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Written by Midnight Butterfly
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Sunday, 29 March 2009 22:24 |
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Page 1 of 3 
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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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 07 April 2009 19:08 )
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