When I first heard that “Watchmen” was finally getting the greenlight and that Zack Snyder fresh off the commercial success of “300” would helm the project, ambivalence was the only feeling I could muster. “300” wasn’t a completely unpleasant way to spend a couple of hours. I respected it more for its technical accomplishments than anything else (visually, Snyder produced champagne with beer money). “Dawn of the Dead” I loathed on general principle. You don’t need to remake the best zombie movie ever IMNSHO. And the "innovative" idea to have agile zombies was just spit in George Romero's eye. It wasn’t especially original either, since Danny Boyle did it (better) in the uneven but solid “28 Days Later”. So suffice to say, I didn’t have much confidence that Snyder could transition the source material into a self-contained fully-realized piece of cinema that could stand on its own two legs. The first crop of trailers further deepened my skepticism. Would we get three hours of brutal slo-mo action sequences, perhaps another goofy slo-mo sex scene? Um, yes and yes.
I don’t think there is anything inherently “unfilmable” about "Watchmen". I read Alan Moore’s deconstructionist take on the superhero perhaps a decade ago. There is no doubt that it is a canonical text in the comic book world; it has a place reserved in the pantheon next to Frank Miller’s "The Dark Knight Returns", Gaiman’s "The Sandman" and Garth Ennis’s "Preacher". These works were the foundation of the contemporary comic book. The source material deserves every bit of respect that it's received. "Watchmen" sprawls over twelve issues and spins a wide narrative web; the book's tangents go on tangents. This might seem daunting, but the story has a very clear through-line. It is essentially a detective story told by the paranoid
The biggest issue Snyder has is that he’s far too reverential towards the source text. Hell, Cecil DeMille took more artistic license with the Ten Commandments than Snyder does with Moore’s "Watchmen." The most glaring issue is that transferring entire swaths of dialogue from the graphic novel does not a good screenplay make. As Anthony Lane points out in his New Yorker review (his review sucks, btw; I don’t know why he or Denby for that matter even review films; they both seem like they hate movies for the most part)--you can’t have characters (even right-wing nutjobs like Rorschach) spouting lines like: “The city screams like an abattoir full of retarded children.” Yes that’s from the original text, but that doesn’t make it, you know, good.
The second major issue is that Snyder fails to capture the mood almost entirely. I’m more forgiving here, because his task was so awesome. How to capture the existential dread of the mid-eighties at the zenith of the cold war and nuclear posturing on both sides of the Iron Curtain? I remember being subjected to fear-mongering propaganda like “The Day After” which is to this day one of the scariest films I’ve ever seen. There are still images seared into my brain decades later like the poor dog digging up the kitchen floor in a vain search for food after the family had abandoned it for the basement shelter post nuclear holocaust. Damn you, Reagan!
Watchmen is set during this period and we see these scenes where tactical decisions are made and the Doomsday Clock moves closer to midnight, but we don’t feel it. We’re as detached from the ordinary citizens as Dr. Manhattan. We don’t spend enough time with the alternate world to really grasp what’s going on. One minute Dan and Laurie are having a nice dinner in a restaurant, the next people are rioting in the streets. Why? If people are rioting, why is Nixon serving a third term? Is America supposed to be a fascist nation? It’s not really clear. It's also not clear what this Watchmen group represents. We're given a couple of flashbacks to photo shoots of team pictures and a couple of Watchmen dispersing a riot, but that's all. There's no sense as to what the Watchmen meant to the world or even to each other. For the unconverted the proceedings on the screen must be terribly bewildering and/or numbingly boring. Why should anyone care about these characters? Not just the superheroes, but anyone? The film doesn't even try to answer that.
To make matters worse, the acting save for a few characters is uniformly atrocious. It’s as if they got Hollywood money to make the flick and populated it with actors that would be mediocre in a Sci-Fi Channel original movie. Malin Akerman who plays the Silk Spectre II seems lost from the very first scene and never recovers; unfortunately she gets probably the second most screen time after the superb Jackie Earle Haley (more on him later). Matthew Goode as Ozymandias comes across as the world’s most obnoxious prick as opposed to the smartest man (which might be fine in another film, but it's a complete mischaracterization of the graphic novel version). I found the Comedian’s performance to be uneven, but again the bad dialogue kneecaps him (see: Vietnam bar scene). Physically (with the exception of Goode's Ozymandias--too scrawny) the characters are three-dimensional doppelgangers of their print counerparts. Sure Patrick Wilson's Dan/Nite Owl could have been a bit paunchier, but he pulls off "middle-aged schlub" quite well. He and Jackie Earle Haley give the movie some desperately needed heart and humanity.
Some positives on the acting: Billy Crudup does about as much as one can do with Dr. Manhattan considering his performance is comprised mainly of voice over (still his few "in the flesh" bits manage to sell the tragedy of Dr. Manhattan with just a handful of scenes). Matt Frewer pops up in a minor but important role; made me smile to see good ol' Max Headroom on the big screen. Carla Cuggino as Sally Jupiter enlivens things in her few scenes, but I kept thinking why not let her play Silk Specter and just get an actual old lady to play Sally? On a related note, all the aging makeup is terrible. And the prosthetics for the actor playing Nixon are distractingly bad. No one got an inkling how bad this stuff looked from the dailies? Jeez. Anyway, Patrick Wilson as the somewhat pathetic Dan manages to create a character the audience can really invest in. Dan/Nite Owl actually comes across as a complex fully-fleshed out character as opposed to the other characters who are given a great deal of expositional baggage, but still feel rather one-dimensional.
Jackie Earl Haley as Rorschach manages to avoid that fate seemingly through force of will. As I mentioned before, he's saddled with some of the most ham-fisted dialogue in the movie, but for the most part he makes it work. He easily monopolizes the movies best scenes including the prison sequence (I still don't understand why there was a riot) and his confrontation with Dr. Manhattan at the film's end. His performance equals Ledger's turn as Joker in terms of truly capturing the essence of a well- established literary character on the screen. I'd honestly sit through the film again (on DVD) just to watch his portrayal of the schizophrenic love child of Philip Marlowe and William F. Buckley.
The word is that Zack Snyder has an extended cut that adds on at least an additional half-hour to the movie. I suspect that cut will be even worse. If I could tell the "visionary director of 300" (as the trailers dramatically intone) one thing, it'd be that what's missing from the film is not more elaborate subplots; what's missing is a vision.
A few notes: unless you’re filming an episode of The Red Shoe Diaries, a slow-motion love scene is completely risible; Tears for Fears "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" should never be used without irony in a film; gratuitous explicit violence is not inherently more real or potent than tastefully cutting away and leaving something to the imagination.
Final note: The one place Snyder does show some inventiveness is the new ending. It works. In fact it works better than Moore's original ending. If it were a better film, I'd be writing about the film's subversive commentary on religion. If it were a better film. Too bad.
