I remember being around twelve years old and seeing images of Dave Gibbon’s artwork for the first time in a little Terry Zwigoff doco on mainstream comics. It looked so goddamn weird. I was habitually taking The Dark Knight Returns out of the library at that point, a big push out of the current X-men arcs I was following with lunch money alone. I would like to say that when the pulp edition of Watchmen first came into my possession later that year, it was a game changing, mind expanding forum to blitz my senses into accepting radical comics, but… well, not really. Its panels were conservative, lacking necessities such as: Accentuated violence, salivating anticipation of the grotesque, and the ever present barrage of sexual humiliation to be found in it’s (more attractive) contemporaries.
It was just sort of goddamn weird, I mean, there were extended novellas breaking up each issue in the collection. Reading in a comic book, Jesus. Yes, this misunderstanding dissipated as superior mature sensibilities took over at age fourteen and found the undeniable quality in this literature, this masterpiece of graphic form and narrative, this example of top tier characterization, a worthy edition in the pantheon of the truest of classics, the this, the that, yeah yeah. The source material has had its due masturbation in the hype surrounding its inevitable motion picture adaptation, and it goes without saying that I find Watchmen’s pages (more on it’s celluloid later) awe-inspiring. It feels wrong to start things off with “I remember being…” or a reminder of “No, really, love the book, graphic novels yeah!” But it should be painfully clear that any stranglehold of pure murderous love I had for Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s monolith would not in any way affect my experience walking into the theatre to see the Watchmen movie. Really.
Really. Movie Watchmen. I came out of that theatre. Watchmen, the movie, was the worst movie I had seen in years. Did I feel betrayed? Hell no, I wanted a movie, a great movie, a psychoses driven sci fi epic that could only be strengthened by the cavalcade of amazing concepts in the written original. As far as I was concerned, this film owed no service to any fan except maintaining its own quality as a singular piece of entertainment. The cultural obsession with adaptations completely mimicking their basis is a sickening and ineffectual phenomenon. Watchmen pandered to that. I imagine Alan Moore, in the epicentre of composing ideas for his Century: 1910, receives a spec script from Solid Snake (David Hayter, of X-men fame) himself. The script covers all the bases, hits all the narrative points, lifts some memorable dialogue, and lets it play out for a little over three hours. Moore cheekily states it is “the closest anyone could get to the original comic”, full well knowing any closer would render it a Coles Notes storyboard of the original collection. Fanboys go wild. Bases are loaded. It has the blessing of the master. And surely, those lines are repeated by your favourite characters, yet from page to screen, from mind’s eye to mind’s infidelity, everything is lost.
The film opens promisingly; a well-played tongue in cheek exposition of invasive mobile framing establishes cold war era Reaganism (oops, I mean Nixonism), cutting between farcical talk shows and pseudo alternative history details. It is here director Zack Snyder and his camera have the most success when embellishing this world, taking some liberty with it, and throwing subtlety out the window (it is the attempts at the latter later on that drown this ship). This opening could have been a fertile ground to establish a world as memorable and evocative as Blade Runner, or even Brazil… From a well made fight sequence commencing this film, to the slow motion credits sequence following, this first twenty minutes’ pure audacity would be enough to encourage the academics to give this one a shot. Then, well… What the hell happened?
The lengthy number of reels forcing narrative pacing is a crucial flaw; character driven plot threads are clumsily strewn throughout the larger diegetic events, and other more self contained “portraits” halt momentum dramatically. The Dr. Manhattan soliloquy is neither relevant or interesting enough to fully support it’s drastic narrative inclusion. There is another similar pastiche of the first Watchmen meeting, told not so much from varying perspectives (as it is handled in the source) but merely advancing the larger film’s laborious plot. There is no direction, no commonality or organic quality in the storytelling, and it effectively mires the burgeoning character’s fates with unconnected events. But wait, for such a slavish devotion to the original comic’s narrative events, surely this gripe should be targeted on Alan Moore; Watchmen on the page is episodic, its plot incremental, and its portraits self contained. The majesty of Moore’s “under language” (contrapuntal dialogue layered with non synchronous events) allowed for an unspoken uniformity present in every panel. The film attempts it occasionally, but its editing is too jarring and convoluted to execute it. Speaking of those characters, they are either performing cold readings of speech-bubble-lifted monologues from Moore’s pen, or humiliating ad-lib nuances (mostly with a few extra “fucks”.) The performances are horrendous, plain and simple, even from shockingly capable actors such as Patrick Wilson. Each line is awkwardly speckled like drool from barely conscious mannequins, and every physical impulse a preschool tableaux… Ham-handed does not even begin to accurately describe the utter tragedy that follows in Jeffrey Dean Morgan (“Can’t a guy talk to his, y’know… friend’s daughter?”), and Malin Akerman’s (refer to: crystal castle shattering temper tantrum) wake. They fully turn in embarrassing performances, and should both be worrying for their careers.
What I will grant this film, is its usage of Billy Crudup. His voice work is once again astonishing (a la Princess Mononoke), echoing nebulae of evocative response through his soft timbre alone. His poorly designed (but not endowed) CGI husk is saved by his presence alone. As for the film’s overall craft, the production design is a pseudo retro hodgepodge straight out of Back To The Future: Part 2’s 80’s themed future cafe. The computer modelling work is lifeless, perfunctory, utilitarian; there is no color or salivating texture in this New York, only grey tones and soft Final Cut blur. The set’s “easter eggs” and world painting props are so overt that they feel aberrant. For a film so intent on carbon copying the framing of the pulp, it is strange the pages bright four color earnesty was not even considered.
While the above has detailed the fundamentals of what makes this a defective project, it is its all out offensiveness that really embosses it with sulphuric acid. Zack Snyder and his team would seem to use the “mature comics” stigma too arrogantly (and petulantly) shock you in submission. Where Moore’s characters are plagued by their own psychoses (which are admittedly perverse in nature), Snyder’s have none at all; The Watchmen are sociopathic, merciless and dissociative. For example, The Comedian is not driven to rape by his misplaced affection for The Silk Spectre; instead he enacts a psychopathic assault, violently, fetishistically, and worst of all, so do the filmmakers. The rape scene is treated with the same grace as later wire fu action sequences. Rorschach’s axe-meets-skull debut is emotionless and without consequence. Laurie and Dan’s fight with the Knot Tops leaves dead and mutilated remains, all shrugged off with a casual goodnight. These people are not driven by sexual hang ups or Jungian quirks, they are not driven by anything at all. The film’s devotion to unnatural and graceless carnage designates it as the most expensive b movie ever made. There is nothing under the surface here, only the cold pseudo intellectual twangs of a radio shock jock.
The Director’s Cut really only adds more absurdity to this abomination (such as extra gore, more Malin Akerman, and off-putting Raging Bull pap) sending it further into a zone where nonsense and lack of taste cohabit peacefully. I suppose this cut is the definitive form of the film, and I did a lot of soul searching after completing it. I am confident that (while sometimes comparing is necessary) my history with Moore’s epic did not wholly tarnish my enjoyment of the film. The flaws I found in the film were independent factors that were not influenced by my original processing of the 9 panel pages. This is a fundamentally bad film, poorly made, poorly acted, and yeah, despite it using a lot of the comic’s lines, frames, and events, it is worlds away from resembling the nature of the original material. This film’s strength is cautionary; it is a veritable encyclopaedia on bad filmmaking, so in that sense, it is a must watch… This all the more maddening, as I ponder if Terry Gilliam’s original treatment twenty years ago would do the trick, or if the talented Paul Greengrass could have made this something special in 2006. I wanted a movie that I could remember as something I dug when I was twenty years old; independent, integral, worthy.
(2.5/10)
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