Watchmen

Watchmen (***1/2)

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

The Superman exists, and he's American.

Like many others who have read the graphic novel, I followed the news and trailers leading up to the release of Watchmen with some excitement, but also a great deal of anxiety. I'm not as militant as Alan Moore himself is in that I certainly never thought that the very idea of an adaptation of Watchmen was somehow unnatural, but I was certainly skeptical as to how well the book could be transferred to another medium given its structure and the fact that its just really, really densely packed. The choice of Zach Snyder to direct seemed questionable. Snyder had made a name for himself directing 300, also a graphic novel adaptation, but a much different one for which filming some badass looking slow-motion fight scenes against some pretty CGI backgrounds was enough to get the gist of it. Having now seen the movie, I think Snyder, as well as the writers (one of whom is David Hayter -- Solid Snake!) deserve a lot of credit for putting together what is probably the best adaptation one could probably realistically hope for. It isn't perfect, but it manages to stay true to the spirit of the Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's work, and manages to include quite a bit of the details packed into the 12 chapter story into the 2 1/2 hour movie. I'm curious as to how well I'd be able to pick up on every detail had I not first read the book. A friend of mine who saw it without having read the novel loved the movie and had no problems following it, but I've read the reactions of a number of critics who seemed confused amidst the various jumps in time and the asides meant to develop the characters which aren't directly related to the main conspiracy story. Then again, many of the same critics didn't really seem to buy into the whole concept of the movie at all, and they may not have been on the edge of their seats putting every effort into following everything that's going on. Watchmen is certainly a story that not absolutely everyone is going to find accessible and engaging to them.

The movie starts out with the hook: The Comedian--a former masked vigilante, first with the Minutemen in the 1940s, then with their successors the Watchmen in the 1960s, and who then worked as an agent of the U.S. Government after vigilantes were outlawed--is thrown out of the window of his studio apartment by an unknown assailant. After this introductory scene, we get the opening credits, which believe it or not are one of the coolest things in the movie and are almost like a tiny movie in and of themselves. There's a lot of history in the world of Watchmen that occurs before we're introduced to it in its alternate version of 1985: Nixon has been elected to five terms, two teams of masked heroes have come and gone, and the world's first honest to goodness "superhero" has appeared, and America is now using him as the ultimate deterrent in the Cold War. Many of the details of these events are mentioned only in passing in the book, or relegated to one of the afterward sections of each chapter, which masquerade as newspapers, magazines, and other documents that "exist" within the world of the story. The credits are a way of quickly giving a novice audience the gist of some of these details in a quick way that doesn't hold up the story, and I don't think it could've been done better than the way it was. With Dylan's "The Times They Are-a Changin'" playing, we're shown a series of vignettes of famous moments that have been altered from our own in Watchmen's reality: the famous embrace from the ticker-tape parade at the end of World War II is now a lesbian kiss, the assassin on the grassy knoll who killed JFK is the Comedian, and Dr. Manhattan is already standing on the moon when Neil Armstrong takes his first steps. They're scenes that are simple with a strange power to them. Its almost worth seeing the movie simply for this.

As the movie progresses, it follows along the track of Rorschach's investigation of the Comedian's death, which he is convinced is part of a larger plot against all former costumed heroes, but stops for pauses along the way to fill in some of the asides involving the individual characters that popped up throughout the graphic novel. Some of them are a bit rushed and compressed from what they were in the comic, but its certainly mostly there, and with a run time of over 2 1/2 hours, they probably included just about all that they reasonably could. Rorscach's psycho-ananlysis, The Comedian's assault on the original Silk Spectre and her daughter's confuntation of her mother regarding it, Dr. Manhattan's time-jumping story of his transformation ("A circulatory system is seen out near the security fence..."), and Dr. Manhattan and the Comedian during their stint in 'Nam are all there. I've read some reviews complaining that these asides are too distracting from the main story. I disagree. The main story is okay for for what it is, but its ultimately just sort of a "who-dunnit" detective story as the conspiracy is unraveled. All the flashbacks are what make Watchmen what it is, and at its heart, more than anything, its a deconstruction of the comic book superhero mythos. Dr. Manhattan has Superman like powers, but instead of being infatuated with humanity like Clark Kent, because of how he now sees the world, Dr. Manhattan can no longer relate to it. Whereas some superhero characters like Peter Parker are constantly trying to balance their normal lives with their life as a masked hero, Rorschach is trying to use his vigilante persona to repress and destroy who he used to be, to the point where he considers his mask his real face. Whereas the Justice League is generally unquestioned as a force for good, the Watchmen are seen in their world as an inherently fascist idea, existing underground, occasionally rising from the depths only to suppress the "normal" people. Its an attempt to challenge the established idea of a comic book hero.

I've also seen the movie dismissed as too nihilistic. Its certainly one of the bloodiest, grittiest, darkest, and cynical comic book movies ever made, but I don't think its nihilistic. I suspect the biggest reason why its been labeled as such is because of how it ends, and the decision Ozymandias makes, which he believes has to be done to "save" the world. But the movie certainly doesn't endorse what he does, and another main character actually dies in protest of it. If you really want to come away with a central message of the movie, I don't think you should look to Ozymandias's decision, but reather an epiphany that Dr. Manhattan comes to at the end of the film, having spent most of the film before hand speaking more nihilistically than anyone ("A living human body and a dead human body have the same number of particles. Structually, there is no difference.") For as much as the movie walks you into the abyss, I think it walks you back out at the end. There is a lot of death along the way, but consider Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, a movie with many of the same themes of Red Scare-era paranoia, which ends with literally the world being destroyed in a nuclear holocaust. I don't think Dr. Strangelove is nihilistic either. I think it shows how nihilistic thinking in some of its characters leads to very bad things happening, to send a message to the real life powers that be to hopefully dissuade them from that sort of thinking.

The cast of Watchmen is mostly comprised of relatively unknowns, but they do a very good job with the material. Particularily, Jackie Earle Haley impressed me as Rorschach. While I thought his raspy Batman-esque voice was perhaps a little much (I never really imagined Rorschach talking like that. I imagine that he perhaps imagines himself talking in that voice), but once he's unmasked, he plays his character with a fearsome energy, constantly keeping this pierecing gaze on his face. The actress who plays the second Silk Spectre was a little off, I think, but in many ways she had the hardest sell, having to convince the audience that she was the lover of a giant, naked, blue CGI dude. I think the comic will always be the definitive Watchmen experience and that being a comic is the best medium for it, but there is a certain undeniable excitement in seeing what Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons created on a static page on a big theathre in motion. Its one thing to see Rorschach's mask in a still imagine, its another thing to see it constantly shift around, something which could only be described to us in the book. Watching the Watchmen is certainly a tremendously worthwhile experience.