Who Enjoyed the Watchmen?

As I sat in my theater seat on Thursday night  for Zack Snyder’s Watchmen, expectations were floating at around 50%. I had always felt, since seeing the trailer last summer before The Dark Knight, that Zack Snyder was an inappropriate choice to direct and lead such an ambitious, beloved project. Alan Moore’s original comic was an epic, albeit convulted tale. Despair, revolt, and cynicism pervade throughout most of Moore’s work, partially thanks to the blurry distinction between  “somber” and “weighty” in the world of mutants and plasma. Moore, a man who “smokes too much hashish and worships lizards”, disavowed involvement with the film version of his 1987 graphic novel, yet Snyder and a cast of relative unknowns, armed with the same crew that crafted 300 and a budget of one hundred and twenty million dollars, tried to replicate the comic panel by panel.

The plot is ludicrous, and in Snyder’s Watchmen, this is detrimental; the 1987 setting, with a gray-haired Nixon serving his third term and the U.S. “on the brink of nuclear war” with the Soviet Union, is no longer as controversial or politically apt twenty-two years later. New York City is a rat-infested, crime-ridden comic book city, and the ‘Watchmen’ are a group of costumed vigilantes, inexplicably masters of hand-to-hand combat. Their names are the Comedian, Rorschach, Nite Owl, Ozymandias, Silk Spectre, and Doctor Manhattan, who’s walking and talking nuclear man.

Someone’s picking the Watchmen off, and meanwhile, the “Armageddon Clock”- which gauges how close the nation is to nuclear war- marks five minutes till nuclear winter. Aimless wanton political allegory aside, the plot skips around, providing no backdrop- who are these characters and why do we care? That stubborn refusal to engage emotionally is in the spirit of Dr. Manhattan- the metaphysical anomaly capable of traveling anywhere in space or time- he is detached and disinterested. Snyder’s Watchmen assumes that you are invested from the get-go, yet the film crumbles apart during the opening titles- another pop culture time-line from WWII through JFK and hippies. Like Benjamin Button, Hollywood perpetuates an oversimplification of American history. Garbage.

Watchmen is a grotesquely absurd yarn, and attempting to summarize it would no doubt be an injustice; know simply that Rorschach (Jackie Earle Hale) is a masked detective who narrates his journal entries and the problems at hand seem to be Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), fully naked blue man, and his potentially harmful radiation. Also, throw in wanton murder and vigorous sex in the cockpit of the Owl ship. Having read the comic, I can tell you that the directors who had attempted the project (Terry Gilliam, Darren Aronofsky) were right: it is an impossible task. The “prison scene”, in which several Watchmen kick ass during a prison riot, is a memorable moment in the book, but what Snyder produces is a painfully banal cookie-cutter superhero fight without momentum.

Jeffrey Dean Morgan as the Comedian, a grim, cynical soldier perpetually smoking a cigar, unleashes some of the more potent demons of the comic book onto the movie screen. Misogynistic and offensive, the uncomfortable irreverence of Moore’s work comes through his brutality. Rorschach as well, the psychologically damaged (completely insane) man who lacks human sympathy, is compelling on the big screen. One cannot help but feel that each separate storyline detracts from a common thread, pulling what was a tightly knit graphic novel into a loose, jumbled pile of yarn.

The lack of soul throughout is most reminiscent of Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin, which relied on similiar theatrics to entice herds to the cinemaplex. Colorful, rubbery, and staggeringly unsubstantive, both films are mindless hogwash. Perhaps Watchmen’s crime is greater, however, as it deludes millions of geeks into thinking that “deep thought” can be found in the ramblings of Dr. Manhattan, or the cartoonish and, really, lame portrayal of Richard Nixon. Alan Moore, a Brit, was simply writing his own idiosyncratic fantasies, and the sensation of seeing them projected on-screen is nothing short of strange. Maybe the graphic novel wasn’t as good as I thought.