So, I finally got around to seeing Watchmen last night, and I certainly agree with many of the opinions blogged previously by my esteemed colleagues Scott Von Doviak and Paul Clark, i.e.: “There are a million reasons a Watchmen movie should never have been made,” and also, “That said, the movie is far from a disaster.”
True, there’s way too much voice-over, the faux-Nixon proboscis is like a bad Saturday Night Live sight gag and the audience at the screening I attended actually burst into derisive laughter in response to the instant cliché usage of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” during what would otherwise have been a perfectly lovely sex scene between Patrick Wilson’s Nite Owl II and the va-voomy Malin Akerman’s Silk Spectre II.
And I can’t imagine what I would have made of the movie if I wasn’t already familiar with the source material: the numerous backstory digressions killed the propulsive, race-against time whodunnit nature of the plot (in a way they didn’t in the graphic novel), and even with North Korea actually launching missiles in the real world, the original work’s haunting sense of impending doom never felt as vivid in the film...mostly, I think, because I was more emotionally connected to my memories of the characters on the page than the oddly flat performances unspooling before me on screen.
To read Watchmen is to spend a decent amount of time with the various inhabitants of Alan Moore’s alternate reality universe up inside your head, from the heroes to the innocent bystanders they’re supposed to be “protecting” (like the newstand guy and the kid with the Tales of the Black Freighter comic, who make only blink-and-you-miss-it cameos in the film). But it’s hard to share the elder and junior Nite Owls’ nostalgia for crime-fighting camaraderie when all we’ve really seen of it is Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Comedian mowing down gooks and brutally raping Carla Gugino’s Sally Jupiter...itself a vividly unpleasant scene that undoes the character’s later, seemingly straight-faced longing for the old days.
And yet, and yet...for all its flaws, Zack Snyder’s Watchmen at least aspires to art, and the sheer improbability of its existence is kinda breathtaking: a pointy-headed, existential think piece on the nature of good and evil (and the miracle of life) uneasily coupled with everything from standard CGI superhero action to naked tits, a big blue schlong and a child’s corpse being devoured by dogs....the fuck?
Compared to cynical drek like, say, The Spirit (or the atrocious Sam Hamm adaptation of Watchmen that thankfully never came to pass), Snyder’s fealty to Moore’s vision is quixotic, fascinating and (for me, at least) never boring despite its titanic running time. And unlike the misguided yet entertaining Troll 2-esque passion projects of the midnight cult movie circuit or muddle-headed misfires like Howard The Duck and The Last Action Hero, there’s plenty in Watchmen that legitimately works, from the big prison break set-piece to Jackie Earle Haley’s marrow-chewing Rorschach and the eye/brain candy of Billy Crudup’s Dr. Manhattan.
So who should watch Watchmen? Hard to say, really...I’m just glad that I did.
Related Posts:
Screengrab Review: “Watchmen”
Screengrab Review: Watchmen (Paul’s Take)
