Drawn to Cinema Season: Watchmen (Dir Zack Snyder, 2h 43m, 2009)
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| Watchmen Theatrical Poster |
Graphic novel adaptions invariably lead to the English writer, Alan Moore. Moore has enough adaptions-bad and good-of his graphic novels: V For Vendetta, From Hell, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Constantine, and today's film, Watchmen to form an entire season, whilst his general dismissal of the entire process of adapting comics and graphic novels into films, whilst his disinheriting of turning comics and graphic novels into films that reach cinemas at all have set out Moore as a cantankerous and difficult figure from Hollywood's perspective.
Atop all Moore's other works stands Watchmen, his, and artist Dave Gibbons' 1987 Cold War deconstructionist satire of superheroes and detective stories. Watchmen, the film, had long been thought unfilmable-the comic hadn't even finished its run by the time that 20th Century Fox optioned it in 1986, where, in the first of many dismissals, Moore
refused to write the script, the ending was considered too complicated, and would-be director Terry Gillam, now making the film for Warner Bros, couldn't raise a quarter of the (then) colossal $100 million budget, and
walked. So Watchmen languished in production limbo for fourteen years, with everyone from Michael Bay, Daron Aronofsky, Paul Greengrass and Tim Burton attached to direct a script written by David Hayter (otherwise known
for writing the second X-Men film and voicing the protagonist of Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid video game series), and Alex Tse.
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| Who Watches the Watchmen: the film's central cast. |
Enter, thus, off the back of his stylised adaption
of Frank Miller's Thermopylae graphic novel, 300 (2006), Zack Snyder; whilst Snyder’s later filmography is patchy at best, especially in the ill-fated DC Cinematic Universe, eventually
leading to him drawing a line under making any further comic book movies, he's a director I've never quite brought myself to actively dislike; even if his endless revisionist approach to his filmography with director's
cuts, a trend that began with Watchmen's three and a half hour cut, has reached a bizarre nadir with the first part of his Rebel Moon duo of films for Netflix, on which Snyder has, by all accounts, complete creative control, also receiving a R-rated cut.
Snyder, undeniably, starts strongly: we are introduced to this world, this alternative vision of 1985 via the apartment of The Comedian, the alias
of Edward Blake, a world where Nixon is now president for the fifth time, where war with the Soviets seems inevitable, and where Blake soon finds himself attacked by an intruder, and ultimately, despite a pitched, and well-choreographed
battle that sets the tone for the violence of the film, thrown out of the window of his apartment to his death, ending with a perfect visual creation of the opening panels of the first issue of Watchmen. What follows-to the strains of Dylan's 'The Times They Are a-Changin' ' is the standout sequence, not just of Watchmen, but arguably Snyder's entire filmography.
Across a wordless montage, we are taken from the heyday of the superhero in the MinuteMen, including Blake, of the 1940s against the
Nazis and other Axis Powers, the fates, histories and growth of each of them interlaced through popular culture of the 50s and 60s, and into the 70s, together with Watchmen's alternative history, whilst a new generation of heroes appears and comes to prominence. The quality of this sequence is double-edged as we are soon taken on a whistle-stop tour of our
dramatis personae in the aftermath of the Comedian's death via the character of misanthropic noirish Rorschach. This performance in itself, a growling, overwrought and unintentionally hilarious take from Jackie
Earle Haley is the first in a number of elements that completely misses the pure satire that is Watchmen.
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| Rorschach (Jackie
Earle Haley), hunts for clues. |
Worse, where Snyder seems to realize that the original is a satire, he chooses to reframe it, despite its 80s setting, as a polemic on the War on Terror, a juxtaposition that simply does not work. More frustratingly, it's apparent, particularly in
the later half of the film that Snyder-a man whose filmography has often flirted, despite his stated politics, with right wing and fascistic imagery, and, despite being a lifelong Democrat feels like the herald of Ayn Rand Supermen throughout his efforts in that genre, has chosen Rorschach, a man who spits gutter-trash politics, and is little more than a thug wearing a mask, not only as his protagonist but as its moral centre. Moreover,
it's a change of focus that destabilises the entire film, the gutting of much of the third act, a satire of superheroic showdowns in Moore's comic, is much of the cause of this, as Snyder transforms it, for the worse,
into a vague conspiracy thriller where the right wing masked thug has the answers, and stands on the moral high-ground.
Thus, in a first act that considers the legacy of The Comedian, good and bad, as well as his funeral, we are introduced to the interpersonal relationships of the former Watchmen. These range from Daniel Dreiberg/Nite-Owl (Patrick Wilson), a Batman-esque retired superhero, and Adrian Veidt / Ozymandias
(Matthew Goode), a billionaire who remains the only superhero to go public with his identity to Laurie Jupiter / Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman), the daughter of one of the original Minutemen, with an unexpected link to another,
and her lover, Jon Osterman/Doctor Manhattan (Billy Cruddup), a post-human figure who has become the USA's main nuclear deterrent against the Soviets. Alone among these performances in terms of quality, is Cruddup, who
has to balance his pre-transformation self, his phosphorescent current form, and his increasing distance with his own humanity with a degree of cool analysis, that only fails when he confronts face-to-face with what seems to be the damage he has wrought upon those around him.
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| Spectacular, but empty: Watchmen's visual ambition is not matched by its narrative |
Much of the rest of the major cast feel like the action figures that dot Ozymandias' office-plastic shells of characters that Moore made flesh. They
play their parts well, but all Snyder seems interested in doing is banging them together. Thus, as Zack positions his action-figure-actors throughout painstaking recreations of the graphic 'Watchmen’s meticulous panelling, and
as the film begins to unravel a conspiracy that goes beyond the murder of the Comedian, and involves much of our cast, so the cracks in Snyder's understanding of Watchmen grow till the film falls apart. In a visual sense? Zack understands Watchmen entirely-it's a paean to the visual style of 80s superhero comics, and there's
certainly enough visual grit, enough of the sense of the pure absurdity of guys in spandex and women in risible outlandish costumes, and the fantastical vistas of the locations that the film unhurriedly travels through are
still impressive, especially once one of our main cast exiles themselves to Mars.
The film's visual ambition, like much of Snyder's other work, is enough to at least give
the film a certain grandeur, even if, in another staple of his filmography, the soundtrack choices range between 'obvious', 'passée' and 'please stop letting Zack use Leonard Cohen and Nick Cave
in his films'. Look, the point is, on surface/visual level, Watchmen is a pretty good film. Sadly, Watchmen is a work that operates on slightly more than this, and here, Snyder flails like a hydrophobic in the Mariana Trench, incapable of making sense of
the film's narrative ambitions, its dialogue, or its overall take on the way that superhero comics had ended up by the 1980s. Whilst it's fair to argue that the film has curiously aged well in the advent of the very
narrative devices that Moore and Gibbons were responding to-a point that I will, grudgingly give Snyder-the fact remains that Snyder does not understand Watchmen as anything other than DC and Marvel comics with sex and ultra-violence.
Moreover, though, its a work where every line, every moment that Snyder retains from the original comic,
is treated with such solemnity, such philosophical weight-a problem that also stymies Man of Steel and Batman V Superman's quasi-religious undertones, that he completely misses when the comic is taking the piss out of the very superhero tropes that Zack Snyder practically enshrines with the weight of
Old Testament writ. At base, one is left with an adaption that seems so slavish, hewing so close to the original work, and so beholden to faithfully rendering Moore and Gibbons' work into cinematic facsimile that the same tone
of portentous seriousness covers everything, leaving the film with scant breathing room, or, indeed, the self-awareness to know when its target audience and this self-same tone of awed respect, is the butt of the joke. Watchmen, thus, is ultimately a flawed piece of cinema, a visually stunning but largely narratively hollow work, showing the graphic novel film at its best-and worst.
Rating: Neutral
Watchmen is available to stream via Amazon Prime, and on DVD and BluRay from Paramount Home Entertainment. It is also currently
available via HBOMax and on DVD and BluRay from Warner Bros Home Entertainment in the US.
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