WATCHMEN – zack snyder – 3.9 / 10

More than twenty years after it was first published and after almost a dozen different writers and directors attempted to make it and failed, Watchmen finally arrives on the big screen. Like any film based on a popular book, there are two types of potential viewers, those who’ve read the book and those who haven’t. The former are going to be measuring the film against the movie that played in their heads as they read the book and the latter are going to measure the film based solely on what’s up on the screen. Since I’ve read the book a few times (most recently a week ago) I can’t really speak to whether or not the latter group will like this movie (though my suspicion is that they won’t because it’s just too damn silly) but I can say that fans of the graphic novel will probably feel that Snyder and Co. followed the letter of the book but completely missed its spirit.

Watchmen is set in an alternate version of 1985 America wherein Dr. Manhattan, Earth’s lone super-powered superhero, ended the Vietnam War in a week and ushered in a new age of technological wonders and neo-fascist government (led by Richard Nixon, recently elected to his fifth term as President). Within that framework, Alan Moore (the author of the graphic novel) told a sprawling story that spanned decades and generations, the main thrust of which was an investigation into what sort of person would want to put on a mask and tights and go fight crime. His answer, for the most part, was that ‘masked adventurers’ (a phrase oft repeated in the book but pointedly changed to ‘masked avengers’ in the film) would be people with either severely deluded ideas about their own self worth, people who are dangerously close to becoming unhinged or people who just liked the attention and publicity. That being the case, it is any wonder that the superheroes in the Watchmen graphic novel ended up doing a lot more harm than good?

Unfortunately, making an enormously expensive studio film about a bunch of sociopaths and misanthropes in ridiculous looking costumes is a losing proposition, so anyone who was actually going to adhere to the subtext of the book (say Terry Gilliam or Darren Aronofsky, both of whom were attached to the project at one point or another) was never going to get to make this film. Enter Zack Snyder. Hot off the ridiculously anti-historical, brazenly homoerotic, patently absurd 300, Snyder was just the man to beat the thornier aspects of Watchmen into submission and turn the whole thing into a huge music video.

The problem with turning Watchmen into a slam-bang piece of popcorn entertainment is that it completely misses the point of the graphic novel. Take, for instance, the scene where Nite Owl and Silk Spectre break Rorschach out of jail. In the book, both of the heroes are terrified that they’re going to get caught up in the full-scale riot that has broken out in the prison. They want to find Rorschach and get the hell out of there as quickly as possible. In the film, Nite Owl and Silk Spectre give each other a coy smile and then proceed to gleefully beat the shit out of a dozen inmates using high-flying acrobatics and martial arts. In the book, the point of the scene was that when faced with real danger and overwhelming odds, a costume and some fancy hardware is plain silly and probably dangerous besides. In the film, the point becomes something more along the lines of ‘superheroes are badass!’ which both completely misses the point and undercuts the overall narrative which ultimately ends with the lesson that even superheroes can’t change the world for the better.

And it goes on like that throughout the film. Little changes here and there and the occasional omission (like some of Rorschach’s more repulsive ideas about modern society’s true nature so that he comes off as more of a hero and less of a nutcase) add up to a completely different take on the idea of the superhero than what was in the book. But since the film follows the plot of the book almost to the letter, it ends up contradicting itself, leaving the audience completely unsure how Snyder meant for them to feel about the idea of putting on a mask and fighting crime.

Snyder doesn’t help his case by opening the film with an alternate world version of the 'McLaughlin Group' complete with Pat Buchanan and Eleanor Clift impersonators in terrible make-up. For people who watch the show (me among them) having actors impersonate the guests on the show is just distracting and weird. For people who don’t watch the show (I’m assuming most of the country), the scene must have just seemed bizarre. So the question becomes, what’s the point? Why take every member of the audience out of the film right at the beginning?

The same goes for the film’s version of Richard Nixon. In the graphic novel, Nixon was hardly ever seen and when he was it was always from behind and mostly obscured by shadow. But right away the film cuts to a full on close-up of some actor in terrible make-up trying to look and sound like Tricky Dick. No matter how you feel about the real Nixon, this moment in the film is just off-putting and weird. And it’s the same in every one of the half dozen times that Nixon appears in the film. It achieves nothing that couldn’t have been done better with a little more subtlety.

In fact, the make-up throughout Watchmen is laughably ridiculous. At no point does the viewer ever get completely pulled into any scene with the older version of Sally Jupiter (Carla Gugino) because her make-up is so glaringly noticeable. There’s always a part of your mind focused on how bad the whole thing looks. So too for The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). Though Morgan is pretty great in the role, all the scenes that feature him as an old man make him look like he’s wearing a rubber mask of some kind. And it’s impossible, for me anyway, to feel sadness for some guy in a rubber mask.

The film is also not helped by the way Dr. Manhattan is rendered. A completely CG creation, Dr. Manhattan looks like a glowing blue version of Arnold Schwarzenegger in his 1970s prime. He’s a freakin' monster of a man. This is another example of how Snyder, in trying to be cool or edgy or whatever, changed things just enough to completely alter the meaning. In the book, Dr. Manhattan is naked because he’s so disconnected from humanity that he doesn’t care about petty things like shame and decency. He’s moved past them. But since he controls matter with his thoughts, he can easily cover himself up or alter his appearance when he needs to. Most of the time, however, he doesn’t give it a second thought. But the film’s Dr. Manhattan looks like a Mr. Universe contender. That seems to suggest, since he’s altered his physical form to take on a shape that is intimidating and a little threatening, that he feels the very petty human emotions of jealousy and self-satisfaction. It might even lead one to conclude that he feels a little bit of self-doubt, something the Dr. Manhattan of the book had long ago left behind. And that small change, again, shifts the subtext just enough so that the film sends two conflicting messages about this character. Snyder, in other words, has once again missed the point in an attempt to make a purposefully mundane looking book really ‘pop’ on screen. (And what’s the deal with Dr. Manhattan’s circumcised penis? It seems to me that a guy like that wouldn’t bother to give himself a unnecessary medical procedure.)

Not helping things either is the dreadful performance of Malin Ackerman as the second Silk Spectre. More or less the heart and soul of the book, Silk Spectre comes off rather poorly in the film. Some people have said Ackerman sounds like Drew Barrymore, others have said Cameron Diaz. Personally I think her voice is a dead ringer for Kate Hudson's. The point, however, is that it seems that no one is actually focused on the character or the film whenever she opens her mouth. And since much of the emotional heft of the book comes from her character’s experiences, that’s a shame.

And then there’s the music. Oh, boy. I don’t know if Snyder was trying to be funny by scoring a love scene to ‘Hallelujah’ but if he wasn’t, it sure came off that way. And if he was, to what end? And that’s just the worst of a handful of dreadful musical choices. Throughout the film Snyder makes the sort of totally obvious choices for musical accompaniment that a hack reality show producer would be embarrassed to make.

But even with all of that, somehow Snyder managed to put together what might end up being the best five minutes of film anyone will see this year. Unfortunately for Watchmen it comes at about the four minute mark (which means you have another two hours and forty minutes of nonsense to get through before the credits roll) but even still, the montage of twenty years of life in this alternate America set to Dylan’s ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’’ is astonishingly assured and wonderfully well shot. I suppose the full impact of some of the images may be lost on those who haven’t read the book, but there’s no denying the power of seeing John F. Kennedy’s assassination recreated so exactly with a completely different perpetrator.

This sequence does in a handful of minutes what the rest of the film can’t accomplish with more than two and a half hours. It shows what the impact of superheroes on the world might actually look like and why that wouldn’t necessarily be the good thing most other movies and comic books assume it would. That’s really the point of the Alan Moore graphic novel and, for five minutes at least, Zack Snyder gets it perfectly right. Too bad it goes totally off the rails not long afterwards.