Overall Rating
  Awesome: 16.82%
Worth A Look: 44.86%
Average: 4.67%
Pretty Bad: 23.36%
Total Crap: 10.28%
7 reviews, 65 user ratings
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| Watchmen |
by William Goss
"Red with Menace, White with Fear, Blue with Malaise"
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For decades, filmmakers have been trying to bring the densely-plotted, genre-twisting, award-winning graphic novel 'Watchmen' to the screen, and leave it to '300'’s Zack Snyder to tackle a movie that even Terry Gilliam and Paul Greengrass stepped back from. That isn’t to say that Snyder hasn’t bitten off more than he can chew, but what has made the cut is an inevitably compromised translation of some inherently uncompromising ideas that still stands as a work more faithful, engaging and ambitious than most this season.The world of Watchmen is an alternate one set in a 1985 that sees Nixon claiming his third term after the arrival of caped crusaders and one especially empowered being changed the course of history (brought to striking and effective light with an opening credits sequence set to Bob Dylan’s “The Times, They Are A-Changing”). These “masks” have been outlawed, and the presence of the teleporting, telekinetic Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup) on America’s side only frightens the Soviets closer and closer to nuclear war. In the midst of all this, a retired super-patriot known as the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) finds himself tossed from his penthouse apartment and landing as most things do from great heights, and the still-street-scouring Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) wants to know how a man like that met a fate like this.
The former bombshell Silk Spectre (Carla Gugino) has passed the torch to her daughter (Malin Akerman), the aged Nite Owl (Stephen McHattie) let an admirer (Patrick Wilson) take his place, and Ozymandias (Matthew Goode) has turned his substantial intellect into a formidable business empire, and slowly but surely, they all wonder who would’ve killed the Comedian, who among them might be next, and perhaps most importantly, why.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg: any and all civilian subplots have been done away with, while the parallel plot of a comic book is being wisely saved for DVD. That which remains still clocks in at the better part of three hours, but if audiences were willing to sit through The Dark Knight without complaint, then they should be able to give this its due attention. For the layman, it’s an elaborate plot to grasp, spanning generations and thusly prone to flashbacks, but it shouldn’t be an impossible one. For the fans in waiting, it’s an accurate adaptation for the most part, though its insistence on repeating verbatim passages tends to result in the occasionally stilted line reading as much its need to alter motives and add needlessly violent flourishes leads to somewhat short-changed characterization.
Rarely do the elements come so cohesively together as they do with the back story of how physicist Jonathan Osterman transformed into the cool, removed super-being of Dr. Manhattan, someone who can end the Vietnam conflict within a mere week but fails to reciprocate the love of first a colleague, and then Silk Spectre II. It’s a chapter of the film that ranges from conflicts personal to those political, navigating between the intimate and the infinite aspects of his existence with exceptional grace, with a perfectly passive Crudup as convincing to our ears as the visual effects are for the eyes.
Ironically enough, the more emotive roles of Wilson and Akerman ring a little less true, as both try to find their place in a world that wants rid of their alter egos, but may need them now more than ever. Gugino and Morgan are likewise forced to deliver some heavy-handed bits under varying degrees of aging make-up, while Goode is perhaps given the shortest shrift out of the entire ensemble in terms of character and range. He may be rich, but it seems that money does not equal time for our exceedingly clever man.
Last but certainly not least would be Haley as the gravel-voiced and fairly psychotic Rorschach. Having most recently played a likewise outcast sex offender in 2006’s Little Children, the once and future Kelly Leak manages to bring a more live wire persona to the table, though his circumstances as tweaked by Snyder and writers David Hayter and Alex Tse lend him to being more of a conventional antihero than he should rightfully come across as. Similarly, the infamously changed climax takes a different route to the same end as the novel, and perhaps reasonably so, but it compresses and condenses a moral battle of considerable magnitude into more of a small-scale melodrama at the end of the world (literally, at an Antarctic base).There are plenty of nits for the fans to pick at, and as a casual entertainment, it indulges in too many details and yet not enough nuance. Maybe it wasn’t meant to be; some books are perhaps best left unfilmable ('Revolutionary Road', cough). Maybe some alternate universe did get a prime rib of a sprawling HBO miniseries that left in every last bit of gristle. But in this universe, Zack Snyder’s serving up a big burger for our consumption, and even without all the toppings, burgers this well done tend to be rare.
link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=17536&reviewer=409
originally posted: 03/06/09 04:26:13
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USA
06-Mar-2009 (R)
DVD: 21-Jul-2009
UK
N/A
Australia
06-Mar-2009
DVD: 21-Jul-2009
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