Review: Watchmen (2009)

Tue Mar 17 00:19:58 EDT 2009

                            WATCHMEN
                (a film review by Mark R. Leeper)

     CAPSULE: CAPSULE: After years of its fans waiting,
     Alan Moore's mammoth graphic novel WATCHMEN has
     come to the screen.  This is a film of violence, sex,
     breaking glass, and spattering blood--dark both
     literally and figuratively.  Zach Snyder (director of
     "300") gives us a more-than-ample 163 minutes in this
     gaudy, ugly world.  If you are looking for a highly
     digitally enhanced, noisy, explosion, hot-grease-in-
     the-face, fighting, meat-cleaver sort of film with
     plenty of people being thrown through plate glass
     windows in slow motion this could be one of the
     biggees of the year for you.  Rating: -1 (-4 to +4)
     or 3/10

I expect this to be one of my unpopular reviews.  Your mileage may
well vary on WATCHMEN.  Roger Ebert gave it four stars, his highest
rating.  I have friends who were really looking forward to this
film.  I read the graphic novel years ago and it did not stick with
me.  I saw the film minutes ago and it did not stick with me much
either.  Much of that is by choice.  This is a cold, ugly, violent
film.  The characters are more than one-dimensional, but I hesitate
to say they made it half way to two-dimensional.  Besides the
bizarre problems that the plot hands them, their personal problems
are melodramatic and cliched.

The original comic book of the story was twelve issues long and set
in an alternate 1985, though it was released in 1986 and 1987.  The
Watchmen are a team of superheroes centered on Dr. Manhattan
(played in the movie by Billy Crudup), the only one of their number
who actually has super powers.  And his powers are almost god-like
due to his having received a lethal dose of strange radiation.
Other heroes seem more Batman-like with natural, if exaggerated,
skills.  They are the Comedian, Nite-Owl II, Rorschach, and Silk
Spectre II.  Actually, the film begins with the Comedian (Jeffrey
Dean Morgan) being murdered.  The other Watchmen to varying degrees
think about their relationship to the dead less-than-super
not-really-hero and try to find his killer.  All this is told
against a backdrop of rapidly escalating Cold War tensions between
the United States and the Soviet Union.  Somewhere in there
manipulating events is Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.

Speaking of Richard Nixon let me add an aside here.  Having Nixon
as a character might have been an interesting touch in the comic
book.  As bad as I found watching the film, it always got worse
when the storyline visited Nixon.  Robert Wisden plays the
ex-President in what looks like a satirical Halloween mask.  It
features a big Cyrano nose.  Seeing Nixon played this way is a lot
like hearing a song you never liked in the first place sung so
off-key as to send chills down your spine.  The design of the
superhero costumes may have come from the comic but look just
horrid on the screen.  Night Owl II (Patrick Wilson) comes off the
best looking like a parody of Batman.  The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean
Morgan) looks like a middle-aged cigar chomping version of Robin
the Boy Wonder.  Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman) looks to be
dressed in vinyl in a style you generally see only in the wrong
part of town.  Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) wears a mask with
black Rorschach-test-like symmetric black splotches that constantly
move around and re-form themselves.  It quickly becomes a major
distraction.  Dr. Manhattan is big and can grow to giant
proportions while he gives off a Messianic-looking blue glow.  He
actually has too different costumes.  One is no more than a
revealing thong.  That is the one he wears for serious occasions.
Later in the film he seems to decide that is overdressed and just
lets it all hang out.  This film earns it R-rating and then some.
(Side note: A family in the row ahead of us would let their four-
ish son watch scenes that graphically show someone having hot oil
thrown in his face or getting a meat cleaver embedded several
inches into his head, but covered their son's eyes when characters
were nude and having sex.)  Zack Snyder's world of 1985 is dark and
rainy portrayed with a subdued color pallet.  It is deeply
oppressive, which is probably precisely the idea.  Something
creative and original could have been expected from the Tyler Bates
musical score given the pretensions of the film.  If it was there,
I missed it.  Mostly what I heard was unimaginative "texture" music
with dull chords and no attempt at any melody.  Where they use
source music it generally is badly chosen.   A sex scene (in a
flying thingee without wings, no less) to the tune of Leonard
Cohen's "Hallelujah"???  Feh!

The adapted screenplay by David Hayter and Alex Tse is trying to
delve into what being a superhero is really all about.  They give
us some standard mother-daughter tensions, an obnoxious man whom
you know not to like because he smokes a cigar, and lots of violent
fights.  A world-threatening plot is uncovered that might have
graced a lesser James Bond film, but with a few tweaks for
superheroes.  Like THE RETURN OF THE KING the film seems to have
multiple endings, in one of which Night Owl II tells us nothing
ever ends, which for me was precisely the message I did not want at
that moment.

This was a big disappointment.  Watching it I found very quickly my
wristwatch becoming my closest companion.  With a film featuring all this
violence and with superheroes the last thing you would expect is a
film so dreary and tedious.  WATCHMEN is overlong, painful to
watch, and occasionally pretentious.  It is intended to give us
insights into the experience of being a superhero.  So far nobody
has stepped forward to endorse the accuracy of those insights.  I
rate WATCHMEN a -1 on the -4 to +4 scale or 3/10.  Reportedly Alan
Moore has not allowed his name to appear on the film.  I know I
wouldn't want my name on it.

Film Credits: <http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0409459/>

What others are saying: <http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/watchmen/>

					Mark R. Leeper
					mleeper at optonline.net
					Copyright 2009 Mark R. Leeper