In Theaters: March 6, 2009

Don’t bother watching these Watchmen

Watchmen
Directed by Zack Snyder
Starring Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup, Jackie Earle Haley and Patrick Wilson
**

Like every other fanboy who discovered Alan Moore’s groundbreaking graphic novel Watchmen as a comic-book loving teen, I’ve been both anticipating and dreading the arrival of Zack Snyder’s film version.  On the one hand, it’s hard not to geek out at the promise of seeing the comic’s beautifully drawn panels recreated so meticulously on the big screen.  At the same time though, I had enormous reservations about Snyder, whose previous film—the slow-mo-a-go-go adaptation of Frank Miller’s ultraviolent 300—was a triumph of style over substance.  That approach was adequate for 300, which, like much of Miller’s recent output, was aggressively shallow.  In Watchmen though, content is king.  Would Snyder be up to the challenge of bringing the comic to life with its deeper themes and ideas intact?  Or would he produce a visually impressive, but dramatically flat photocopy of the text that almost single-handedly revolutionized the comic-book industry.

I’m sorry to say that my fears were justified.  On a purely technical level, Watchmen is undeniably impressive.  The special effects are largely seamless, the production design is obsessively detailed and the characters all look like they’ve stepped right off the page onto the screen.  But as an adaptation—as well as a movie in its own right—it’s a profound disappointment.  A complex meditation on the nature of heroism and living in the shadow of a global apocalypse, Watchmen demands a more thoughtful approach than Snyder seems willing to bring.  While the director’s passion for the book is obvious from the first frame, it’s never clear that he really understands what Moore was trying to get at when he wrote Watchmen in the mid-’80s, at the height of the Reagan era and the beginning of the end of the Cold War.

For the uninitiated, the plot kicks off with the murder of Edward Blake, who once battled evildoers as the masked hero The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan).  The mysterious circumstances surrounding his death spurs one of his former colleagues, a psychopathic vigilante known as Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), to pay a visit to other ex-crimefighters, including the reclusive Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson), the bodacious Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman) and her big blue boyfriend Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), the only hero on this alternate Earth with actual super powers.  As their investigation continues, they stumble upon a vast conspiracy with consequences that are literally apocalyptic.

Malin Akerman as the scorchingly hot Silk Spectre

Sounds like a fairly straightforward plot, but on the page, Moore employs such devices as a fractured chronology and multiple points-of-view to provide potent psychological and sociological insights into these characters and the world they inhabit.  That kind of context is largely missing from the movie, even though the screenwriters hit all of the major story points Moore laid out in the book and use much of his original dialogue with little re-writing.  The result is a movie that looks and sounds like Watchmen, but doesn’t feel much like Watchmen.  It’s clunky and plodding where the book is elegantly paced with not a single wasted moment.  The problem is that the filmmakers have tried to include too much of the book onscreen.  While it would have been hard to lose certain fan-favorite moments and subplots, a trimmer running time would have forced Snyder to really focus the film’s narrative, as well as find a way to make its themes relevant to modern audiences.  As it is, it’s difficult to tell what Watchmen is about…and this is coming from someone that has read the book multiple times.

It’s also a shame that Snyder willingly surrendered his own imagination by deciding to follow the book’s visual style so closely.  For all my complaints about his surface-level reading of Moore’s dense text, the guy is obviously creative and has a great eye for striking images.  In fact, the film’s most inspired scene doesn’t appear in the book at all—an opening credits sequence that walks viewers through an alternate history of America via a series of comic-book like tableaus.  The only other significant creative choice Snyder makes behind the camera is to carry 300’s slow-mo heavy action sequences over into Watchmen.  But that exaggerated style doesn’t mesh well with this material; after all, the heroes of Watchmen aren’t larger-than-life Spartan warriors—they’re (mostly) ordinary people.  So seeing them scramble up the sides of buildings like Spiderman (as Rorschach does) or deliver devastating slow-motion flying kicks like something out of an old Jean-Claude Van Damme movie (as Nite Owl and Silk Specter do) comes across as vaguely absurd rather than badass.  Casting is another area where Snyder drops the ball.  While Haley is effectively creepy as the sociopathic Rorschach (although the movie makes him into more of a hero than I’m comfortable with), none of the other actrors bring a lot of personality to their roles.  Akerman and Crudup prove the biggest washouts, turning two of the book’s most interesting characters into flat, boring whiners.

Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) hides in the shadows

Unlike some Watchmen readers—as well as Moore himself, who has repeatedly called the book unfilmable—I still think it’s possible to make a great movie out of the comic.  But doing that requires a director that doesn’t feel entirely beholden to the source material or to the fanboys that demand nothing short of devout reverence to their Holy Book.  Frankly, I would have loved to have seen the version that Paul Greengrass was preparing to direct—which was rumored to take place in a post 9/11 America—before it was scuttled at the last minute due to budget concerns.  Snyder’s version captures Watchmen’s style, but completely misses its substance.

Verdict: The two-star rating merits a Skip It, but who am I kidding?  If you’re a fan of the comic, you’ve obviously gotta See It

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