One of the best measures of any long film’s quality is whether or not it plods along as if it skipped the editing stage completely. Take it as a strong recommendation, then, that over the course of two hours and 43 minutes, Watchmen never wears out its welcome.
Based on Alan Moore’s seminal comic – or rather, his graphic novel, as some are quick to insist, pointing
to its inclusion on Time Magazine’s list of the 100 best novels – it is a deconstruction of superhero mythology, a perfect antithesis to the Superman story. Watchmen inhabits an alternate timeline where the presence of superheroes has affected world history: It is 1985, Nixon is in his fifth term as U.S. president, the Cold War never ended, and the prospect of mutually assured destruction by means of nuclear war is so immediate that the Doomsday Clock is at five minutes to midnight and still ticking.
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Watchmen Directed by Zack Snyder. Starring Patrick Wilson, Jackie Earle Haley, Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Carla Gugino |
The superheroes, however, are merely ordinary mortals who fight crime as costumed vigilantes on the Batman model, with no telekinesis, spider-web-slinging, or other fantastical powers in evidence – think Mystery Men without the comedy. Not only that, but these heroes have given up their group moniker, the Minutemen, retired from crime-fighting, and mostly fled the limelight.
There is Nite Owl, a Batman lookalike with owl-themed gadgetry; Silk Spectre, whose strained relationship with her mother (the original Silk Spectre – in this universe, vigilantism is hereditary) echoes her emotional embroilments with other members of the team; Rorschach, a sociopathic film noir anachronism with a roiling ink blot for a face mask; Ozymandias, the “smartest man in the world”; and the exception to the rule, Dr. Manhattan, turned blue and imbued with bona fide superpowers by a scientific experiment gone awry.
When one of the former vigilantes, known as the Comedian, is murdered, it falls to the remaining members to return to the public eye and track down his killer before they are targeted themselves, all while trying to stave off a nuclear apocalypse.
Watchmen the film may or may not please die-hard fans of the comic, but it certainly puts to rest the issue of whether it is inherently “unfilmable”; it is up for debate whether it lives up to its source material, but it definitely succeeds as a movie. Director Zack Snyder, fresh off his success with 300 (another adaptation of a famously gritty and violent comic) is clearly resolved to give the story the best possible treatment (the Watchmen project had been mired in “development hell” for more than two decades with various directors attached over that time).
Snyder’s devotion to the comic manifests as an almost slavish fidelity to Moore’s work, such that the movie encompasses all kinds of disparate narrative strands found in the comic: a protagonist’s journal entries, a soliloquy on Mars, myriad flashbacks, and a title sequence montage which explains the history of the Minutemen, cleverly set to Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changing.” This faithfulness extends, of course, to the graphic representation of sex, rape, and good old fashioned costumed hero ass-kickery, although with an 18A rating, the violence is more in line with that of Sin City than any of the popular, kid-friendly superhero franchises.
With the exception of Robert Wisden as Richard Nixon (which seems like a hollow, prosthesis-reliant caricature after Frank Langella’s remarkable performance in Frost/Nixon), the acting is consistent all round, with performances ranging from serviceable (Matthew Goode as Ozymandius) to superb (Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach and Billy Crudup as Dr. Manhattan). Some of the graphic novel’s peripheral characters are missing, along with a story-within-a-story and a bio-engineered diabolus ex machina climax, but word is that a director’s cut DVD will include some 40 minutes of additional footage.
Watchmen is scored by Tyler Bates, and the soundtrack is a generally inconspicuous one, which usually means it has succeeded at underlining the action, although some of the song choices are strange (Hendrix’s “All Along The Watchtower” and Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” both appear as if to create some kind of Brechtian continuity rupture), and some of the material sounds as though it was directly lifted from Vangelis’s score to Blade Runner (in his work on 300, Bates was reprimanded for stealing musical cues from other films).
In sum, Watchmen is both more and less than The Dark Knight (against which it will inevitably be compared, along with Sin City). It has no virtuosic Joker performance (although Rorschach actually comes close), no all-star ensemble cast, and no pair of prolific composers working on motifs for the score; but it has the kind of many-layered detailing usually found in artier movies (cf. Children of Men), intense action (which was rather lacking in The Dark Knight) to match its grit, and a capacity – if not a need –to be watched more than once.
Maybe we can finally put to rest the question of what is the “best” comic book adaptation, and be pleased there are so many candidates (alongside all of the less successful attempts) that it no longer seems a fluke when a director manages to bring a comic vividly to life.