Kelly Wand"Watchmen" review
March 31st 2009 07:14
The most faithful Alan Moore adaptation since "Return of Swamp Thing"!
(Disclaimer: Mild spoilers ensue, including the entire ending.)
I say this with genuine admiration: Zack Snyder’s Watchmen, his free-ride movie after 300, is the most audience-unfriendly movie since Jack Frost, possibly even Dennis Hopper’s Chinchero*. Which easily makes it so far the most interesting movie of 2009.
By way of boring personal preamble that characterizes blogging, I came to Watchmen the graphic novel in my late 20s and didn’t remember most of its grace notes that well. I recall liking it more than expected. But mostly I remembered that it ended with a giant squid, secretly created by human geneticists and a comic-book author with a pirate fetish, somehow teleported into Manhattan and killing everyone (bloodily, bodies hanging out of skyscrapers) by using its mind. The opening six pages of Watchmen’s last issue consisted entirely of splash pages of the destructive aftermath with no dialogue panels at all, after nine issues of pretty talky stuff, which to me made for a dramatic denouement. When I heard last year during the film’s production that they’d taken that part out, I sort of assumed that they hadn’t left anything else that was good untouched. For future reference, if you’re a theatrical adaptation of a graphic novel and you remove the first imagery that I’d even want to see filmed when I think of that novel, my excitement about seeing you rapidly deteriorates. Yet my interest levels dectupled upon receiving multiple independent confirmations of people walking out before the end of its first hour. Red flags like that turn me into a bull.
So I went, and went again. And while Watchmen definitely has its issues, as free-ride movies go, it’s pretty goddamn ballsy, especially considering that nowadays even free-ride movies are intended to be blockbuster hits for teens. You see, kids, back in the madcap medieval era of the early 1980s, coked-out studio executives would leave even pains in their ass like Michael Cimino alone long enough for him to bankrupt the studio on stuff like Heaven’s Gate. But now times are leaner, the accountants are in rehab, and Watchmen is this curious hybrid product that’s the result of Snyder trying to deliver a hard R to satisfy 300 fans (even though the graphic novel’s hardly R-rated), while at the same time watering it down just enough not to freak Warner Bros. out, all in the course of attempting to render intrinsically unblockbuster-y (or, as Terry Gilliam once pronounced it, “unfilmable”) source material into three intermission-less hours of fun mainstream fare about costumed mentally troubled types smashing each other through glass repeatedly. By unblockbuster-y elements, we’re talking a comparatively giant (albeit proportionately modest) blue penis, very little “action”, tons of windy pretentious dialogue about the American dream and quantum universes, an irrelevant whodunit (although even terrific whodunits don’t exactly have much repeat value), and an ending where the good guys surrender placidly to a bad guy who looks and sounds like a Nazi who’s just killed millions and framed another character for it. Oh, and it’s 3 hours long. I’ve seen it twice now, and I can attest that people did indeed walk out during both screenings. Couples, mostly. Girlfriend in front.
I don’t entirely blame them, since Snyder’s slavish visual fidelity to Alan Moore’s 1985 dystopian social commentary and deconstruction of the modern superhero doesn’t mean shit to most people. Moore didn’t structure his twelve-issue novella as a spring blockbuster, and Dave Gibbons’ artwork, while colorful and sardonic, is mostly confined to boxy little squares, nine panels to a page, that don’t exactly lend themselves to the cinematic, let alone the IMAX-sized. Difficulty-wise, Snyder may as well have tried to “adapt” a Rodin sculpture.
There are admittedly stretches in Watchmen where you suspect that he has. Although there’s far less self-congratulatory slo-mo than I feared, the movie has its share of Zack moments, from the pointless shot where Malin Akerman’s vapid superheroine Silk Spectre “dodges” a fireball in a burning building to the lingering sameness of people breaking fingers for information (it’s always two fingers before the subject caves). Jackie Earle Haley’s awesome sullen scenes as lovably sociopathic shrimp Rorschach notwithstanding, there’s not a single memorable fight in the whole movie (there wasn’t one in 300 either). While attempts to capture the novel’s visuals are almost frighteningly rigorous and detailed, Snyder and screenwriters David Hayter and Alex Tse may have ironically erred too much on the side of faithfulness to some of Moore’s hoarier dialogue. There’s a big difference between reading lines like, “What happened to the American dream?” spoken by a character who’s supposed to be a bit of a joke and hearing it spoken earnestly by a character on a gigantic screen. One-note characters like the Comedian feel less believable translated from the page, while more critical characters like Ozymandias get short shrift. Only in a live-action film does it occur to wonder why, after so many public-relations offenses, a sociopath like the Comedian would still be allowed to remain the public face of supergroup after supergroup for decades. Or how he and Ozymandias got his “powers”. You wonder if Snyder even noticed Moore’s undercurrent of dark humor. It’s hard to tell how serious he is trying to be, from the Laurie/Dan courtship scenes and the cruelly dumb shape of Rorschach’s final epitaph to the mostly perplexing musical scores. The movie’s song choices range from the painfully unsubtle Halleluljah for a carefully dull sex scene to the painfully trite (Simon & Garfunkel’s Sound of Silence for the Comedian’s funeral? Even though he neither died during nor was he a product of the ‘60’s). Alternate realities should have less banal soundtracks – in fact, they ought to have their own soundtracks, especially in such a vastly different geopolitical landscape, but I digress.
Finally, there’s the matter of that revamped ending, contorted into a vague resigned shrug. Not sure I get how blue energy-balls conveniently resembling Dr. Manhattan’s in hue and “signature” would lead to the same global response as the appearance of a dead psychic giant squid: how does a rogue U.S.-made superweapon already proven to be indestructible keep the world united indefinitely? (A friend who preferred the movie ending argued that Moore himself hadn’t been all that fond of the squid, and therefore it sucks. My response was that good art isn’t always intentional.)
Yet Watchmen is still worth seeing, both for anyone drawn (as it were) to the comic medium for which this is, by any definition, some kind of milestone, and for the acting. Whoever thought to cast the Bad News Bears’ Jackie Earl Haley as trenchcoated misanthrope Rorschach or Almost Famous’s golden god Billy Crudup as blue god Dr. Manhattan is grossly, criminally underpaid.
Jeffrey Dean Morgan as the deliberately unfunny Comedian and Matthew Goode as the androgynous Adrian Veidt aka Ozymandias both pay their dues but get none of the good lines (much of the Veidt backstory appears to have been trimmed or never written, which is unfortunate since he is, inarguably, a central figure). The “normal” characters, Patrick Wilson’s Dan Dreiberg and Malin Akerman’s curiously enervated Silk Spectre, are trotted out periodically like the bland romantic leads in early Marx Bros. movies to give the audience someone to “relate” to, which is also unfortunate. In the novel, she was a slightly bitchy chain-smoker and her drunken midnight carouse with Dan in his flying bathysphere was knowingly ridiculous and amusingly self-aggrandizing, with them tone-deafly making coffee for their bewildered charges. Here Snyder is the tone-deaf one, trying to convert this into a straightforward perfunctory action sequence, sans the action.
Yet Snyder & Co. left in substantially more details than any diehard fans of the book had any right to expect. Including Dr. Manhattan’s controversial glowing blue cock. Though kept mostly unobtrusive, the sight of it made both audiences I saw the film with titter like hyenas. Yet it’s an important brushstroke (as it were) characterization-wise. Though usually flaccid, it’s an indication of how Dr. Manhattan has evolved way past clothes or quaint human notions of sexual uptightness. In fact, he’s less weird for showing it than audiences are for laughing at it. You even get the sense that he intentionally made it appear smaller as a compromise of public courtesy (to human males). Of more interest is that he still has a sex drive at all, considering he’s an accidentally created god coming to terms with his growing disinterest in human tribalism and its swiftly aging womenfolk. In short, he’s a compelling, well-written, original character, voiced by Billy Crudup with a slightly effeminate detachment and intelligence that Keanu Reeves’ Klaatu can only dream of (or, to pilfer Manhattan’s own analogy, compared to Crudup Reeves is the world’s smartest termite).
The high point of all 3 hours of Watchmen, in fact, is the strangely hypnotic sequence describing Dr. Manhattan’s background, ascension, and adaptation to living in a quantum reality, ingeniously set to Philip Glass’ eerily apt Koyaanisqatsi score. Also pleasantly surprising is that Snyder kept Moore’s alternate 1980’s Cold War setting, a quasi-totalitarian regime ruled by Nixon and Kissinger, however remote and un-topical such trappings will likely strike younger audiences. And the prison stuff. And the fake commercials. And the subtle absence of smog (because Dr. Manhattan has unlocked renewable energy sources, although doubtless such privileges are, by movie’s end, on borrowed time). And Dr. Manhattan’s Martian edifice. Lee Iacocca getting shot in the head. The sawn arms. For all its warts, give me Watchmen over The Incredible Hulk any day.
You see different movies for different reasons, some because they’re roller coaster rides, others because they help you get laid. But some you see simply because they’re not like anything you’ve seen before or ever will again. Watchmen is one of those.
And while Zack Snyder’s copycat efforts so far hardly qualify him for the “visionary” status accorded him by Watchmen’s TV ads, the fact that he got a major studio to bankroll such a gloriously weird platter may very well be a sign of higher evolution.
*Another free-ride movie.
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