Watchmen (2009) - Reviewing the Movie
Zack Snyder's Ambitious Comic-Book Epic Finally Arrives.
Mar 25, 2009
It's 1985 and as everyone knows, Nixon is in his fifth term, costumed heroics were once part of everyday life (but are now illegal activities), a giant blue demigod has ended the Vietnam war and as the Cold War rages on, the Doomsday Clock sits perched precariously at four minutes to midnight.
Not as you remember it? Well, that's because this is an alternate world as laid down in Watchmen, a two-decades old comic created by writer Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons. Now, that groundbreaking series has been lovingly, painstakingly re-created for screen by helmer Zack Snyder.
Watchmen - From Comic to Screen
Watchmen was seen as seminal in print form, even making Time's 'Top 100 Books' list. With a decidedly choppy pre-shoot history (the project has been on-off for almost as long as the story has been in print), would it be possible to even film what many had called an unfilmable story? Terry Gilliam had a stab at it, as too did Darren Aronofsky and Paul Greengrass, without an end result. And yet, against the odds, Watchmen arrives.
On the page, Watchmen is a ten hour read. Between it's twelve chapters are excerpts from journals, autobiographies and newspaper clippings, creating a rich, complex world, deconstructing the superhero myth whilst celebrating the nature and evolution of comics. For fanboys and devotees of all things caped and spandexed, this is manna from heaven. The real challenge for Snyder was how to translate all of those details into something palatable for cinema-goers who won't even know about the original story, while retaining all the crucial elements demanded of fans.
How it Translates
The end result is something better than anyone could have reasonably expected. Snyder resisted studio pressure to go for a short running time, delivering an almost three hour film that delicately recreates the source material, sometimes as a frame-for-frame copy of the original panels, slavishly adhering to the complex chronology that has us jumping up to forty years backwards to the roots of the original 'Minutemen' heroes. A brilliant, breathless montage at the beginning sets the tone, then takes us to a mysterious, brutal assassination of a burned-out vigilante. A masked detective called Rorschach sniffs a deeper conspiracy and brings former team-mates out of retirement to investigate.
Visually, the movie is a masterpiece of set design and lighting. New York is seen in neon-drenched hues the colour of bruises. Snyder's trademark slo-mo (as seen in 300) is used to hold and frame moments in time, often freezing the action for no greater reason than to celebrate an act of violence - perhaps the most questionable deviation from the comic where violence is depicted, but in a more fleeting, shocking manner. Here, it just comes across as a kind of pornography. Bones shatter and tear through skin; a naked calf blooms a crimson exit wound as a bullet passes through; whole bodies explode at the click of a finger. Nice if you like that kind of thing.
The Cast
The major hiccup is in casting. Matthew Goode as Ozymandias (supposedly the smartest man on Earth) is as super-heroic as a Starbucks exec with a thyroid problem, talking and moving so sluggishly you'd think it was Snyder's slo-mo kicking in each time he's on-screen. Malin Akerman fails to capture the complexity of her Silk Spectre.
But it's not all bad news. Jackie Earle Haley is a revelation as anti-hero Rorschach. Jeffrey Dean Morgan perfectly captures the seedy, menacing qualities of The Comedian. Billy Crudup gets mo-cap duties for Dr. Manhattan, a CGI render of a usually naked blue man that leaves very little to the imagination. Crudup has gone to some length to explain that isn't his physique we see, which is pretty honest considering.
Who Should Watch the Watchmen?
Watchmen is an adults-only comic book movie, which may seem to some like a contradiction in terms. Yet the original comic paved the way for The Dark Knight, another movie hung up on the nature of vigilantism; ironically, fans of that film might just assume Watchmen is an imitator. Of the two, Watchmen is the better - which makes it perhaps the best comic-book movie yet made.
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