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The first sound you hear in Zack Snyder’s Watchmen is a scream. It is only the shrill whistle of a tea kettle but it indicative of what is going in the world: society is reaching the boiling point. Within moments we will witness a man of violence die a violent death. The scene is a symphony of balletic brutality and for a long time this will be the only beauty we can see...the only beauty this world deserves. After the murder, the audience is taken through a history lesson of an alternate reality. This is a reality where costumed heroes have changed the course of history. It is a world where the aesthetics of our serial films of the thirties and forties have pervaded and shaped the parameters of a culture. Snyder doesn’t just show us pictures from this history, he stages them like scenes from a wax museum, invigorating each tableau with a rich context of familiarity. We don’t just recognize this history we remember it.
Snyder continues to be one of the movies’ great visualists. He understands film as visual medium in a way that not every big time Hollywood director does. It’s not just that he uses pictures to tell the the story – which he certainly does – but he also maps the emotional milieu through which the audience will experience the story. He has a flair for knowing how to nurture and develop an image, giving it space to breathe and having it climax at its moment of greatest impact. The history montage at the beginning of Watchmen feels like a Life magazine photo spread come to distorted life. It carries nostalgia. It’s the most audacious story-telling of the film and in a lot of ways, that peak is never reached again in the rest of the near three hour duration time. There are instances of breathtaking beauty, of blistering irony, even of crackling wit, but all the separate elements never come together the way they do in this opening sequence, to not just tell the story but ignite it.
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| Watchmen is, of course, based on Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ iconic graphic novel of the same name. If you were reading comics back then Watchmen was a bombshell. You had never read anything else even remotely like it. It was as cataclysmic an event in the world of comic books as the advent of hip-hop was to music. Every revolution in comics, every innovation since, seemed to have Watchmen at its core. That kind of pedigree can be as much a burden as a help. There is a guaranteed audience but it is an audience with astronomical expectations.
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Because of its subject matter, thematic density, and length, Watchmen was for years thought un-filmable. Though this idea is undoubtedly disproved with the movie, the reasons why it was the conventional wisdom for so long are all too apparent. It’s not so much that the comic was un-filmable as much as it is that the story had already been created within its perfect medium, it had already found its fullest fruition. It’s supposed to be a comic book. The plot of Watchmen was not particularly clever on its own. It was more of a structure on which Moore could hang his ruminations about the definition of heroism, the nature of Time, the fluidity of morality, the re-definition of humanity in the era of nuclear energy and rampant technology and a scathing critique of the whole notion of super-powers. After all, when the book came out there were only two countries that were qualified as ‘super-powers’, the USSR and the United States. Criticizing the attitudes of these nations through super-heroes felt like a stroke of genius. The ideas are what are important. With the film, all the richness of philosophy and politics is given a token nod at best. It races from moment to moment, from back story to back story, from fight to explosion without having the space to let us in on what it all means. It’s like if you took all the philosophy out of a Milan Kundera novel and left only the events of the plot you’d just have a bunch of people lying to and sleeping with each other.You'd miss the point of the book.
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| The primary culprit is time. Moore and Gibbons had time to develop all the various themes and more in their twelve issue comic book epic. Here, Snyder gives himself three hours. What happens then is that the plot has to stand on its own. It is okay for what it is, but in the end it’s about a bad guy trying to take over the world. The plot was standard issue for the super-hero genre but that is what Moore took and turned inside out. Here, Snyder follows the plot of the comic and yes, it is an alteration of what we have come to expect but it is not thrilling, not revelatory; and frankly, its logic is questionable at best. The events of the story are not what made Watchmen a cultural phenomenon in the first place. It’s the ideas.
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Spider-Man, Superman, Batman all come with cultural contexts for the audience. We already know large elements of their various stories and even need to see those elements for a project to be successful. Even if the audience doesn’t know the particulars, say, of a given super-hero’s origins, the hero occupies a place in our collective consciousness. I had a friend who used to threaten machines that weren’t behaving with a shaken fist while saying “Hulk will smash”. She had never read a Hulk comic book in her life but there was a fundamental aspect of the Hulk mythos that had filtered down to her through the pop culture ether. In Watchmen, that has to be artificially created. It’s not just about telling the audience who these characters are but making them care. It’s a daunting prospect. One of the primary draws for super-hero comics is their surface innocence. Super-Man fights for truth, justice and the American way. He never abuses his power, never lies. He’s a nice guy. Spider-Man believes that with great power comes great responsibility and despite the social, familial and financial issues of Peter Parker, he still translates that maxim in the most selfless of ways. Even Batman, violent and angry though he is, has a strict moral code that he adheres to religiously and doesn’t kill. The heroes of Watchmen have no such superhuman predilections. They are immensely flawed. The very premise of Watchmen is with great power might come great responsibility but how is that responsibility then exercised? For the Watchmen, their super abilities set them apart, make them different, allow them to live by different rules than the rest of us, but do not make them better people. It is for this reason that they have been outlawed by the time the story begins. We don’t have time or reason to fall in love with them. We meet them all as relatively unhappy people. They’re like bitter ex-pro athletes. These are not the easiest ‘heroes’ to relate to or to support.
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| Indeed, classic status or not, Watchmen did not succeed because of tremendous affection for the characters. The only character that really resonated with readers was the murderous psychopath, Rorschach. That remains the same here. As alien as Rorschach’s mentality is to just about anyone who’s going to see the movie, Rorschach still holds the most fascination for the audience. His ‘super-power’ is tremendous conviction. His every action is driven by his absolute faith in its righteousness. He is so completely hollowed out by pain and rage that if he’s not expressing that, he’s not expressing anything. Jackie Earle Haley is magnificent in the role. He seems born to play it. (I don’t know that that’s a compliment exactly but heck, it’s making him rich so what does he care?) Haley is carving a niche out for himself as a particularly gruesome kind of outcast. His sexual predator in Little Children was terrifying because it didn’t seem like he was acting at all. Rorschach is a character that demands a similar kind of commitment. Haley’s a small man – as is Rorschach – so when he’s screaming “You don’t understand, I’m not locked in here with you, you’re locked in here with ME!” at a bunch of hardened convicts he has to believe it or we won’t. Haley’s belief never falters, not when he’s burying an axe in the head of a child murderer, not when he’s lying to a psychiatrist about the ‘pretty flowers’ he sees in inkblots.
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Malin Akerman on the other hand is hopelessly miscast as Laurie Juspeczyk/ Silk Spectre II. She’s likable enough and she’s certainly a pretty girl but Silk Spectre is not a character defined by sexual charisma the way say, Catwoman or Elektra are. In the course of the story she is the girlfriend of and cheats on a god, she is transported to another planet, and she discovers a horrific fact about her familial lineage. It would be a demanding role for anyone and Akerman is never up to the task. Having a real actor in the role would have helped immensely. If the premise of the story is ‘how would real people react if they had super-powers and influenced events in the real world’, Akerman’s lack of depth is a crippling deficiency at the center of the film. On the other hand, watching her strip down to her thigh high super boots and get her freak on in IMAX does have its charm. Patrick Wilson continues to surprise and delight as an actor. He has chiseled leading man features but he’s an actor who’s not afraid to roll up his sleeves and get his hands dirty. Like Akerman, he’s probably miscast if only because he’s too handsome but he does solid work. Dan Dreiberg/Nite Owl II is a fairly bland character. He’s just a guy reaching middle-age wondering where he’s going in his life. You can’t make him dynamic, you have to make him honest. For the past few years Wilson has hovered around stardom and it is because he might have leading man looks but he has character actor sensibilities. That’s a compliment. Likewise, Jeffrey Dean Morgan as The Comedian, and Billy Crudup as the nuclear demi-god, Dr. Manhattan and to a lesser extent Matthew Goode as Ozymandias all create flesh and blood characters. Crudup in particular is an understated but powerful presence in a role difficult to ground in any reality. Which is good because Watchmen needs all the help it can get. It’s reaching, after all, for greatness. And there are times when it feels maddeningly close. As a painter on a silver screen canvas it’s hard to beat Snyder and company. Two heroes kissing with a mushroom cloud exploding behind them, a crystal castle rising out of the desert floor of Mars, a strange owl ship bursting out of the Hudson river or a god striding through the Viet Nam jungles wreaking havoc – to name just a few – all become shockingly beautiful images. The prison riot is a dazzling showpiece. The brutality and gore are often intoxicating. So much of what happens on-screen feels like exactly what it needed to be and perhaps that’s part of the problem.
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Snyder, if anything, (and here I know I blashpheme) seems crippled by faithfulness to the source material. In 300, he found a cinematic way to accomplish what the comic book did and wound up expanding on it. With Watchmen he mimics the comic, sometimes to great effect, but he doesn’t re-discover the story as a movie. On some level, he needs to find his own vocabulary, his own palette to work with and perhaps, even his own message to convey. It’s been a quarter of a century since Watchmen the comic first appeared and immediately changed the world around it. A work as complex thematically as Watchmen will continue to yield insights for years to come but the movie feels unsure of its place in the world. Certainly it has power. But it's nihilism doesn't entirely convince, it feels more an affectation of style than a substantive perspective. Ultimately, Watchmen falls short because it has too much reverence for the original work. It doesn’t define itself as fiercely as it needs to. It's not confident enough in being its own work of art. Regardless, there is something to be said for the beauty, the intelligence, the drive that is captured on film. Watchmen does not fail because it aims too high but because it doesn’t have enough faith in its own medium to achieve its lofty aspirations. Regardless, it is a noble misfire, worth seeing in theatres, undoubtedly a creation of artists at work.
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