at the reader the opposite. Even the inclusion of “Tales of the Black Freighter,” the in-narrative comic one of the character’s is reading, is often missed as the stand-in for Veidt and his fear blocking his reason. As a conclusion to a two-part tale, Chapter II impresses by sticking the landing on a well-understood story by picking up the momentum Chapter I creates and riding it all the way to its horrific conclusion. Nostalgia is no replacement for reality and it’s a lesson we’d all do well to remember, otherwise, no matter how well-intentioned the stopgap, we’ll always end up longing for yesterday instead of looking toward the future.
Watchmen: Chapter II Special Features:
- Dave Gibbons and Watchmen: Chapters 7-12 (7:15)
- The Art of Adaptation: Building to the Final Act (10:04)
- Designing Watchmen (22:00)
Available on digital November 26th, 2024.
Available on 4K UHD and Blu-ray December 3rd, 2024.
For more information, head to the official Warner Bros. Pictures Watchmen: Chapter II webpage.
Final Score: 4 out of 5.
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Categories: Home Release, Home Video, Recommendation, Reviews, streaming
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