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

Watchmen
Directed by Zack Snyder

I figured going in that Zack Snyder was going to nail the visual look of Watchmen; question is, would he nail the story -- the subtleties and philsophical underpinnings, not just the bare-bones plot -- and characters? Would he capture the convergence of past-present-future that Alan Moore so nailed in placing Watchmen in an alternate history that, for all the differences in the details, doesn't look terribly different from our own?

In our history, we lost the Vietnam war, and Richard Nixon left office in disgrace. In Moore's alterna-history, we won Vietnam thanks to the presence on our side of a physicist-turned-glowing-blue-nuclear-superhero who turned the tide in our favor, and Nixon is still president, courtesy of the removal of that pesky little term limits stipulation.

In the brilliant opening sequence (actually, one of the best opening sequences I've seen), Snyder lays out the changed course in history wrought by the presence of Doctor Manhattan, formerly the physicist known as Jon Osterman (played with perfect pitch by Billy Crudup). The opener does exactly what it should do: sets the tone for the film that's to follow by showing us not just the reality of the world we're entering, but how it got there. It gives context without overbearing exposition and, perhaps more importantly, it pays homage to the visual nature of its source material by showing -- not telling -- us what we need to know about the world in which Watchmen is set.

Watchmen as a story is smart and deeply philosphical, and the graphic novel is complexly layered and filled with allusions to time and symmetry in the storytelling; the film retains much of the structure and philosophical feel of the novel, wrapped in a struggle for good and evil in which it's unclear just who the bad guys are.

The question woven throughout the film is "Who Watches the Watchmen?", and that question is just as relevant to our own history as it is the history of Watchmen: who decides what's right and what's wrong? What happens when those given that power get it wrong? Like the graphic novel, Watchmen the film questions ideas about what's good and what's evil, what's black, white or shades of gray, but leaves it to the audience to make its own moral judgments.

But enough about the intellectual side of Watchmen. How are the characters, how does it look, how well does it meet the fanboys' expectations, how true is it to the source?

Jackie Earle Haley (the paroled child molester in Little Children) is so good as Rorschach that, after seeing him in the part, I can't imagine another actor who could play the tortured vigilante under the mask of shifting inkblots to such good effect. His tone of voice, the way he delivers his lines, the way he carries himself physically -- in every way, Haley nails the part. Patrick Wilson (Haley's Little Children co-star) does a solid job as the soft, paunchy former hero drawn reluctantly back into the vigilante game. Jeffrey Dean Morgan excellently evokes the darkly tragic contradictions at the heart of The Comedian, and I didn't even hate Malin Akerman as Silk Spectre, though when she was cast for the part I felt it was an odd fit. Not that she's not a good actress, it just felt like an odd casting choice at the time. But she's fine.

The only casting choice that didn't work well for me was Matthew Goode (an actor I usually like very much) as Ozymandias. I'm not sure what it was. Physically, Goode's acceptably close enough to the character to pass -- he's tall, lanky, handsome in a refined sort of way. But the delivery, especially whatever accent that was he was using, grated on me.

Visually, Watchmen is a stunning film to look at, and Snyder gets what his job was: bringing the graphic novel to life. It's remarkably faithful to the source material (some might say to its detriment, but it worked for me), and the camera angles and careful framing of shots -- many of which are recognizable as directly taken from the panels on the page -- are indicative of the care Snyder took in adapting this material, and his awareness of the fanbase.

Storywise, the script by David Hayter and Alex Tse does as good a job as one might hope in adapting a very complex source material to fit within the limits of a theatrical adaptation, while still retaining much of the philosophical feel of the graphic novel. Snyder and the screenwriters do a fine job of translating the core threads of the story onto the screen, and most of the scenes play like extended, animated versions of the panels Snyder culled through in storyboarding the script. There's certainly more excising of things from the source than adding an original perspective to it, but given the material they were working with and Snyder's desire not to muck about too much with Moore's vision.

The film is an interesting hybrid of visual styles, painted in the gloomy palette of the source material and, like the panels in the graphic novel, darkening in shading and tone as the story gets darker. But Snyder also knows when to take advantage of having the canvas of a movie screen to work with, as in the excellent effects work that brings Doctor Manhattan to life and the rotating quantum watch-castle on Mars. Frequently the action scenes have the feel of extended comic book panels in motion; Snyder takes what works visually from the panels, and imagines how it would look if it we could see more than one still frame.

And now, to the violence. Is Watchmen violent? Yes, very. I wouldn't necessarily characterize it as "ultra-violent," though, as most of it's very much over-the-top, comic book, clearly fantasy violence. What can I say? It's culled from a violent source material -- and in certain respects the film (especially the last act or so) is, I think, much less graphically violent than the panels in the graphic novel. I mean, yes, there's blood, and bodies vaporizing and blowing apart (great special effects on that bit), and the occasional dangling, bloody appendage, but it's all very comic-book in nature, and most of it happens within the necessary context of the storyline, rather than being peripheral to it.

So while it is violent, the violence in Watchmen was less disturbing to me than the violence in, say, Last House on the Left, or Reservoir Dogs. That being said, I wouldn't recommend it for younger viewers who might be enticed by the trailer (I'll have to mull on whether to let my 12-year-old watch it, and I don't censor a whole lot from her) or for the overly squeamish; it is considerably more graphically violent than your average comic-book film, and for those who might be put off by such things, there is a fair amount of full-frontal male nudity of the glowing blue superhero variety.

I admit that I was trepidatious about Snyder's ability to pull off an adaptation as challenging and complex as Watchmen, but after seeing the end result, I have to say I was pleasantly surprised and left with a satisfying feeling that he nailed it quite well. Watchmen, the film is about as good a theatrical adaptation as fans of the graphic novel could hope for, and engaging enough that folks drawn into it by the "superhero film" angle of the marketing shouldn't be disappointed, either. In its way, the film is as relevant as an artistic and cultural statement as the source material -- and that's saying something.

-Kim Voynar

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