Watchmen

Watchmen

161 Minutes

First things first – if you want Watchmen the comic book, stay at home, pick it up and read it. Nothing transfers media without change, so the fact that Watchmen the film is significantly different in both plot and tone to its source material is no surprise and no real detriment to it. What’s more shocking is that director Zack Snyder has managed to make such an immense film at this early stage of his career; only his third feature film (and coming directly off the mixed bag 300), Watchmen reaches for grandeur and frequently grasps it.

Clocking in at over a two and a half hours, Watchmen moves quickly, even as vast stretches of the plot are spent in quiet dialogue and flashback. There are enough plots and characters to fuel at least two films of similar length, so it should be considered a credit to the filmmakers that they constrained it to a single film, rather the default box office gross-expanding sequel. Of course, it’s a condensed version of a sprawling story, but anyone who’s read the graphic novel knows the basics: in the Nixonian 1985 of New York City, aging superhero and sometime government agent Edward Blake A.K.A. The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is brutally murdered, prompting ultraviolent vigilante Rorschach (Jackie Earle Harvey) to pursue a mysterious “Mask Killer.” Meanwhile, nigh-omnipotent superman Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup) drives girlfriend Sally Jupiter/Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman) into the arms of nebbishy retired crime fighter Daniel Dreiberg/Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson), while the retired “smartest man on the planet” Adrian Veidt (Matthew Goode) labors for infinite energy in a world barely minutes from total nuclear annihilation. To say any more to is to be full of spoilers, not to mention completely inane. In a story as complex as even this shortened version, any summation is incomplete.

If the film succeeds by anything, it’s by sense of style – Snyder’s use of slow motion can seem somewhat laughable, but it’s a welcome change from the hyper-kinetic cuts exemplified by The Dark Knight. Everything in Watchmen moves as though in a dream, slowly, hazily, with a deliberate sense of itself. Even the action scenes, which become increasingly bloodier and more bone-crunching as the plot grows even more sinister, move with the colossal violence of icebergs colliding. Probably the greatest choice in the course of the movie is to definitively render a whole world of backstory into a montage of not-quite-still photographs over the opening credits; characters are explored and explained in brief monochrome images, lives and deaths and a whole alternate history in just a few minutes.

Of course, if the opening is astounding, the ending credits set to My Chemical Romance’s truly execrable cover of “Desolation Row” are a counterbalance. The soundtrack is so prevalent in the film that it might rate its own credit; like the chapter-coda quotations in the source material, the song choices are heavily weighted towards the 1960s and New Wave, with mixed results. Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” comes off as overly considered (sorry, it’s just never going to be okay after The Graduate), but a weirdly romantic placement of “99 Luftballons” and a climatic “All Along the Watchtower” more than make up for it.

And there are the negative aspects of the film – no matter how you cut it, the condensation bleeds significance from the story too easily. In particular, so much of Sally Jupiter’s hatred of The Comedian is trimmed from the film that her later breakdown is robbed of its emotional resonance, as is Rorschach’s tremendous loneliness and anger in his prison stint. The acting is uniformly consistent, but rarely transcendent – Billy Crudup makes the most of his distant, uninvolved voicework (and to be fair, in his earlier, more fleshly incarnation), as does Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who radiates a gritty charisma in every scene. Most of all, Jackie Earle Haley is wonderfully believable as Rorschach: his flat stare and Tom Waits growl make his every move a standout. Strangely, though, it’s the original dialogue and not the comic book script that sounds most natural. Perhaps there’s something in that.

Watchmen the movie mostly succeeds in a nearly impossible task – in the graphic novel world, perhaps only Eisner’s A Contract with God and Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns are as venerated and influential. Any attempt at recreation is impossible, so boldly Snyder and company depart from the plot when necessary, keeping the essentials as a skeleton (and heart and brain, to be honest), but don’t balk at changes. Keeping spoilers aside, the ending is not what it was and neither is Watchmen. But it’s close, and closeness to the sublime is pretty damn good.

by Nathan Kamal