Movie Review: "Watchmen"

Blue Man Group:

Left to right: Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Malin Akerman, 

Billy Crudup (and CGI), Matthew Goode, and Patrick Wilson

"Who watches the Watchmen"?  An interesting idea that the movie never really develops, but in terms of the box office, who's watching "Watchmen"?  Plenty of folks, as the flick just raked in almost $56 million on its opening weekend.

Let me preface my review by saying that this movie is NOT for everyone.  Ludicrous violence, explicit sexual situations, foul language, and an abysmally nihilistic worldview underpin this film from beginning to end.   If you're offended by moviemakers and CGI artists taking extreme and excessive liberties with the human body in nearly every sense of the word, then you'd best stay home and watch "The Incredibles."  In a nutshell, if you couldn't handle the sex and violence in 2007's  "300," director Zack Snyder's previous work (which I did like -- a lot, actually), I can almost guarantee you won't like "Watchmen." 

If you can see past the shredded bodies and plentiful blood splatter, though, "Watchmen" is a dense movie that provokes comment and debate.  That in itself is a good thing.  As for the radically mixed reviews (people have called this film everything from unmitigated garbage to transcendent glory), I took that as a good sign that we've got something different and interesting at the cinema.  And boy, is that the understatement of the year.

"Watchmen" is a film that pulls no punches in its unrelentingly fanatical -- no, flat-out obsessive -- effort to tell the story immortalized in the graphic novel that has taunted Hollywood for 20 years,  daring it to make a film version that would (a) do even remote justice to the story, and (b) not result in riots by enraged fanboys.  So did Zack Snyder's "Watchmen" succeed?  Yes and no.  All the hype and expectations weigh this movie down.  I didn't think it lived up to the hype.  In a way, it couldn't possibly do so.  At the same time, it had its good points.  The technical artistry is spectacular.  The acting is desultory and the story's pacing problematic.  In the end, though, "Watchmen" is a flawed (at times deeply flawed) but remarkable achievement.

My preface: yes, I have read the graphic novel, thanks to La Parisienne, so I was familiar with the story and characters.  I did go to the theater trying to be as objective as possible and trying to judge the movie as a movie.

The film kicks off with an instantly arresting action scene and the most stunning confection of opening credits that I've ever seen.  I had wondered how Snyder could effectively give enough context and backstory without bogging down the entire flick, but the opening credits do this with aplomb, carried by Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'."  Think of the excellent use of opening credits-as-condensed backstory in last summer's "The Incredible Hulk," and you get the idea.  I was absolutely floored.  "Watchmen" could not begin with a more auspicious and gloriously promising start; unfortunately this was a promise that the rest of the movie could not quite keep. 

The film runs for nearly 3 hours; at 163 minutes, it sometimes trips and drags.  Paradoxically, sometimes it has a great deal of violence but no real action.  The thing is hampered by its own gigantic scope and even more gigantic ambition.  It does, though, painstakingly re-create the world of the graphic novel, even to the point of consistently copying individual frames of the comic onto the movie screen.  The storyline itself is harder to accommodate.  It's set in a decaying, crime-ridden, pre-Giuliani New York in an alternate history's 1985, where Nixon is still president, nuclear war with the USSR looms, and an act of Congress has banned masked adventurers (an idea that has unfortunately lost its novelty after "X-Men" and "The Incredibles") and forced superheroes into retirement, where they carry on as civilians with varying degrees of success.

The brutal murder of the one of these old heroes, the Comedian, prompts the troubled masked vigilante Rorschach to brood on the possibility that someone is purposefully killing ex-heroes.  He then seeks out those who are left -- Laurie Jupiter (aka the Silk Spectre), Dan Dreiberg (Nite Owl), and Adrian Veidt (Ozymandias), along with Dr. Manhattan, the only person who possesses actual superpowers, thanks to a dreadful laboratory accident that transformed physicist Dr. Jon Osterman into a glowing blue being with near-godlike powers.  As these damaged heroes come out of retirement, their search for the Comedian's murderer culminates in a terrifying discovery.

The plot is convoluted, with each character possessing a backstory and a present-day assortment of emotional baggage, and this is where the movie begins to have problems.  There's simply too much going on for any of it to be developed in any real depth.  The quality of the cast is pivotal, but it is also inconsistent.  I had liked the fact that there were no bona fide Hollywood "stars" in the cast, that the cast consisted of character actors; this prevented any one of them from overshadowing the rest by dint of "star power."  Even so, the individuals chosen for the roles turned in a mixed bag of performances.  

I'll start with the good.  Jackie Earle Haley's Rorschach basically IS the movie.  Hidden behind his ever-shifting, uncanny black-and-white mask, he is a faceless and uncompromising vigilante  who sees the world in absolute terms of right and wrong; unmasked, he is even more chillingly intense.  Whether Rorschach is an Objectivist hero is up for debate, but Haley depicts him with a fierce intensity that is this movie's best attempt to embody one of the source comic's characters.  His disgust for the sordid side of life is almost palpable, and his voiceover narration is eerily exactly like what I thought he should sound like.

The Comedian, whose murder opens the movie, barely qualifies as a "hero."  A violent, sadistic brute who sees life as a cruel and sick joke, a sometime-assassin and near-rapist, he emerges from the graphic novel as a figure that evokes more revulsion than empathy.  In spite of all that, somehow Jeffrey Dean Morgan manages to give the swaggering, stogie-chomping Comedian a soul -- or at least, a glimpse of one -- and a perverse charisma.  (Maybe it's the dimples.)  Morgan has an undeniable presence, and when he's not on screen, his absence is clearly felt.  It is to his credit that he, against the odds really, portrays the Comedian as a human being -- flawed beyond belief, but a human being all the same who in the end grasps some understanding of his own behavior... and his own mortality.  Even a Comedian weeps.

Matthew Goode plays Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias, who now runs a corporate empire, while Billy Crudup plays Dr. Jon Osterman and provides the voice for Osterman's alter ego, Dr. Manhattan.  The blue post-human Dr. Manhattan is arguably the most intriguing figure of all -- he is in many ways beyond humanity now and has begun to lose all connection with it -- though the movie never fully delves into this or his actual nature (or why he's wearing Captain Jack Sparrow's eye makeup).

Patrick Wilson turns in a surprisingly sympathetic performance as the one-time Nite Owl who is living a lonely little life as the bespectacled, rumpled, but well-meaning Dan Dreiberg -- as nerdy and nebbishy a figure as you can imagine, and all too human, down to a certain moment of cringing embarrassment.  In the end, he may be, out of all the costumed adventurers, the one who is the quiet hero.

The weakest member of the cast is, I'm sorry to say, the Swedish-Canadian actress Malin Akerman, whose performance as Laurie Jupiter/Silk Spectre is disappointingly flat.  OK, I appreciate the fact that she's also there in part to swish her hair around and look good in her costume (spiked heels and garters and all), but a pretty face is not enough.  Akerman can't seem to do more than memorize her lines; the idea of actually delivering those lines in character seems to be a foreign concept.  As for emoting as the troubled yet fiery Laurie, well, fuhgeddaboutit.  Still, it could be worse.  As La Parisienne said when she and I were having our big post-movie discussion, however lacking Akerman's performance was, it could have been worse; it could have been Katie Holmes in "Batman Begins"!  I laughed and told the mademoiselle I was going to steal her comment and put it in my review.  So yes, Akerman at least isn't Katie Holmes.

In retrospect, I suppose it's no surprise that the worst scene in the movie has Akerman in it.  Don't read any farther in this paragraph if you don't want more spoilers . . . but the scene is so terrible that I can't help but slam it publicly.  I'm talking about the love scene between Nite Owl and Silk Spectre in the airship.  Somehow, despite showing so much skin and so many contortions that it was practically pornographic, it managed to be simultaneously boring and ridiculous.  Heck, both lovers looked uncomfortably as if they were phoning in their performances, and the soundtrack bursting into "Hallelujah" (I'm not making this up) turned the whole thing into a silly, cheesy farce.  (I couldn't decide whether I should roll my eyes or snort with derision, so I did both.)  As for the flamethrower bit at the end -- oh, please.  It was so wretched I found myself thinking almost nostalgically of the upside-down, half-masked kiss in "Spider-Man."  At least that had a touch of charm and emotional connection in it.

Other low notes included Carla Gugino's applied-with-a-trowel old-lady makeup, Nixon's Cyrano-like nose (a prosthetic even sillier than Nicole Kidman's in "The Hours"), and the casting of Matthew Goode as Adrian Veidt.  He seemed too slight (and too much like an effete rich kid escaped from his prep school), and I simply couldn't take him seriously in his role -- especially when he sashayed on camera with his flippy blond hairdo and a fey purple suit complete with a leafy gold pin in the lapel.  And while the soundtrack was mostly on-target, the use of Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" during one scene made me laugh -- and not in a good way.  

Still, these are small complaints.  My biggest criticisms remain: the bloated length of the flick is symptomatic of a fundamental problem: how to tell the story.  I felt that the flick either should have been shorter or longer.  (Or that it might have been better as an HBO miniseries.)  The narrative is so dense and detailed that the moviemakers found themselves caught between two competing desires: re-creating the visuals of the graphic novel and telling the essentials of the story.  In the end, Snyder and company seem to have fallen between two stools.  The film as it is now does not really consistently connect with the audience on a visceral, emotional level.  Somewhere along the way, amid all the pretty pixels of CGI and all the worshipful frames and all the blood (mistaking violence for profundity?), the ability to grab the audience's soul has disappeared.  Somewhere, the emotional punch to the gut is gone, maybe because we never really develop deep attachments to the characters.  Maybe it was worn away by the sheer length of the flick too. By the time I got to the climax, I felt more battered than anything else.  I was worn out.

I have to say, though, that for all its narrative flaws, "Watchmen" is a work of visual, artistic brilliance.  The flick is packed with arresting, memorable images, some of which are eye-poppingly spectacular.  Rank it right up there with "The Matrix" and "300" for delivering the next level of visual effects.  The CGI creation of Dr. Manhattan is Peter Jackson's Gollum taken to the next generation, and the glowing result is quite stunning (though, as I said before, I started wishing that someone would CGI some pants for the guy).

In the end, though, I was glad I went, and I will almost certainly see it again.  The upshot:  This is a comic hero movie for thinking adults who are not afraid either of graphic violence or difficult ideas and debates.  You don't have to like something or agree with it in order to appreciate it.  Go see this movie with some thoughtful friends and then sit and talk for hours.  Do I recommend this film?  Yes, with reservations -- and a warning that you might be completely lost if you're not a little conversant with the graphic novel.  And in the final analysis?  "Watchmen" is daringly ambitious, but by trying to do too much, in the end it doesn't do quite enough.  Even so, there is no other recent film that comes close to its overwhelming complexity.  If its reach exceeds its grasp, I can't bring myself to fault it for trying.  (Plus, we all can't be "The Dark Knight.")

Mad Minerva gives this film a grade of B.   Maybe later I'll post something on the ideas in the flick, but the hearty B is for the flick itself.  

"Watchmen" runs 163 minutes and is rated R for extreme graphic violence, explicit sexual situations, nudity (real and CGI), and language.

Rotten Tomatoes gives "Watchmen" a "fresh" rating of 65%.

(And writing all this has made me hungry.  I think I'll end with some calamari.)

UPDATE:  Related thoughts here.