Posted on 03/05/2009 2:01:47 PM PST by a fool in paradise
Whew! Tinseltown's go-to graphic-novel guy didn't ruin Watchmen. But he doesn't get it either.
The most eagerly anticipated (as well as the most beleaguered) movie of the year (if not the century), Watchmen is neither desecratory disaster nor total triumph. In filming David Hayter and Alex Tse's adaptation of the most ambitious superhero comic book ever written, director Zack Snyder has managed to address the cult while pandering to the masses.
Warner Bros., which battled Fox for possession of the property — from which author Alan Moore has, typically, removed his name — is marketing Snyder, who remade George Romero's Dawn of the Dead in 2004 and had a surprise megahit two years later with his adaptation of Frank Miller's comic book Thermopylae, 300, as a "visionary." That's a grateful studio's code word for "competent hack." The master of the vid-game aesthetic has successfully streamlined Moore's 12-part graphic novel and, even at a running time that tops two hours and 40 minutes, made it commercially viable.
In its movie incarnation, Watchmen (which first appeared early in Ronald Reagan's second term) could be most simply described as an apocalyptic sci-fi murder mystery cum love story set in an alternate universe where masked superheroes are real, albeit largely retired, thanks to Richard Nixon, who is enjoying his fifth term as president — in part because the greatest of the Watchmen, Dr. Manhattan, a mutated atomic scientist who glows like blue kryptonite and possesses unlimited cosmic powers, settled the Vietnam War in a week. The story unfolds, amid many noir tropes (endless night, constant rain) and numerous flashbacks, in the shadow of impending nuclear obliteration.
As the U.S. and Soviet Union face off over Afghanistan, the irascible renegade "mask" Rorschach (played, in an inspired bit of casting, by Jackie Earle Haley) discovers that an even more asinine colleague formerly known as the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) has been murdered. The Comedian is a cigar chomping a-hole responsible for doing away with the alternate universe's Woodward and Bernstein, as well as numerous Vietnamese and hippie protesters, who at his height claimed to embody the American Dream — so his death has a particular resonance. Rorschach, a paranoid type who keeps a Travis Bickle-oid journal, jumps to the conclusion that someone is plotting to kill all surviving Watchmen, although he fails to persuade either Ozymandias (Matthew Goode), the most successful of the "masks," or his depressed onetime partner Nite Owl II (Patrick Wilson) to come out of retirement and join him on the case.
Meanwhile, Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), to whom the president (Robert Wisden, brandishing an alarming ski-nose) has given the responsibility of deterring Russia's nuclear threat, is increasingly alienated. Having offended his inamorata, the erstwhile Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman), by projecting a pair of avatars for her sexual gratification while he solves a difficult equation in the lab, the azure godling violently teleports himself from his boudoir to a guest TV appearance with Ted Koppel (Ron Fassler), and then, angry at being accused of spreading cancer, sulkily bungs off to Mars. After Rorschach is set up, busted and sent to the pen, the two second-generation masks, Nite Owl and Silk Spectre, return to action both in public (rescuing fire victims from the roof of a flaming apartment tower) and in private (humping like porn stars amid the piles of their passionately discarded superhero paraphernalia in Nite Owl's flying whatchamacallit).
It should be apparent that Watchmen is founded on a pop mythology nearly as detailed as Lord of the Rings. Moreover, in its parodic historical references, integration of various written texts and temporal simultaneity that only the comic book page can afford, the graphic novel has a modernist structure even more complex than its characters' tangled genealogy. Snyder enriches the mix by riffing on alt '80s periodicity — a simulated McLaughlin Group with Pat Buchanan opining on the nature of Dr. Manhattan is particularly funny — and a strategic '60s soundtrack. Indeed, the credit sequence which scores a frozen tableaux history of the Watchmen and their precursors the Minutemen to the young Bob Dylan declaiming "The Times They Are A-Changing" is far wittier filmmaking than any of the movie's excessively juicy fisticuffs or the escalating pandemonium Snyder orchestrates as Watchmen staggers toward its climactic Armageddon.
Although the ending has been somewhat modified from the novel's, let it be said that Watchmen doesn't lack for self-confidence or even entertainment value. Its failure is one of imagination — although faithfully approximating Dave Gibbons's original drawings, the filmmakers are unable to teleport themselves to the level of the original concept. Perhaps no one could have, but it would have been fun to see what sort of mess Terry Gilliam (who hoped to make a movie version back in the '80s) or Richard Kelly (who surely took inspiration from Watchmen in conceptualizing his no less convoluted comic-book saga Southland Tales) would have made of Moore's magnum opus. Snyder's movie is too literal and too linear. Social satire is pummeled into submission by the amplified pow-kick-thud of the sub-Matrix action sequences; not just metaphysics and narrative are simplified, but even character is ultimately eclipsed by the presumed need for violent spectacle.
The philosopher Iain Thomson (who valiantly brought Heidegger's Being and Time to bear on his reading of Watchmen) maintained that Moore not only deconstructed the idea of comic book super-heroism but pulverized the very notion of the hero — and the hero-worship that comics traditionally sell. For all its superficial fidelity, Snyder's movie stands Moore's novel on its head, trying to reconstruct a conventional blockbuster out of those empty capes and scattered shards.
Snyder enriches the mix by riffing on alt '80s periodicity — a simulated McLaughlin Group with Pat Buchanan opining on the nature of Dr. Manhattan is particularly funny — and a strategic '60s soundtrack. Indeed, the credit sequence which scores a frozen tableaux history of the Watchmen and their precursors the Minutemen to the young Bob Dylan declaiming "The Times They Are A-Changing" is far wittier filmmaking than any of the movie's excessively juicy fisticuffs or the escalating pandemonium Snyder orchestrates as Watchmen staggers toward its climactic Armageddon.
Shouldn't they be playing Hendrix's cover of All Along The Watchtower? That song factored into the plot more than The Times They Are A Changing...
I have a ticket for the first IMAX showing here in DALLAS. I will not read a review until I have seen the movie....
LMAO!!!!
“and a strategic ‘60s soundtrack”
Let me guess. “All Along the Watchtower”?
Weird. Didn’t see your last line...
“I have a ticket for the first IMAX showing here in DALLAS.”
don’t drink anything before you go or while there. It’s a THREE HOUR movie. It’s also much darker and more violent than the comic.
Actually All Along the Watchtower comes at a critical point in the movie, and it is perfect.
The music integration is perfect in my opinion.
Actually the right wing Rorschach is the only character whose integrity is remaining at the end (in spite of his hang ups).
Moore did not intend it, but I see the alternate 1985 as what the U.S. would have been like if Reagan had not been elected. Boy he would have a cow if he heard me say it to him in public.
The source material is not perfect, but it is the first comic to really go after the violent underside of masked vigilantes.
I got to say that I loved the movie. Not as good as Dark Knight of Spider-Man II, but comparable to Batman Begins and Spider-Man I.
In the comic book, the bad guy is a leftist, while the heroes are mostly right right-leaning. I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I’m expecting Hollywood to turn this around and cast the bad guy as a right-winger or, at least censor the fact that he’s a leftist as it clearly states in the comic.
Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns came first.
And Denny O'Neil/Neal Adams sort of hit on that territory with some of their work in the early 1970s.
A three hour movie deserves an intermission. The old epics had one. They’d even have a 3 act story arc.
Theater owners don’t realize that they will sell MORE snacks if people realize they are going to be seated there another 80 minutes watching the conclusion of the story.
A Leftist? How so? He’s a Capitalist with megalomaniac tendencies. I’d expound further, but it’d be a spoiler.
My source is directly from the graphic novel where it is explicitly stated that he (the bad guy) is a leftist and that the other heroes are right-wingers.
Being wealthy doesn't exclude one from being a leftist. It's all about control and centralization. The leftist elites are all wealthy. What they're interested in is control. That comes from centralization. They're the ones who think 'the little people' can't think for themselves and need the enlightened ones to guide them.
I'm re-reading the GN right now. I'll have to pay closer attention to it...
Well, I thought the first hour or so was painfully slow. It played like a narrated docudrama. The last hour or so picked up. The movie was good — not great — but good. I will give 3.5 stars out of 5.
Saw it yesterday, I’d give it a 9/10. Beautiful visuals, awesome characters, and an engaging, detailed story. I particularly liked the combination of camp and nihilism, especially the comic-like portrayals of public figures. Didn’t even notice the slo-mo action, it all seemed fluid.
Only three small complaints though—
1) Scene by scene the movie is perfect, but the pacing between the events prevents an emotional climax where it is needed in several places.
2) The soundtrack could have been more original. I liked the use of Philip Glass/Koyannisqatsi though.
3) Anti-Americanism goes with the territory with this kind of movie. But the green Kool-Aid about free energy— the writers must know nothing about physics (conservation of energy, thermodynamics) along with economics (opportunity costs, economies of scale, etc). This stuff made me cringe, not the buckets of blood.
Considering when this was written, the gas crunch of the late '70s would have been still clear in everyones mind.
The idea is that John breaks the rules. Things that used to be impossible, aren't any more. This scares the bejeebers out of most folks.
Positives: The soundtrack was spot-on perfect, the characters were true to the graphic novel, and the visuals were fantastic.
Negatives: They wasted a lot of time trying to up the sex-and-violence factor. I really didn't need the five-minute porno between Nite Owl and Silk Spectre dropped into the middle of the movie--especially when so many other sequences actually critical to developing the story felt rushed.
Oh, and I was sad that they dropped the faux-Cthulhu from the climax--that was my favorite part of the original story.
Shalom.
Watched it. Nothing else looked interesting. In a word... pointless.
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