..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

Watchmen
Directed by Zack Snyder

The squid should thank its agent…

… since Watchmen "co-creator" Alan Moore won't be thanking his. Warner's promotional material for this weekend's wide release refers to director Zack Snyder (Night of the Living Dead, 300) as "visionary," a word defined here as "one who uses intricately colored and designed cartoon panels from the source work in lieu of storyboards."

Serialized by DC Comics in 1986-87 and collected into what became one of the most respected of graphic novels, Watchmen offers an alternative world, one in which Nixon is a no-terms-limit dictator and nuclear annihilation is imminent. Masked superheroes are banned. Violence runs in the street. In 1985, years after their involuntary retirement, someone is killing the superheroes. The movie's slavish devotion to Gibbons' panels is curious, but even more so is the inconsistent tone. There are witty bits of production design—Henry Kissinger talking nukes in a war room patterned after Ken Adam's for Dr. Strangelove, the character of which was patterned after a young Henry Kissinger—that serve as filigree. But suspense? Rage? Fear?

While Alan Moore's dialogue is often cut-and-pasted in instead of reshaped for the ear rather than the page, his sardonic near-nihilism comes through come in isolated lines with gratifying bile. Before Watchmen, Moore's most ambitious project, Big Numbers, made it to only two issues before its collapse. (An excellent example of Moore's level of control in his stories is seen in his script for the third number of the uncompleted project.) Watchmen the movie, however, makes it seem that Watchmen the novel was the one that collapsed. The story limps when it should rocket, ambles when it should rock. It's boring.

A few side notes: There's an elevation of the level of sadism—are there limbs sawed off in the novel? A handful of scenes that incorporate the World Trade Center towers veer from stately elegy in distance to a scene where their mist-shrouded form in distance is accompanied by a pullback to an iron gate that reads "Cemetery" and then a full, wide panorama that includes gravestone after gravestone at a funeral, followed by an American flag-draped casket battered by large cold droplets of rain. In a murky palette ranging largely from rain blue to gunmetal gray, some colors are toned down: the substantial bursts of grue, of blood-slick viscera that winds up on walls, floors, and in one case, a pressed-tin ceiling, is a slick of gray-black-wine red splatter.

Early reviewers made ample note of Dr. Manhattan's outsized blue willie that's brought out for ample passages of schlong-and-dance. Interestingly, as Snyder demonstrated abundantly with 300, he's comfortable with wallpapering his movies with homoerotic content to a target audience that will likely be largely adolescent and post-adolescent males. For instance, Snyder finds ample ways to photograph Patrick Wilson's thrusting buttocks during a couple of fucks. While I like Wilson in Hard Candy and Little Children, in Watchmen most of his acting is done with his ass. He's burdened with one of the sillier costumes and his performance as a privileged schlemiel comes out more dullard than a man who's tamped down his inner reserves. With his hair bunched up in a bad haircut and wearing a bowtie, Wilson looks more like Tucker Carlson before his time than anything else.

Jackie Earle Haley is the movie's dark pearl. Unmasked, Haley's performance lacks the actorly vanity-of-no-vanity and goes straight for the goods. Under the Rorschach mask, his guttural growling of narration along the lines of calling Manhattan "an abattoir of retarded children" or a "city dying of rabies" is monotonous, but with the mask off, interacting with others, his every intonation is as pungent as if he were biting into a metal file with every word. Travis Bickel's got a rat-faced bastard for a cousin.

As Ozymandias, Matthew Goode is a louche Xerox of a plutocrat, a haughty metrosexual perhaps enamored of singer David Sylvian's early 80s posh, and with plush intonations and plusher purple ties and fashion accessories. (A single shot of his character entering Studio 54 to the admiring gaze of a phalanx Village People look-alikes may be one of the stranger moments in a strange movie.) Malin Akerman is terrible, hardly holding the screen even in a role that is a cut-out of male fantasies, and speaking in a perfected account of Cameron Diaz's tones but without any of her giddy charm. Even when Akerman's stuffed into spandex, she comes off badly, as if she'd studied Demi Moore's oeuvre and failed to meet those elevated standards. Her delivery of "Seems there's things you're not telling me these days, John" is almost laughable; "It's all quantum physics and parallel universe with him!" would defeat far more experienced performers.


Of the many well-known pop songs used as ironic wallpaper, starting with Bob Dylan's "The Times Are A' Changing" under the extended credits sequence, and including Simon and Garfunkel's " The Sound of Silence," and Leonard Cohen's now-ubiquitous "Hallelujah," the best comes at the very end. The melancholic ache and deep-creased bruise of Cohen's worldview has a wit and grandeur that could inform a movie on similar subjects set in a similar time. "First We Take Manhattan," popularized in the 1980s by Jennifer Warnes on the Cohen cover album "Famous Blue Raincoat," plays in its entirety under the end credits, which may or may not run six full minutes, and it is an alternative universe to this alternative universe that has always held a darkling hint of a never-to-be-made neon-noir doomed romance of outlaws and revolutionaries:

"They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom / For trying to change the system from within / I'm coming now, I'm coming to reward them / First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin/ I'm guided by a signal in the heavens/ I'm guided by this birthmark on my skin / I'm guided by the beauty of our weapon s/ First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin…" I can smell night's summer rain on still-warm cobblestones…

Considering the well-publicized looting of Cohen's savings by a dishonest manager, the portion of the surely substantial music rights budget that's going to Cohen is a sweet gift to a good man.

- Ray Pride

Home | Movie City News | Contact Us
Report broken links and other web problems to Webmaster.
©2009. Movie City News, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Movie City Geek, Movie City Indie and MCNBlogs are trademarks of Movie City New