Watchmen

Take the heaviest, dustiest history of the Cold War you can find and hit yourself in the face with it while watching Taxi Driver and you'll know what it's like to view Zack Snyder's nearly 3-hour long Watchmen, a heavy-spirited affair that arrives a good two decades after it was needed. Stories about Alan Moore's hatred for Hollywood adaptations of his work have almost achieved cliche status by now, but it wasn't until I was looking at the Watchmen poster outside the local theatre that I focused on the fact Moore's name is literally not on the movie. (The poster reads "Based on a graphic novel co-created by Dave Gibbons")

I can understand why an artist with any feeling for his work at all wouldn't want his name on this unsubtle and assaultive movie. I have only passing familiarity with Watchmen in its graphic novel form, but that work (which includes numerous text passages) can hardly be any less layered than what's on screen. While I don't agree with those who've said that there's nothing good in the movie after the stylish opening credits sequence, I do wish that Snyder had been able to maintain the energy and tone that the titles establish. In 1940 a group of "costumed heroes" known as the Minutemen establish themselves and quickly become iconic and popular figures. Chief amongst them are the cynical Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and Sally Jupiter aka Silk Spectre (Carla Gugino, who deserves some federal bailout money for what she's asked to do here). The 1985 murder of the Comedian opens the movie proper, and it's the Comedian that's one of the movie's biggest problems. Unlike Jackie Earle Haley's Rorschach (more on him later), whose sociopathic behavior is honed to a fine point by his belief that "liberalism" will bring about the end of civilization, the Comedian's disgust with the world is literally homicidal; his attempted rape of Sally is Snyder's most disturbing and least necessary directorial flourish. As Rorschach vows vengeance for the Comedian's death and attempts to enlist his now retired Watchmen colleagues (whose careers have been interrupted by a law banning masked heroes) in solving the murder viewers new to the Watchmen might have a hard time wondering if the Comedian's life was worth saving.

It's Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach that provides Watchmen with what heart it has and raises all sorts of disturbing questions about what exactly heroism is anyway. Rorschach spends most of the movie behind a mask adorned with constantly shifting ink blots (Why and how do they shift? Apparently no one cares), and his gruff narration sets the scene of a New York and a world on the edge of an abyss both moral and literal (a US-USSR nuclear conflict looms). When Rorschach is set up for murder and falsely imprisoned we get a glimpse of the man behind the ink blots, and Haley's performance is all the more impressive for managing to be humane and chilling simultaneously. While Rorschach is the only character unwilling to accept the half loaf of an ending after the motives of Comedian's killer have been revealed, readers of the source material would be hard pressed to describe his behavior as "heroic" out of hand. Yet for too much of the film Rorschach is flattened out into the Last Angry Man in America. His murderous behavior has no context, since the filmmakers are even less interested in grounding their comic book world in a recognizable reality than the makers of The Dark Knight (and that's saying something). Look elsewhere for discussions of Snyder's attempt to placate his core audience by replicating panels from the book.

Every bone break, knife edge, and other contact with hard surface in Watchmen is given its full glory, but Snyder's reverent direction and the complicated web of character relationships keep the audience at much too great a distance to consider the consequences. There seems to be little reason why Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman, whose acting and costume both merit a "yikes" - decide for yourself on the inflection) should fall for the schlumpy Nite Owl II (Patrick Wilson) except that the script calls for them to unite to assault the jail where Rorschach is being held. (He doesn't need their help) SS2's pursuit of the Nite Owl is allegedly motivated by the behavior of her lover Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), once a nuclear physicist whose exposure to radiation has transformed him into a creature with the ability to control matter and see the future. Dr. Manhattan is the vehicle for most of the science fiction-ish aspects of Watchmen; he's trying to build a reactor that will solve the world's energy problems and is tempted to take up residence on Mars when his disinterest in humanity approaches the point of no return. The good Doctor also serves as the mouthpiece for the "big" questions that no Zack Snyder-directed movie is capable of answering, such as whether there's any point to saving humanity and why anyone should bother trying. (Anthony Lane called this "metaphysical vulgarity") Any doubts about or serious examinations of the characters' mental states and their awareness of the consequences of their actions have no place in this Watchmen, except when its revealed Nite Owl needs his costume in order to perform sexually.

Watchmen may please its target audience but I'm skeptical about what it has to offer a general audience other than the lame promise of another "event" movie marketed and tested until all the flavor is drained out. Zack Snyder may be Hollywood's reigning champ at creating onscreen fantasy worlds, but he hasn't yet learned how to tell a human story.