Cast: Billy Crudup, Malin Akerman, Patrick Wilson, Matthew Goode, Jackie Earl-Haley

Director: Zack Snyder

Screenplay: David Hayter

Running time: 2 hrs 43 mins

Genre: Action/Adaptation



CRITIQUE:


Clearly, for a source material that’s considered to be “the greatest graphic novel of all-time” by Time Magazine, there’s something astoundingly impressive about Alan Moore’s cultural reworking. For an average superhero narrative, Watchmen is avant-garde. It’s ambitious, complex and befuddling – not three ordinary words you can usually link to a ‘superhero’ story. Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight has recently annihilated the guidebook and elevated the genre into something seriously superlative – the pressure on Watchmen is an extremely large one. Having endured the scorching fires of development hell, passing through Aronofsky to Gilliam to Greengrass, and even the diabolical court battle between Warner Bros and Fox, somebody who’s just done with bloody Spartan battles arrives at the studio doors and pretty much saved the day. Zack Snyder, ever the visualist, the purveyor of über-slow-motion sequences (one can even press the slow-button watching The Matrix scenes) and tantalising graphic art, seems the man for the job – it’s quite a stunning vista: the parched, solitary landscape of Mars, the obliterated look of New York, the dark noirish backwash of its city. High on art concept, but then seems untidy in its narrative execution.


Watchmen’s main obvious strain is the source graphic novel’s density, multi-strand stories weave together with major plots, sub-plots, history plots, character plots. Suffice to say, there’s a lot of plot going on in one film. And it’s very apparent that Snyder and Co wrestled with this aspect (no wonder why more capable-if-experienced directors skewered away), and this shows some stress in the picture. The central story revolves around a group of superhero has-beens, shown in an inspired montage of an alternative Nixonian America to the tune of Bob Dylan’s ‘Times They Are A’Changing’, who are all entirely fucked-up either because of their own human nature or mankind don’t need them anymore. America is at Cold War with Russia, with the paranoia of nuclear weapons. One stand-out performance here is Billy Crudup’s neon-glowing ‘übermensch’, to use Nietszche’s term, Dr Manhattan, employed by America as an ultimate weapon. There is a hint of sadness and gentility in Crudup’s portrayal that even though he’s CGI-filtered, cock-and-balls hanging out, he harbours a certain nihilist philosophy, a derision of mankind’s nature that he becomes disabled with human emotion. Another intriguing creation is Jackie Earl-Haley’s Bogart-esque Roscharch. Fresh from his Oscar nomination from Little Children, he injects a noir hard-boiled detective into Roscharch with sub-zero morality, with a memorable mask that constantly shifts to encapsulate his constantly-changing emotions. Along with him is Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s The Comedian, whose death sets the plot into motion; a loose-cannon whose testament in life is to have the last laugh (there’s a clever scene of his character-arc narration that gives depth to this character). However, the rest are either silly or caricature-like. Malin Akerman as Silk Spectre comes tantalisingly close to being a porn pin-up star with kinky boots fetish, with a rather poorly-done sex scene with Patrick Wilson’s Nite Owl’s aircraft with ‘Hallelujah’ as the choice music background. Even Matthew Goode, as perfectly cast as he is, seems a misnomer – his Ozymandias-slash-Adrien-Veidt remains a cardboard cut-out character. All these characters’ back-stories crisscross around each other, and the execution of tale threads lay heavy and laboured. One evident scene is the funeral of The Comedian, where suddenly everyone is indulging in flashbacks.


RATING:

Watchmen has moments of pure ambition, dazzle and folly all entwined together making an uneven motion picture. It stays in the right side of watchable, if not dizzyingly layered and byzantine – although this is no masterpiece.



RATING: B-