Reviews
Watchmen
March 6 2009
Zack Snyder
Starring Patrick Wilson, Billy Crudup, Jackie Earle Haley
Related reviews and interviews
Not just one of the most anticipated films of the year, but of the last quarter of a century. The greatest graphic novel ever written. The one that Terry Gilliam, David Hayter, Darren Aronofsky and Paul Greengrass all failed to adapt for the big screen. The one they said no one could. That’s a lot of weight for a film to shoulder. All of which makes 300 director Zack Snyder’s Watchmen even more impressive: it’s stylish, adult and very, very faithful.
How do you introduce superheroes no one has ever heard of? Who don’t have superpowers? Who are just damaged men and women who dress up in funny costumes? How do you explain that a luminous blue demi-god helped Nixon win the Vietnam war and stay on as US president? That a new generation of masked vigilantes have been outlawed and someone is murdering them?
Snyder does it all in one brilliant stroke. Scored to Bob Dylan’s ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’’, the stunning opening-credits montage glides us through a startling new vision of the twentieth century. Gaudily dressed men arresting bank robbers. JFK picked off by a grinning cigar-chomper behind the grassy knoll. An astronaut standing on a lunar surface with a giant blue figure reflected in his visor. Those former vigilante heroes being dragged into retirement, asylums or the morgue.
From there on in, even at two hours and 40 minutes, Watchmen never slows down for a second. Actually, that’s not true. It slows down a lot. Whether it’s superhero sex or sequences of brutal, bone-snapping violence, Snyder loves to lean on the slo-mo, savouring and stylising the action at every beat. Take the famous scene where retired crime-fighters Nite Owl II (Patrick Wilson) and Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman) batter a gang of alley-thugs: faces crumple, bones burst through flesh and blood spatters. Get used to it. Bullets in brains, arms sliced off with a buzz saw, a man burned to death with cooking fat, splatty eviscerations… X-Men: The Last Stand, this ain’t.
Concussive as they are, Snyder’s chop-socky fight sequences are as theatrical as the rest of his film. From Nixon’s prosthetic nose-job to the rain-soaked synthetic backdrops, Snyder never allows us to forget he’s making a comic-book adaptation. Then again, no comic-book has a soundtrack as incredible as this: Nat King Cole’s ‘Unforgettable’, Nena’s ‘99 Luftballoons’, Hendrix’s ‘All Along The Watch Tower’. And truth is, Watchmen shouldn’t feel like a comic-book superhero flick. It’s a PT Anderson movie: a traumatised ensemble of characters, not much action, lots of talk.
That’s why Snyder recruited actors not stars – a cast of ace character-thesps who breathe real, soul-sick human life into their iconic roles. Behind a bald, buff, bright-blue coating of CG, Billy Crudup hides electric flickers of pain in the impassive face of master-of-matter Dr Manhattan (whose modesty Snyder has no modesty about hiding). Jeffrey Dean Morgan aces his decade-spanning turn as amoral sociopath The Comedian. Matthew Goode grows steadily inside his role as ‘the smartest man in the world’, millionaire mystery man Ozymandias. Patrick Wilson effortlessly convinces as the doughy, impotent Batman-like Nite Owl II. But his Little Children co-star Jackie Earle Haley is the best of the lot, nailing the sadistic self-hating as twisted detective Rorschach. “None of you understand,” he growls after sending a shiv-wielding criminal to a horrific end. “I’m not locked up in here with you. You’re locked up in here with me!”
Admittedly, Malin Akerman doesn’t make as much impact as her latex fetish costume. Scoring a porny slo-mo sex scene to ‘Hallelujah’ is pretty wince-inducing. And come the apocalyptic finish, anyone who hasn’t read the graphic novel is probably going to be left scratching their head. Moore’s story is dense, detailed and never designed to be swallowed in one sitting.
Maybe this is why the full weight of emotion, grim humour and tragedy loaded in the novel doesn’t (quite) come through. At times, Snyder seems to unpack the drama in slick sequences rather than one long fluid story, intently cross-cutting his way through Moore’s complex weave of flashbacks, multi-character plotlines and alternate-‘80s exposition. There’s a saying that a masterpiece has already found its perfect medium. Snyder has done as good a job as anyone could have done. That’s a loaded compliment. But as compliments go, it’s a huge one.
Anticipation:
Enjoyment:
In Retrospect:
As a devout fan of the novel, I found this one of the strangest films I've seen in a long while. The film was beautifully true to the original, to the extent that there was almost no reason to watch it by the end. There's no doubt, in my mind, that this was worthy of Alan Moore's opus after 3 decades of waiting , but something was missing, and I'd be really greatful if someone could tell me what…..
Written by DanB on March 6th, 2009 at 23:52
i agree with both of you guys and think that just like Dr. Manhatten could have stepped in and cared about saving ppl earlier could have stopped all that death, maybe if Moore would get over himself and helped in the filming process the movie would have the something that's missing
Written by Alfredo M on March 8th, 2009 at 06:37
To be fair to the film, Dr Manhatten acts as he did in the graphic novel, and to be fair to Alan Moore look what they did to his graphic novels in The League of Extraodinairy Gentlemen, and From Hell.
But a friend I went to see the film with, who had never read the graphic novel, also felt that Doc Manhatten's change of heart was a bit…brisk.
Written by Dan B on March 8th, 2009 at 12:56
Moore get over himself and help in the filming process? The guy's had his work turned into movie-garbage enough times for us to forgive him for not being involved in Watchmen, dontcha think Alfredo?
Written by Donnie_Smith on March 8th, 2009 at 17:23
For me… when I read the graphic novel, my pre-conceptions of the 'super-hero' were challenged and the grit of it was a shock. I just didn't get that from the film despite it remaining quite true to the original text. Overall, I think it lacked any serious depth, it felt like any other comic book movie.
The film is worth seein just for the intro sequence and Jackie Earle Harley's performance.
Written by Shaun R on March 9th, 2009 at 10:42
In fairness, part of the reason that Watchmen might feel "like any other comic book movie" is that all such movies have been heavily influenced by Moore's graphic novel. Its dark deconstruction of the superhero, so challenging at the time Moore wrote, has since become just another cinematic cliche, to the extent that it can even appear in family-friendly films like The Incredibles… If you'll excuse a play on words that Moore himself exploited, time is Watchmen's greatest enemy. That said, it is remarkable how few tweaks the adaptation has required to make Moore's Eighties-focused vision seem relevant to the ills of our own Bush-dominated, neo-con age of Terror and the abuses of political power.
Written by Anton Bitel on March 9th, 2009 at 12:07
Its ultimate failing is that Snyder slavishly sticks to the book. Like a gibbering fanboy, he, at no point seems to realise that a graphic novel and Film are two different media, and is happy to trace the graphic novel onto celluloid, basking in his glory of being crowned a 'visionary' film-maker. Sorry folks, but the only 'visionary' at work here is Alan Moore. Any greatness in the movie is purely from the ideas being copied over. Add to this, Snyder's 'giggling schoolboy' approach to sex and violence and you've gotta wonder who thought this was a good idea!
Written by Fortunesfool73 on March 10th, 2009 at 09:01
"a graphic novel and Film are two different media"
This i, of course, true – no matter how slavish an adaptation form one medium to the other, the final product *must* inevitably be different (it moves!). That, however, is not to say that an artist working in one of those media can't mix it up a little with the other. You don't hear anyone criticising Messrs Moore and Gibbons for appropriating to their graphic novel the matchcuts, zooms, jumpcuts and other tropes normally associated with, well, film (it has been something of a cliche to describe Gibbons' visual style as 'cinematic') – so it is not entirely inappropriate that Snyder should return the debt by making his film look comicbook. Whether you like his films or not, Snyder's use of the original comics as his storyboard has become his signature style, and it gives his films a look that is distinctive from other comicbook adaptations.
As for the conspicuous labelling of Snyder as 'visionary' on the Watchmen poster, that is the fault (or otherwise) of the studio's advertising division rather than of Snyder himself. It is a mistake to hold directors responsible for the way that their films are promoted.
And much as I admire the original Watchmen, I don't recall its sexual politics (or indeed its female characters in general) offering so much more depth than Snyder's film. If we are to credit "any greatness in the movie" solely to Moore, then perhaps we should direct some of our criticisms of the movie his way too…
Written by Anton Bitel on March 10th, 2009 at 10:29
It may be his signature style, but copying someone else's work to this degree is 'plagiarism' in my book. I feel that Snyder is all surface and no depth. His immaturety shows through when the film requires an adult approach to adult themes. He doesn't know how to cope with them and falls back on 'making it cool'. Maybe one day he'll stop all the theatrics and prove me wrong, but I said that about Michael Bay too….
Written by fortunesfool73 on March 10th, 2009 at 10:46
"a graphic novel and Film are two different media"
Once your point is accepted, no amount of 'copying' from one medium to the other can in any straightforward sense constitute plagiarism, surely. It's closer to translation. There's more to the film than its comicbook template, as would be demonstrated (at the most reductive level) by comparing the framecounts of both. Snyder makes the comic move, and in so doing, cannot be said to be slavishly copying the original. There are, of course, plenty of subtractions, expansions and out-and-out changes made to the original's *story*, too.
Sometimes the glossiest of surfaces can conceal hidden depths. I'll bet different viewers take away very different things from Watchmen – some will think it's 'cool', 'sexy' etc., others will find it a disturbing reflection of the underlying fascisms that inform both superhero movies and realworld power politics (including those of the last decade, irrelevant to the original graphic novel, but definitely making their presence felt in the film)… There was a similar ambiguity, I think, at the heart of Snyder's 300, depending upon whether the viewer regarded Snyder as straightforwardly endorsing and celebrating ('making cool') the fascisms that he was staging, or more subversively exposing, interrogating and parodying them. Like the shifting images on Rorshach's mask, what Snyder's films offer depends in part on what you want (and are prepared) to see.
Perhaps we can agree that the court is still out on Snyder – although if we do not agree, that position would evidently still be true…
Written by Anton Bitel on March 10th, 2009 at 11:15
Part 1:
I went to see Watchmen last night. I read the book some time ago (it's not my favourite of Moore's books, but it is fantastic), and, having seen the film adaptations of "V for Vendetta" and "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen", and having laughed my way through Snyder's "300", I wasn't expecting much. There are myriad reasons why Moore's work hasn't translated well to the big screen, and they're too numerous to go into here.
All that said, I was pretty impressed by Snyder's "Watchmen".
Written by Graimito on March 10th, 2009 at 13:05
Part 2:
It wasn't without it's problems. The music was often jarringly inappropriate and out of step with the mood of the scene ("Hallelujah", "All Along the Watchtower"), dropped like a brick into the middle of the film's most tense or emotional scenes. The characters felt inevitably shallow, given how little time the film had to peer into their pasts and flesh them out. It's hard to know, having read the book prior to seeing the film, how many of the really interesting moral themes were actually noticeable – how much did viewers really get to understand Rorschach's moral absolutism beyond the odd key line or "black and white" symbolism, or understand Ozymandias' brutally utilitarian ethics? The sub-plot around Laurie's relationship with her mother and the Comedian was pretty tacked on, and so didn't feel significant enough to be the catalyst for Dr Manhattan's change of heart.
Written by Graimito on March 10th, 2009 at 13:06
Part 3:
Some scenes at first seemed to fail horribly, but that might not have been Snyder's fault. Watching the slo-mo sex scene to the strains of Leonard Cohen's grumbling baritone was so comical it had the whole audience giggling (especially the fiery "climax"), but then, sex IS comical (at least when other people are doing it). How can two awkward, broken people, one of whom can only get it up when playing superhero, having sex in a robotic owl NOT be comical? In both the book and the film, we are laughing AT Nite Owl, and his absurd "golden age of comics" mentality. Other awkward scenes showed that sometimes what makes sense in comics just doesn't make sense in the 3D world.
The slo-mo violence I actually thought worked extremely well, for three reasons: first, there's not much action in Watchmen, so it makes sense to spin it out. Second, it was beautifully choreographed. Third, it captured the feeling of poring over comic book fight scenes, slowing down to enjoy the energy and weight of violence and action that comics do so well.
Written by Graimito on March 10th, 2009 at 13:06
And otherwise, it worked, more or less. It looked fantastic. The acting was, by and large, excellent – particularly Jackie Earle Haley's scenes, and Billy Crudup in Dr Manhattan's "reminiscing on Mars" sequence. Ozymandias was also very well done.
Lastly, the somewhat changed ending worked well, despite fan-boy fears. In fact, I think it may have been a better ending than the one in the comics, which I always found contrived and over-complicated. I think this was almost as good as a Watchmen adaptation could ever have been made, and hats off to Snyder for resisting pressure to make it kiddy-friendly.
I could have done without Nixon's prosthetic nose, though.
Written by Graimito on March 10th, 2009 at 13:07
I agree with a lot of your points here Graimito, especially re: the music. Apart from the Bob Dylan soundtracked credit sequence, I found all tracks superfluous and distracting to the story and visuals.
However, I thought the character of Ozymandias was unforgivably misjudged. My first impression of him in the book is of a do-gooder optimist whose 'most intelligent man in the world' moniker is laughably ridiculous. When his plan is eventually revealed, it was a great surprise for me as I'm sure it was for other people. Snyder's Ozymandias is snide and sinister throughout. He always appears to have a hidden agenda. His ultimate betrayal barely registered. I realise the fact that I knew the 'twist' in advance would influence this but the character is still poorly translated.
Written by Matt Poke on March 10th, 2009 at 13:52
I can see what you're saying about Ozymandias, but it didn't bother me so much. When reading the book, I didn't find Ozymandias a particularly engaging character. He seemed to come from nowhere, and never got beyond being a pretty precocious, ego-driven materialist. When his true character and role was revealed, it was surprising, but mostly because I had thought so little of him til then.
While I can see that the youthful naivety was never really present in the film, meaning that his final "reveal" was less dramatic, I actually liked the way his character was portrayed. In the film, Ozymandias was portrayed a yuppie, but also as an aggressive, humourless "do-gooder"; the kind of top-down "activist" that approaches peace and well-being in the same way a banker approaches profit. No matter what the lines represent, if the lines go up, then it's a "good thing". Perhaps that's more representative of the neo-liberal world we live in now than it is of the alter-80s of Watchmen.
Ultimately, none of the characters got the time and depth they deserved, though.
Written by Graimito on March 10th, 2009 at 15:13
String me up, but I loved the Dawn Of The Dead remake (pacy, witty, splatty, pretty) and liked 300 (or at least the 15 year old in me did), but WTF was going on here? Akerman and Goode were baaaad, the sex scene was excruciating, Nightowl or Batboy or whatever his name was looked stupid, and the only people I gave a rat's rear about were Rorshach and that Michael Stipe-alike blue man. It was FAR too long, convoluted but NOT complex (sort-of-good-guys save the world – again) and the last half hour (sort-of-good-guys attack an icy stronghold) was EXACTLY like the League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen. It made me repent my assessment of The Dark Knight entirely. Great credit sequence mind…
Written by mattg on March 13th, 2009 at 16:31
I don't want to sound like some kind of Watchmen apologist (and I am far from thinking it the perfect film), but:
1) if the only people you gave a rat's rear about were Rorschach and 'Dr Manhattan', that as I recall reflects the rather confronting effect of the original comic serie,s which gets us sympathising with its most fascistic, psychotic or inhuman characters, while mildly ridiculing those, like Nite Owl, who embrace anything like liberalism – liberalism being marked here as impotent, blinkered and quietly complicit in unspeakable atrocities.
2) Its complexity rests in your phrase "sort-of-good-guys", and the question of what it is exactly that they save the world from. One of your "sort-of-good-guys" engineers what he terms "the world's greatest practical joke" (the laugh being on the millions who die as part of its punchline) – while the others alI turn a blind eye to this gross crime against humanity, and agree, with cabal-like cynicism, to hide the truth from the world. It only seems a happy ending because it mimics the form of more conventional superhero films – but unravel all of its implications, and you'll find there is blood lining your smiling face. Personally, I think I prefer the Dark Knight as a film, but frankly, upon reflection, the ending of The Watchmen is a whole lot darker…
Written by Anton Bitel on March 13th, 2009 at 17:02
I think you make a great case for the book, but a lot of these things were garbled to the point of give-a-shitness in the film – and I still want my Wednesday evening back!
Written by mattg on March 13th, 2009 at 17:27
I agree about the ending….The Dark Knight would have had a much darker (and equal to Watchmen) ending if the Joker had 'won' in his own chaotic way. We might have been left with a broken Gotham which Batman is going to have to rescue from the foundations up (coming full circle from the first film and instead of merely having to rescue his reputation). The Dark Knight's tone may have been darker but the underlying implications and morality are a lot muddier in Watchmen.
I think Jackie Earle Haley's performance is above and beyond the rest of the cast, enough that you would give 'a rat's ass' about him a lot more after 2hrs 40mins and despite his 'death or dishonour' fascistic approach to crimefighting.
Written by Matt Poke on March 13th, 2009 at 17:55
Did the fight scenes pull anyone else out of the film? The OTT stylistics and sound effects, not to mention the inhuman amount of pain inflicted (and received) was surely at complete odds to the point. They're not actual superheroes. I've been a bit harsh on it with hindsight, but I just wish they'd got someone more mature to make it. Snyder's need to show off seriously damaged the film
Written by fortunesfool73 on March 14th, 2009 at 22:44
I always enjoy a good action scene, but I must admit it made me take a step back from the film at a couple of points – especially at the beginning…
Written by Rob Mac on March 16th, 2009 at 18:03
I re-read Watchmen just before the movie came out, so I took the baggage of knowledge into the cinema with me.__I enjoyed the film, but will never know what it is like to be an innocent viewer, which is probably my biggest issue. Not that I didn't enjoy the film, it was just a strange experience, seeing an epic story boiled down to its basics, but obviously with a lot of love for the original. The problem is that you can't just sit down and read the graphic novel in three hours, and you need the level of detail, the build up and side-stories, for it to have impact. __While in one way, Snyder has done a good job of adapting Watchmen, alot of it felt like a compilation of scenes and episodes from the graphic novel, merely in a different format. Which makes you wonder what the point was in the first place. __Some odd moments that didn't seem to work – the revelation that the Comedian was Laurie's father, the ending, the sudden appearance of Bubastis, Nixon's nose…__Too much too take in on the first viewing?__I don't know why HBO didn't turn it into a 12 part series, one episode per chapter, and give the story the pacing it deserves…
Written by Vic Spanner on March 23rd, 2009 at 20:50
THE MASKS OF THE EMPIRE
The symphonic magnitude of the whole film seems at times to forget its original source and instead of a comic adaptation the figurative tones lapse into the sloven chromaticism of an aftermath movie. If the zoomings, authentically larger than cinema, manage to render the spatial realm of the comics whose only borders are those imposed by the reader’s fantasy, the Leonian close-ups lack the epic grandeur they are meant to evoke. That said, Zack Snyder seems to have reconsidered the moral agents at play in his new work (in ‘300’ testosterone was at the service of the imperialist cause against a black homosexual) and while adopting an analogous muscular aesthetic, he scarifies the souls of his character investing them of a ruthless dark side endorsing the highest fidelity to the original. Not a philosophical task not easy to comply with, is it? Since its first appearance in the bookstores (1986) many directors had tried to approach this complex super-heroic feuilleton, Terry Gilliam, Darren Aronofski and Paul Greengrass had all to face an unsolvable quest. How to condensate 12 issues and 338 pages of existential dilemmas, visual inventions and suggestive ultra violence not dissimilar from William Morrison, George Orwell or Stanley Kubrick, into a pop corn movie.
It might be the influence of Dylan’s opening (and closing) notes, but the film seems to conjure up a cruel magic where the inquietudes and bequilements from the past came back to hunt the not so clear consciences of our heros. Beyond the spectacular wiring there exists a psychological subtext overcoming the mask of the super-hero to reveal the violent psychosis of its military vocation and its (in)human limits. With a great iconoclastic verve, the film profoundly questions the super-man figure to project it in the desolated scenario of neocon imperialism where everything is allowed as long as it is not questioned.
For those who would like to hunt the missing parts of this puzzle, they can search the net (http://www.thenewfrontiersman.net), wait for the cartoon, the home video, (a game?) and all those voices composing the transmedial choir of 21st century storytelling.
Celluloid Liberation Front
Written by CLF on May 9th, 2009 at 12:12
If you are going to write………use paragraphs and correct grammar/vocabulary.
Thanks
Written by brizo75 on July 3rd, 2009 at 21:50
Wow, CLF, can you define pretentious?
Written by Shane on July 4th, 2009 at 07:29