An awesome and ridiculous film that leaves you thrilled beyond the point of your natural endurance
2012
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Music
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London,
Derek Malcolm's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Zack Snyder.
Cast: Patrick Wilson, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Malin Akerman, Carla Gugino, Jackie Earle Haley, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode, Stephen McHattie, Matt Frewer
Description: Travel back in time to a very different vision of the mid '80s. Relations between America and the Soviet Union are strained to say the least and there is a very clear and present danger of nuclear war. In this hellish time of suspicion and paranoia, superhuman men and women mingle with the general populous, under the strict control of the government. When one of these gifted folk is murdered, Rorschach joins forces with his fellow exiles Nite Owl, The Comedian, Silk Spectre, Dr Manhattan and Ozymandias to unravel the layers of mystery enveloping the crime. In so doing, these valiant yet misunderstood souls discover a grander, darker and far more sinister plot that has far-reaching implications for the future of mankind.
Country: US. 2009. 162mins
Costume drama: after 15 years in development hell, The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and his fellow Watchmen are finally brought to life by director Zack Snyder in a faithful adaptation
Do we really want another shitty Hollywood film?” demanded Alan Moore on being informed about the latest adaptation of his work for the screen.
When you watch V for Vendetta and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, you know exactly what he means. Besides, Moore has always reckoned that Watchmen, a brilliantly bleak graphic novel often placed among the 20th century’s top 100 novels (not just graphic), was unfilmable.
Now Zack Snyder, who also turned Frank Miller’s graphic novel 300 into a movie, has managed to do it, and reasonably faithfully too — only the ending is changed much. You have to say, it’s a triumph against the odds, but that doesn’t mean you have to like its sprawling surface and pessimistic sense of human destiny.
Unfortunately there is something about Snyder’s smart, polished work that’s too glib. If Watchmen the movie has a heart, I can’t discern it. The missing warmth is what stops Moore’s complex set of costumed heroes from moving us on film, even as we admire the often garish and frequently violent action set-pieces built around them.
The setting is an alternative 1985, with Nixon somehow surviving in office and nuclear war with the Soviets increasingly imminent. Tricky Dickie has outlawed masks and costumes, which means that the collective crime fighters known as the Watchmen find themselves redundant. They are driven to despair by a world that is hardly worth saving even if they were allowed.
These number among them the borderline sociopath Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) and his former partner, Dan Dreiberg (Patrick Wilson), who fight crime like vigilantes; Adrian Veidt (Matthew Goode), who has merchandised his identity as the smartest man in the world; and finally sexy Laurie Jupiter (Malin Akerman) and Dr Manhattan (Billy Crudup), her former lover.
Dr Manhattan is the product of a government botch-up which has endowed him with regenerative superpowers, and is used as a tactical weapon by the US military. He is naked throughout and, as in the book, has visible genitalia. This may account for the film’s 18 certificate, since we are squeamishly silly about this sort of thing, though the often bloody violence may have been a contributory factor too.
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The story begins when another Watchman, Edward Blake (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) — formerly called The Comedian — is hurled to his death by an intruder from his upper-storey New York apartment. He has been moodily watching television, which is calmly telling us about the imminent nuclear holocaust.
The only one of the costumed heroes who suspects a link between The Comedian’s death and the threat of global annihilation is Rorschach, and he also fears a conspiracy to eliminate the Watchmen entirely.
In between this plotline are copious flashbacks that illustrate each hero’s origins and sometimes their view of this blisteringly dystopian world. Chunks of the novel’s dialogue are lifted wholesale for this, but the film still seems more of a visual summation than anything else.
Larry Fong’s widescreen cinematography and Alex McDowell’s noirish production design carry the real weight, but because of this, the clichés which Moore was trying subtly to subvert seem just clichés after all. There is simply no room even in a very long movie for the eccentric author’s more cerebral ideas.
Consequently, few of the cast seem more than vaguely camp cut-outs, though Haley’s narrating Rorschach comes closest to a flesh and blood character. And was it wise to invest the soundtrack with Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, Leonard Cohen and Billie Holiday, as well as parts of Philip Glass’s Koyaanisqatsi score? They hardly seem to fit together, and certainly not as well as Moore and Dave Gibbons, his illustrator, managed soundlessly in the book.
But for all its flaws, and there are many, Snyder’s version is something of a victory in that he made it at all after 15 years of development hell during which Terry Gilliam, Darren Aronofsky and Paul Greengrass had to admit defeat.
At least it looks good, like a version of The Dark Knight coupled with Taxi Driver, and remains faithful to the skin if not the bone of Moore and Gibbons’s astonishing vision.
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