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Movie review: 'Watchmen'
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Watchmen/2009
Directed by: Zack Snyder
Starring: Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode, Jackie Earle Haley, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Patrick Wilson
The Plot: When a former member of a vigilante group known as "The Watchmen" is murdered the only still active member, Rorschach, investigates and pieces together a crime much, much broader and deadlier then even the other retired members of the crime-fighting group seem capable of handling. Soon they are all pulled out of anonymity to confront a global threat that just might be the end of the world as they know it...
The Good: [INSERT WATCHMEN UNDER-APPRECIATED SCHOLAR CREDENTIALS HERE] Which is what I'm supposed to do at this early point in this movie review. A movie review that I'm going to try my gawdmandest to keep from spinning out of control and into the size of the Book of Psalms. Though I was really looking forward to finally - after 20+ years - finally seeing the Watchmen on the big screen, I had no illusions that writing a review for the flick would be a task almost as impregnable as I'm sure translating the original comic work into a film that wasn't 18 hours long was. It's almost too much movie to successfully decode for someone interested in it - original comic book fan or not. So I'll just take the direct route.
The Good is that this is about as close, (with one pretty nagging exception) to the source material as maybe this movie, or any movie could ever get. The Watchmen are living, breathing entities in this film. Sure Zack Snyder's injected alot more fuel into these guys, Night Owl especially, and I think the film is a better film for it. Night Owl isn't much of a pugilist in the original work. And in the film version he's pretty much the same Dan Dreiberg - humble, terminally shy, mousy. But Night Owl? This isn't the Night Owl we know, this Night Owl, (thanks to the best performance in this film by Pat Wilson) packs around ten pounds of dynamite in his right hand, and will leave an entire gang of "Knot-Tops" paralyzed, packaged, and ready for a late night visit to the Emergency Ward. I was expecting to love Jack Haley's Rorschach, and he certainly didn't disappoint. I was not expecting to walk away from the Watchmen hoping that there will be some kind of Night Owl spin-off movie, or comic series in the future. Patrick Wilson absolutely rose to the occasion as this guy.
As a fan of the book I really dug all the little extras that Snyder employed in this film adaptation. Like amping up the fight between The Comedian and his mysterious attacker that kicks off the film and the subsequent events in the film. This is a badass fight sequence. If it were originally written this way in the novel the fight between these two guys would have filled the entire first issue of the Watchmen. The Comedian actually looks and acts like he's not ready to go street diving just yet in his old age. He's not nearly as compliant as he was in the first pages of the comic series. And that additional shiit is really cool.
Like I said earlier Night Owl doesn't just disarm and detain bad guys, he snaps arms and knees before beating his foes mentally retarded. The Comedian is just as nasty, just as ruthless, and every bit the grinning bastard he was in the graphic novel. Zack even manages to capture the collateral damage and extreme carnage a being with Dr. Manhattan's powers and abilities would leave in his wake during his stint at fighting crime.
So if those guys are merciless criminal-career killers, imagine what heights of savagery Rorschach, original bad-guy brutalizer, manages to attain in this flick? Rorschach will have you grinding your teeth, covering your open mouth, and applauding his total disregard for the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness any luckless punk bewteen himself, the truth, and the law might come to terms with. This movie is guaranteed to turn your stomach at least once, more than likely twice - if not more. Zack Snyder seems to be channeling some of that residual "ultra-violence" he began his career off with in Dawn of the Dead. And I don't even want to begin to talk about the sex scenes - or the one sex scene this movie will be forever remembered for...
Alright maybe I do. Depending on your constitution this coupling will either make you giggle, or it'll make you squirm - it will not however, titillate. I'm glad Zack and company included a punch-line to it at the climax.
The Bad: And yet through all of that I can't help but feel that something in this movie was just off. That's the only way I can describe it here: off. It seemed hollow - like a husk of something that could have been a whole of something much greater. Maybe it's because Snyder had to cut soooooo much of the story out. Or maybe it's even because the Watchmen really is unadaptable to film. But I couldn't help but feel - and later confirmed this with the two Watchmen virgins who accompanied me to the movie last night - that the plot behind the film was pretty much a disorienting bombardment of true-to-the-book scenes that arrive and disappear with no announcement and no real resolution till they crudely gel together in the big film finale. Which came off here much more like a 60's era Bond movie ending (the fortress, the debonair villain reveals himself, the plan explained, the confrontation) then I think any real fan of this book will admit it did.
If you haven't read the book I'm sure the character of Moloch is going to completely befuddle you. He's here because he's critical to the investigation of the Comedian's murder, but I have an extremely strong suspicion that a Watchmen newbie is going to be lost trying to discern just who or what Moloch actually is. Ozymandias, (Adrian Veidt) is about as charmless as a proctologist's index finger. And Hollis Mason....? (original Night Owl) Forget Hollis because this film sure did.
Another huge criticism - and I'm sure this is because by the end of the editing process the cutting room floor must have been knee deep in butchered scenes and spools of discarded side storylines - is that New York sure doesn't feel like New York in this context. In fact for a huge city, one teeming with life both good and malignant, it pretty much barely registers as anything other than a backlot set. There is nothing extra, nothing to help paint the scale and size of a real world location, nothing like say: Gotham City, (ouch) to help sell the story of these five extremely fleshed-out characters. The only glimpse of the world they fought so hard to protect from itself is in the final three minutes of the film. Two right-wing literature publishers pop on-screen, seemingly out of thin air, and conclude the tale of the Watchmen for us. In fact....
The Ugly: THE ENDING. Hurmmmm...
There's a reason why Allen Moore pulled his name from this film adaptation. They don't just tinker with the ending - they pretty much take turns screwing it silly. I have no idea why the same people that allowed Dr. Manhattan's big blue boy-banana to carry some major screen time, (this flick has more sausage on film than Jimmy Dean) would then decide that the original "Squid" ending was too ridiculous for an audience to buy. The conclusory event that they settle on is much more ludicrous than anything that happened in Issue 12 of the Watchmen. That big cataclysmic attack that is so devastating at the end of the novel comes off here as a thirty second, minor Michael Bay movie disaster. It has no impact, no resonance, it's just 40 million dollars of special effects, and a really trivial reason why it all had to go down the way it did.
Speaking of millions of dollars....
This movie cost 150 million dollars to make and market. We couldn't get a single wig that looked even slightly credible? Poor Sally Jupiter, her rug had to be the worst of the collection...
The Verdict: It's a big film that still manages to feel kind of empty. I'm sure most of this has to do with the extreme editing measures Snyder had to take to hack this movie down to under 3 hours, and I'm hoping that this feeling is nullified whenever a Director's Cut of the flick is finally released. (Black Freighter cartoon included please) I still can't help but feel that the Watchmen would have made a better mini-series than a stand-alone film event. Whatever the case it's here - and when it's good it's really good. It carries enough sex, attitude, and ultra-violence to give the most discerning filmgoer a powerful case of the "Oh no they just didn'ts"
But as one of those imperious idiots that read the book when he was 13 years old, (see first line in The Good portion of this review for clarity on this egocentricity) I just can't abide the ending they went with here. And I don't think I'm alone on that subject.
The Watchmen is good. Good enough to buy the 6 hour Director's Cut Blu-Ray release when it's finally made available. And definitely good enough to give it its second, third, fourth, fifth day in court. But it should have been great. Maybe even the best this genre ever had hoped to offer.
Did I get it all wrong? Check out fellow Movie Examiner Matt Razak's review of Watchmen. As well as National Book Examiner, Michelle Kerns book-centric review of the film adaptation. And finally a true expert's opinion of the film; Graphic Novel Examiner Kevin Smith's review of the new movie, and he loved it!
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