Zach Snyder's Watchmen is the latest installment in the "Best. Comic. Movie. Ever."-genre and contains the elaborate visuals, morose philosophizing and ultra-violence that we've come to expect from the blockbuster-by-committee committees.
Watchmen is based on the seminal comic book by Alan Moore and David Gibbons (Moore refused a credit and called his book "unfilmable"). Snyder, the director of the Dawn of the Dead remake and 300, the blue-screenstravaganza Frank Miller adaptation, has made his 3rd feature this 'epic', bringing his trademarks of slow-motion limb-smashing, CGI blood splatters and male nudity.
The slow-motion alternate timeline introduction credit sequence with Bob Dylan music pulls you in and is the most effective use of pop music in the film, and there's a lot of it. The Ride of the Valkyries/Vietnam bit was a clever Apocalyspe Now reference but often the pop music was battering, notably the failure of Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah' to make the love scene anything but awkward.
In an alternate 1985 (fat-Elvis Biff Hill Valley era), Richard Nixon (Frank Langella) is on his 5th term as President and the Doomsday clock is dangerously close to nuclear Armageddon. After masked vigilantes helped WW2 America into the modern age, and the only super-human, Dr. Manhattan, turned the tide of the Vietnam war by obliterating the enemy, Nixon has outlawed vigilatism with the Keene Act.
While yesterdays heroes are aging and rotting, someone has targeted the sagging sadist The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan Bardem) for murder and the movie opens with the assault on his NYC apartment. He is a complex scumbag and one of the only lifesigns in a saggy movie. His former teamates start investigating his murder and uncover a conspiracy that confirms their worst fears and brings to a head a harsh philosophical battle that only those with extraordinary power can settle.
Our 'heroes': crowd-favorite sociopath Rorschach (Jackie Earl Haley, the best player the Bad News Bears ever had) is like Clint Eastwood meets Clint Howard playing Travis Bickle in the Saw movies. He is completely off the reservation, but in a world where nothing makes sense, his is the perspective we find ourselves most attaching to. Maybe because he points out the hypocrises of the super-elite or because his uncompromising drive to ACT, in spite of them and the law.
In his ignoring of the Keene Act, and by taking the other heroes to task for giving up the fight, and even in his fighting of the cops (agents of a corrupt government), he never deviates from his path: justice, fairness and truth. He's runty but viscious, as many of his victims would tell you.
Nite Owl II, aka Dan Drieberg, is played by Patrick Wilson (who was very good, along with Haley, in the Jersey-shot Little Children). A technological genius and student of the WW2-era Owl, who he visits, aging. The Boy Scout of the bunch, it is implied that when it became illegal to be a hero, he went willingly and then went to pot. Rorshach and he used to pal around alot and it makes you wonder what the sociopath and the Boy Scout used to talk about in the cock-pit of his giant owl shaped hover-craft.
The Silk Spectres: Entourage's Carla Gugino and Malin Ackerman play vinyl-wearing mother/daughter-heroes and trophy wives. In a movie that feels so detached emotionally, thier story had the most potential to break through to real feelings. Gugino's Sally Jupiter has the most perverse psychology (because sex is worse than violence in Hollywood) but her worst/best/most important decision is left relatively unexplored and then glossed over. I would've like to have seen more day-to-day washed up superhero stuff (like the old, battered wrestlers setting up their autograph stands in The Wrestler) before we reached the Armageddon stuff.
Matthew Goode as Adrian Viedt, Ozymandias, the smartest man in the world, is super-hero as modern media mogul. He idolizes Alexander and his goal is to save humanity (from itself). Wishing to reach beyond the limits of mere manhood, our golden-god is the most-studied and confident of our costumed vigilantes, and his knack for devastating calculation and cold, heartless thinking leaves him as inhuman as the biggest piece on the chess board:
Jon Osterman, Dr. Manhattan, (Billy Crudup), was a physicist when a lab accident made him transcendant. His is God in string theory. Zapping Vietcong into slimy skeletal piles was merely the basest use of his abilities and since the war he has become more and more detached from humanity, seeing life on earth as minute, but he'll always have a soft spot for the ladies.
While I loved the McCloughlin Group segment as an era-establishing moment in Comedian's apartment, with that segment and others, Snyder beat us over the head with alternate historical moments portrayed with made-up actors and digital effects. The movie was already too long and eventually the Nixon stuff got out of hand. The Zapruder bit in the beginning could have been a striking twist of our early perceptions of these characters, but I found it gratuitous and disrespectful. The Iacocca scene too was out of hand. I appreciate the attempt to illustrate the post hero-1985 but it was strained and Gump-like and, worst of all, didn't connect us any further to that time and place as an audience.
Since the Schumacher Batman films, even something as simple as nipples on Ozymandias' costume is a loaded piece of costume. The campy costumes and extravagent designs of the film are great in subverting the genre of the splashy comic book movie. The Comedian is the only one with a utilitarian costume, full of weapons, protection and gear. Rorschach's fedora and trenchcoat helps him dissapear into a crowd and his ever-changing face mask is a great visual piece. Nite Owl II can only function as a man when he's in costume, which is also when his paunch, comb-over and double chin dissapear. The Silk Spectres must spend a fortune in hair removal.
The extreme, graphic violence is sudden and out of character for the budding romance of Owl and Spectre. They go from gaga-eyed kids to efficent murderers in one alley scene deconstucting a bunch of gang members who clearly didn't know who they were messing with. Afterwards we can tell the heroes are both sexually aroused and a smirk from Owl suggests now he feels 'complete' again, after having failed a scene earlier in performing for Spectre sexually. Later, after several acts of heroism and destruction, they consumate their new passion in his floating vehicle. It ends in a flame-jet sight gag, but could have been an exploration of the neuroses of Owl, who to this point, seemed the sanest, 'super hero as the coolest job but I got too old', guy. (Spectre's in it for Mommy issues, Ozy's a genius, Manhattan's a god, Rorschach's a nut and Comedian's a super-soldier). There is no discussion of Owl's neuroses, just acceptance of him as 'okay' now that he can kill and fuck like a real man.
Watchmen may be unfilmable plot-wise (a 5-hour animated version of the comic panels has been released on DVD) and at least two complete plot lines have been excised from the 2hr40 minute movie, but it's thematics and influence have been felt for years in print and on screen.
The late-80s Batman comic renaissance was written post-Watchmen, but made it to the screen faster. Twice. The doomed ending and the appropriation of heroes-as-businessmen idea have all filtered Watchmen through the media already, without it being filmed until now. For that reason, the movie will never have the effect that the book had but above all it won't because the movie is nowhere near as technically proficient as the book.
It has the glitz, the effects, the expense, but not the humanity. Like head-shot horror Wanted, the graphic violence made me uncomfortable rooting for harsh, morally compromised people to inflict more pain on not only each other but innocents, civilians, and people trying to help. The most interesting characters were in it the least and not much happened while we ticked away the hours. The shaggy dog murder plot is supposed to be a Macguffin for the ages but that, the historical pop remake bits and the philosophizing give it a bloated run time.
It has it's crowd-pleasing moments and thrills. It has the fighting and the action. It has the dong. It has the cool lines and harsh social justice and bitter sarcasm of Rorschch behind it. Yes. But it's dragged down by it's big head and self-importance.
