After directing the Dawn of the Dead remake and adapting Frank
Miller’s 300 to the big screen, Zack Snyder chose to adapt
the classic graphic novel Watchmen for his third project as a film director.
Although the Watchmen graphic novel remains a bestseller to this day, and is
considered to be a classic work of fiction, it had also been considered to be
unfilmable by Hollywood for the longest time. Released back in the 1980s, and
created by writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons, Watchmen was a work of art
that would shake the very foundations of the comics industry and forever change
the basic perception of what kind of a story could be told in a comic. Basically,
Watchmen elevated the comics genre.
But while Watchmen may be a superhero story, it ain’t the Justice League. Nor is
it even the Avengers. With their dark and gritty tale, set in an alternate world
where superheroes have been outlawed, Moore and Gibbons bent the formulaic
superhero story out of shape, and comics have never been the same since. It’s
1985 in America, and Richard Nixon is still the president of the United States
in a world that has had superheroes since the 1940s. The U.S. and the Soviet
Union have crossed swords time and again, only to have a permanent nuclear
showdown constantly thwarted thanks to the presence of Dr. Manhattan (well-played by Billy
Cruddup), a being with such immense super powers that he’s worshipped by some like a god.
And yet despite the deterrent to all-out nuclear war that the presence of Dr.
Manhattan provides, the U.S. and the Soviet Union are once again inching towards
a major showdown. Dr. Manhattan, a nuclear physicist who gained his omniscient
powers thanks to a lab accident, is working with the government to try and build
a cleaner source of energy, along with Ozymandias (Matthew Goode), another
former member of the Watchmen superhero group who’s now a corporate tycoon. Yet
this larger, epic story winds up taking a backseat when the Comedian (superbly
played by Jeffery Dean Morgan) , another former member of the Watchmen, is
savagely killed by an unknown assailant. Was the killer a former enemy of the
Comedian who was looking for revenge?
That’s what the mysterious Rorschach (played to perfection by Jackie Earl Haley)
intends to find out, as he defies the government ban on superheroes by slipping
his mask back on and going on a private hunt for the killer. With the exception
of a major change in the climax (which feels derivative of the first season of
Heroes), Snyder is remarkably faithful to the book--and,
despite his best efforts, he still bungles it badly. For instance, a sex scene
between two other heroes, Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson) and Silk Spectre (Malin
Akerman), comes off looking very silly when Snyder sets the scene to Leonard
Cohen's mawkish song Hallelujah (and having Silk Spectre shoot off a flame
thrower at a pivotal moment just makes the whole sequence downright absurd). And
the scenes with Nixon and Kissinger tracking the Soviet Union’s movement in a
government control center comes off as nothing more than a bad imitation of
Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. They feel like they’re in a completely different
movie than the rest of the characters.
And what’s the deal with the make up effects? Both Carla Gugino, who plays the
original Silk Specter, and Robert Wisden, who plays Nixon, are buried under
completely unconvincing old age prosthetic effects that make them look very
cartoonish--which works against whatever realism that Snyder is striving for.
And while the director’s cut (which adds 24 minutes of footage) fills in a lot
of plot holes, the film now plods along at a deathly slow pace as Snyder
obediently tries to hit every beat contained in the graphic novel. Since he
decided to change the ending anyway, Snyder should have taken more chances and
made the film his own. Still,
despite these flaws, the movie is visually stunning, and contains some
great performances (with Haley and Morgan being the standouts). It’s just a
shame that the opening credit sequence should wind up being the main highlight
of the film.
--SF
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