Watchmen

Watchmen
Review by Loc

Who watches the Watchmen? Lots of fanboys will, that’s guaranteed. Will the rest of the population see it? Maybe, definitely during opening weekend. Maybe not much beyond that. Why? Because this movie is less a movie and more an adaptation. A great visual feat, a faithful recreation, but not a piece of work that stands on its own. And in effect, it misses the opportunity to become an entity unto itself. Quick hit: watch for the sheer audacious attempt, but don’t expect greatness.

As the only graphic novel/comic book to garner praise as one of the greatest novels of all time, Watchmen has filled countless pages of analysis and critique over the years. In 1986, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons delivered a 12-issue comic series that deconstructed the modern superhero and ushered the era of realism in comics. Along with Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen set the stage for a dramatic shift in comic storytelling. Not all of it was good, as the industry took the surface layer of
“dark” equals “deep”. Regardless, Watchmen has since been elevated to rarefied air, and been stuck in movie development hell for years.

Until now, as Zach Synder took the goodwill generated from 300 and cashed it in for his shot at Watchmen. And that’s a good thing, cause if there’s one thing Zach can do, it’s make a movie look great. Watchmen looks magnificent for the most part, scenes pay homage to the comic series in panel-to-scene translations that are stunning. The action looks good as well, with some usage of the fast-time-slow-mo sequencing that Synder loved so much in 300. There are parts where the costumed heroes look pretty stupid, but the editing mostly hides the awkward actor trying to look smooth. Hint, Malin Akerman and Matthew Goode aren’t natural athletes, don’t try to make them do choreographed fighting, it looks dumb.

Which brings us to the casting. Some was very very good, some was decent, some was bad, much like the movie itself. Jeffrey Dean Morgan is spot on as The Comedian, a scary brute who’s moral boundaries lie somewhere south of Antartica. Jackie Earle Haley is very cool as Rorschach, but almost brings too much emotion to the table. Rorschach should be nearly black-and-white, doing what he does because his world view is so cut and dry that there is no ambiguity. In Haley’s performance, you almost get a Batman-type badass, which is a bit more than you need.

For the decent, Patrick Wilson’s Nite Owl is good. He’s a good-hearted wholesome guy, the type of superhero that you wished existed. But again, the material really presented him as a broken, fat loser, a man who had given up in life and had little to offer. Wilson’s Nite Owl is genuine and nice, but not exactly someone who needs redemption. Goode’s Ozymandias is also OK, he’s there to be the smartest man in the world. He does what he needs, but there’s not a whole lot of chewing up the screen with this performance.

Then we get to the bad, with Akerman’s Silk Spectre and Billy Crudup’s Dr. Manhattan. Akerman turned in a performance that was exactly the same as when she was in 27 Dresses and The Heartbreak Kid: slightly annoying, mostly flat, and somewhat unbelievable as she delivers her lines. Kinda like she was trying to act instead of just acting. Then there’s Crudup, who is about 90% CGI, a big blue hulked-out naked dude with everything hanging out. And he has a nasally voice. And a soft voice. And that’s really not working for the living nuclear weapon. Not at all.

So with this mixed cast, what happens to the movie? Well, this should really be considered an adaptation more than a movie. You see, Synder does a great job of translating the book, bringing whole issues to life with panel-by-panel recreations. But he failed to make a movie out of it. To make this work as a wholly independent presentation of the comic, Synder needed to cut out some of the fat, rework some of the pacing, and tell a story for this different platform. But he didn’t, he made a visual, moving-pictures comic that ran 2 hours and 45 minutes. So it’s great for the fanboys, probably disjointed, boring, and confusing to the mass population.

Oh but wait, if you stick so closely to the source material, why succumb to reworking the ending?? No spoilers here, but it’s easy enough to say the climax of the movie is reworked to fit more seamlessly to movie’s presentation. But if you’re going to do that, shouldn’t you rework the whole script to make it into a full fleshed out movie? This is the conundrum faced by the audience that may wonder, why oh why is it not there! And if you don’t know what that means, it’s because you haven’t read the book and compared the movie. Dammit!

Overall, there’s some nice visuals and the adherence to the source material is impressive. At this grand scale, it might have been even better as a dramatic series via HBO, 12 episodes to glory. But nope, it’s a long ass movie. And that’s the missing link. It’s not a movie, it’s an adaptation that leaves out some of the important stuff. Too bad, cause it looks pretty sweet. Out of 5 minutes on the Doomsday Clock, Watchmen is ticking away with 3 minutes.