WATCHMEN
PARAMOUNT
RELEASED 6 March 2009
Various attempts have been made to film the classic graphic novel ‘Watchmen’ over the years. Terry Gilliam was involved during the nineties, but came to the conclusion that the story couldn’t be satisfactorily told in a two hour movie. In the last five years both Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Trilogy) and Darren Aronofsky (The Wrestler) were attached but failed to reach any further than the planning stage. Now Zack Snyder, the visionary talent behind ‘300’, has managed to film the holy grail of comic books, retaining the same storyline, time period, and characters.
Imagine a world where superheroes really did exist, like the new Batman movies, only with the superheroes first popping up in the early forties. None of them actually have ‘superpowers’, until 1959 that is when a molecular experiement goes wrong and Jon Osterman (Billy Crudup) becomes Dr Manhattan, a glowing blue demi-god capable of seemingly infinite power. Joining forces with a group of ‘masks’ comprised of Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman), Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson), Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), Ozymandias (Matthew Goode), and The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), the sixties and early seventies sees them become involved in local riots against an increasingly hostile public. Dr Manhattan and The Comedian are utilised by the government in Vietnam where the US only takes a week to defeat the Vietcong in this alternate reality. The Keene Act of 1977 outlaws superheroes, and as Nite Owl and Silk Spectre retire with their secret identities intact, Ozymandias openly trades on his past with a line of action figures and various other merchandise, building a business under his real name of Adrian Veidt that becomes a huge multi-national concern. Rorschach continues as a violent vigilante working outside of the law, and Dr Manhattan and The Comedian remain hired by the US goverment to perform secret covert missions.
As we begin the movie in 1985, The Comedian is thrown out of a 30th floor window, and days later a hitman narrowly fails to assassinate Adrian Veidt. It looks like someone wants the old superheroes gone for good. As the Cold War escalates between the US and the USSR, with Russian forces moving through Afghanistan and towards Pakistan, President Nixon’s hand moves ever closer to the big red button signalling a nuclear holocaust. Can the remaining ‘masks’ work together to discover who is out to kill them, and will there even be a world left to live in?
I have three good things to say about ‘Watchmen’, and three bad things. Let’s start with the first good point, the casting. There’s not one actor in the film that doesn’t feel like they’ve just stepped out of the graphic novel, both in looks and line delivery. It’s uncanny how you watch these actors literally inhabit their comic book personas.
Secondly, the script is a cracker, reminding you just how good the source material is.
Finally, ‘Watchmen’ is as faithful to the graphic novel as anyone could hope for. There is an altered ending (but the revision works well), and otherwise it’s uncanny how much of the book is on the screen. It seems like a magic wand has been waved over the original four-colour pages with the images springing to life. It really does feel like 1985 again.
To start the moans, there’s a prominent sex scene played out to the strains of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ that is frankly... ‘comical!’ I’m sure some degree of light-heartedness was intended, but the scene plays too long and comes over as terribly cheesy.
While the production design, primarily the sets and costumes, are faultless, the special effects work feels underwhelming. Many times throughout the film I thought there was a distinct ‘lack’ of spectacle when I should have been feeling the opposite. I found this surprising for such a high-budget, visual film.
It’s made very clear that none of the ‘superheroes’ (bar Dr Manhattan) possess actual super powers, so why when they fight do they throw each other around like rag dolls, break bones with punches, and not even break into a sweat? This bothered me the most as there is no indication of this kind of over-stylized action in the graphic novel, and it feels sorely out of place.
As a big fan of the graphic novel, it’s a very surreal experience to watch a movie for the first time while being aware I’ve already seen it played out in four-colour panels. I can’t say I was blown away by ‘Watchmen’, and I do have to question whether there is any point in adapting a book for the screen so precisely. Seeing as the original work already exists, why make the cinematic equivalent of a photocopy? Why not create a new vision of the story?
Ultimately, ‘Watchmen’ didn’t excite me on a movie-going level. As a fan, this surprised me, and made me realise that sometimes what you think you want (in this case, familiarity) might not be what you really want.
THREE OUT OF FIVE