Wolverine vs. Watchmen

You probably already know what I'm going to say about this... and you'd be wrong. Watchmen is the single greatest comic book series in history - in fact, its one of the single greatest works of fiction of the last 100 years. Wolverine is a great comic book character, but the writers of this particular movie, will be lucky to not be nominated for a Razzie. And yet... and yet...

When I saw Watchmen earlier this year it was naturally with a bit of curiosity. How had they translated one of the greatest stories ever told into the movie? A dense multilayered look at the psychology and need for superheroes and supervillains in our society and what, realistically, might have happened had they ever been real - did not translate well onto the big screen. Changes that were made to shorten the complex narrative didn't work, and as they related to the end of the film, that meant that the end of the film didn't work. And the Ultimate truth of film is that you can't have a film without an ending. I didn't hate Watchmen, but I did feel that the exercise of making it had been in vain.

Wolverine, on the other hand, has been kicked and dragged through the mud by pundits and fans alike. Essentially an origin story for our favorite adamantium clawed mutant, Wolverine delves into his past and tells his story. There are flourishes and gusto and battles and soap operaish moments and, overall, Wolverine as a film is like a comic book. And, as such, I actually dug it.

There were moments in Wolverine that didn't make any sort of film sense - like the part where Wolvie and a recently introduced hero fight (ostensibly because of a misunderstanding over who Wolvie was working for). If this had been a film, I would have pulled out my hair and said, "That doesn't make any sense!" But as a long time reader of comics, it made perfect COMIC sense. Heroes fight each other all the time. Nobody gets hurt because really the writers and artists just want to see what would happen if Spiderman and Captain America took each other on, for instance. Things like this would be excised out of a good movie script. But not in Wolverine. One gets the impression that the writers of this flick not only understand comic book writing, but embraced it for this film. The scenes, as written, convey that feeling of the panel and the dialog bubbles and even the dramatic lighting and posing. There's not a single frame of this movie that you couldn't snip out and paste directly into a comic book.

So, really, for a change you could skip the film and just read the comic book adaption and get the same thing. And yet, here again is one of the reasons I dug Wolverine. No comic book would have ever told such a straight forward origin story for Wolverine. This was like someone taking and editing five years of comics into a single coherent storyline and selling it for the same 99 cents as any other issue. When I was a kid reading comics and imagining the great movies that could be made from them, this was more in line with my thinking. I wasn't thinking, let's make an artistic masterpiece like last year's Dark Knight, I was thinking, "Let's take this comic book that I'm reading and make it bigger, longer, and more complete." That's exactly what Wolverine is... a bigger, longer, and more complete comic movie.

And the winner is... Wolverine... almost.

I have to knock them for one of the all time worst endings ever! Not the ending you see in real time, but the ending they tack on to the end of film after the credits roll (I understand there are two different versions, but the one I saw was bad enough for both of them). Last summer, Marvel Films made a great move by tacking on extra endings to Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk. These endings were there to introduce the idea of SHIELD and the AVENGERS. Great ideas and well executed. In Wolverine's ending, we see our hero (sans memory) in a bar in Japan. The waitress asks Wolvie if he's drinking to forget and he replies, "No... I'm drinking to remember." Huh? WTF?! That was the whole scene. Not only did it not make any freaking sense, there wasn't any damn reason to wait through all the credits for it. It added NOTHING! NOTHING, DAMN IT! So, Wolverine loses a point for having the worst ten seconds of film in history and then tacking it on to a place of geek film honor - after the credits - so that all of the character's die hard fans can be fully exposed to it. Someone needs to go back to editing school.

In the end, I'll have to give them a tie. Niether film will I watch again. Neither film will I buy on DVD. But I mostly enjoyed the experience of both films. I just enjoyed Wolverine a lot more... until the very end.