This is no crowd-pleaser. And proudly so. Unabashedly, even.
Whatever enthusiasm the opening night audience may have had for director Zack Snyder’s mammoth epic Watchmen
when the film began, it was barely palpable as the credits rolled. The
throng quietly filed out of the screening room, attempting, no doubt,
to puzzle together their own reactions. Certainly that was the case for
me. I knew right away that I admired it. It was impossible not to. But
I needed to sleep on it before I could figure out whether I liked it.
Well, I did. And I do.
Like The Dark Knight before it, Watchmen is the superhero movie in full flower. And like that film, Watchmen
takes a stubborn, insistent pride in its genre roots. Though it fails
to surpass or even match Christopher Nolan’s opus from last summer, and
it has its fair share of creative and narrative missteps, the mere fact
that we’re here talking about its very existence, much less the many things it does right is a miracle worthy of Dr. Manhattan himself.
Under
Snyder’s helm, and in his most confident work yet, this is a movie that
ferociously demands to be accepted on its own terms, even if those
terms mean sacrificing the mainstream audience, rendering this as
essentially an art-house movie wearing the molded rubber and latex cape
of a summer blockbuster.
When the Watchmen
comic series first hit spinner racks in the mid-‘80s, two facts
hardened into the cement of conventional wisdom almost instantly:
first, this was a revolutionary, unprecedented work of art that could
(and did) fundamentally change its medium, and second, this thing could
never be made into a film.
Set in an alternate version of (the then-present day) 1985, the dystopic world of Watchmen
hinges on the conceit that costumed crimefighters have operated since
the 1930s, and their continued presence has fundamentally altered the
progression of history.
Here, Richard Nixon remained in office
into a third (!) term. Costumed crimefighters have been forced into
retirement by a government wracked by the Cold War. And the Doomsday
Clock’s inexorable march towards midnight is slowed only by the
existence of the nuclear-charged Dr. Manhattan, who wields the power of
a god and is under the exclusive employ of the US military. Of course,
all this is mere window-dressing for a complex, multi-faceted story
festooned with symbolic and literary weight.
The series, as
conceived by writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons, was as much
about stretching the bounds of the superhero genre as it was about
critiquing it, delving into the real world ramifications of the
existence of these human gods, as well as the hidden neuroses that
might prompt one to traverse rooftops in colored spandex.
This
was heady, subversive stuff even then. And while the comic series’
enduring influence has only become more profoundly felt in the ensuing
quarter-century, a Watchmen
feature has been the white whale of comic book movies for the bulk of
that time, bouncing from studio to studio, director to director, and
screenwriter to screenwriter. All of them folded under the weight of
trying to encapsulate Moore’s layered, intricate narrative into
something palatable for a mass audience whose concept of superhero
mythologies hewed closer to Adam West than Ayn Rand.
As in the comic, Watchmen
the movie begins with a murder and a mystery: The Comedian (Jeffrey
Dean Morgan) is hurled by a mysterious assailant from his penthouse
suite to the pavement below. This is followed by a brilliant opening
credits sequence, with Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changing”
playing over scenes depicting the impact of costumed heroes on this
world’s timeline, all the way through to Nixon’s re-re-re-election.
From
there we are introduced to the film’s most memorable character, the
enigmatic Rorschach (played behind a full face mask and rumpled trench
coat by Academy Award-nominee Jackie Earle Haley as if the character
was created with him in mind).
A
Randian nightmare come to hard-boiled life, Rorschach is the only
vigilante still active after the government ban, and his investigation
soon widens to his former colleagues: the paunchy, impotent Nite-Owl
(Patrick Wilson); the self-styled “smartest man in the world,”
Ozymandias (the horribly miscast Matthew Goode), who has parlayed his
crimefighting retirement into a vast multinational corporate empire;
Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman), who donned tights as a form of teenage
rebellion against her former-crimefighter mother (Carla Gugino), and
who now lives with the omnipotent, blue-skinned Dr. Manhattan
(performed by Billy Crudup with the help of an army of CGI artists),
whose connection to humanity grows more tenuous as he grows more
powerful.
Soon, the full scope of the plot at work becomes
clear, widening like ripples in a pool, from a single murder to an
impending globe-spanning threat, all while the Cold War plays out
against the backdrop. With so much narrative ground to cover, one can
be forgiven for feeling like the movie hopscotches over some of the
details in the name of brevity. "Brevity" notwithstanding, Watchmen
still clocks in at nearly three hours, and is packed tight with equal
parts meditative dialogue and bone-crunching gore. This is real
“inside” stuff, hard enough for a comic-fluent audience to digest, much
less one conditioned to expect far less nuance and far more fireworks
from its superhero spectacles.
This difficulty becomes
especially pronounced in the third act, where the various dangling plot
threads threaten to coalesce into one impenetrable Gordian Knot. This
includes the movie’s controversial alteration of the book’s climax,
which, while I really didn’t have a problem with it, nevertheless fails
to achieve the emotional impact it might otherwise have had.
Despite this, and even while Watchmen's
reach sometimes exceeds its grasp, the mere fact that Snyder was
passionate enough about the source material to mortgage every last bit
of credibility from his Dawn of the Dead remake and from his 300
in support of a meticulous, even laborious, vision of Moore and
Gibbons’ seminal work, steadfastly holding to the belief that it could
work despite all evidence to the contary, is something that deserves to
be applauded, and certainly it deserves to be watched. |
