Birthday Present… Wrapped In Black


I don’t know what it is about director Zack Snyder and my birthday; two years ago, he and Warner Brothers gave me 300 for my birthday… this year he and Warner Brothers (and Paramount) give me Watchmen.

Not for nothing… but in these hard economic times, a gift card from J Crew would work just as well. :)

Based on yet another “graphic novel” - or indeed, what’s being called one of the “classic” graphic novels of all Watchmen_xl_04--film-A
time - Watchmen arrives loaded with baggage (an enormous lawsuit between Warners and Fox over rights that nearly killed the whole project, as well as one of the book’s co-creators removing his name from the film) and expectations. The “comic book movie” has suddenly moved from being merely part of the “tentpole” story of big studio Hollywood to these days being just about the only tent in town. And Watchmen, it seems, will be the first to be held up to Dark Knight level expectations of quality and success.

Count me among those who are not entirely thrilled with the idea. Though I’ve yet to see The Dark Knight, I see what it has wrought - the need for grim, downbeat worldviews amidst crushing violence is all too apparent. I am realizing that the YouTube superhero parodies of It’sJustSomeRandomGuy aren’t just genius, they’re also prescient commentary on a world where we expect all superheroes to have dark twisted psyches… even when it just makes things absurd.

Watchmen is just that - dark and absurd. Draining pretty much any joy or kick from the grim proceedings, Watchmen lurches along, relentlessly beating the audience into submission, even as it grows further preposterous with every moment. Watchmen isn’t an indictment of film’s growing grimness; but it is an indication that you can do grim wrong… and in a way that’s utterly false.

Unlike others, I suspect it may be the twenty five year old source material - Watchmen is set in 1985, as the book was, and envisions an alternate reality in which America has “won” the Vietnam War, and Richard Nixon has gone on to five terms as President. Winning Vietnam is accomplished by the participation of two “heroes”  - The Comedian, a sarcastic mercenary for hire; and Mr. Manhattan, a physicist transformed into pure electricity by a nuclear experiment gone terribly wrong.

They are just two of a number of heroes in the story, which is chock full of costumed wonders with names that are not entirely memorable. The heroes have been outlawed and run underground after a series of incidents where they became uncomfortably vigilante-ish in their actions, beating up people they were meant to save.

The film opens with The Comedian’s murder, in a violent fight in his high rise apartment that has him thrown out a plate glass window to his death. His death becomes the passion of Rorschach (a muttery, guttural Jackie Earle Hailey), a faceless inkblot (his costume is a wonder of CGI) who was also part of the Watchmen. Rorschach in turn attempts to enlist Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson, trying to shed his youthful studliness), Mr. Manhattan (a very naked Billy Crudup) and Silk Spectre II (Malin Akermann), to little avail.

There’s a lot going on here, too much really for any one summary; yet the busy-ness and sprawling approach to history (I’m not even sure how to thread in the part about the black-clad lesbian who winds upWatchmen-minutemen
recreating the famed photo of the sailor and the nurse kissing in Times Square after World War II) tends to mask, badly, the overall narrow, claustrophobic feel of the proceedings. Despite a lot of big, noisy set pieces and diversions into past history (Silk Spectre’s mother was part of a first generation of heroes that included The Comedian as well), there’s really less going on than meets the eye, and eventually, the film has to face that.

And therein lies the problem; by the time we’re trapped at the South Pole with our main characters, including the supersmart and strong Ozymandias (a blonde-wigged Matthew Goode), much of what propelled Watchmen along has ground to a halt, and we are left with what is supposed to be a dark, cynical view of humanity… that feels utterly manufactured and false.

Where does Watchmen go wrong? I think the mistake lies in the source material, and in Snyder’s fealty to it; it’s the premise that’s the problem, but that can be hard to see. For me it came together in a throwaway moment, when Nite Owl and Rorschach confront each other over years of bitterness and bad actions, the sweetly burnt out Nite Owl accusing Rorschach of being too violent, too intense, too much shoot first and ask questions later. And Rorschach holds out his hand in apology… with Nite Owl saying “It’s Okay, Man” in that late seventies way of finding common ground.

Well, it’s not okay, man… and I suddenly found myself massively irritated at the reminder of post-Vietnam, boomer generation self congratulation. We couldn’t “win” Vietnam, because “losing” is not what happened in Vietnam either. The fundamental problem with Watchmen is that the premise simply doesn’t work - it’s a re-imagining of history that’s not thought through or fleshed out fully enough, and the problem isn’t what’s in it… it’s what’s left out: the quirky, left field details and developments that really make individuals part of history. We have no idea who these characters are, little sense of their “real” lives (though there’s much attention to period details… they don’t add up)… and it leaves them as cold ciphers, with no real way for an audience to connect or care.

I don’t “blame” Snyder so much as I see, now, that he’s willing to utterly commit to a comic book reality - 300 worked as well as it did, and felt completely different from Watchmen because Snyder was keying off of Frank Miller, who really celebrates and thrills to the possibilities of what comics can do and be. Watchmen’s darker, cynical worldview is just as loyal to the source… it’s just that it doesn’t work. And I suspect knowing that it didn’t entirely work was what kept Watchmen in development hell for 20 years. And, apropos of the recent discussion over “conservative” films, it’s not that Watchmen isn’t “liberal”… it’s that the film’s politics are too didactic and at the same time too muddled to be effective; to really succeed with its grim worldview, Watchmen would need more light and more air - a better defined sense of the good vs. evil, even within its own characters, and more attempts to let in a wider sense of the world around those characters. As it is, we get shadows… and ink blots, signifying nothing.

Snyder’s continued visual emphasis on the male form remains disconcerting - I don’t think there’s another movie, except maybe the Ocean’s series, with such an overload of the guys who get hired for their looks. Wilson, Goode, Crudup, Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Comedian… even Jackie Earle Hailey has a body of death - it’s an overload of eye candy, and Snyder works in more male frontal nudity than I thought the ratings board would ever approve… ever. And somehow, against this, the fetish-y nature of the women’s costumes - all thigh high boots and garters and corsets and bras pushing breasts skyward - seems positively chaste. Snyder also continues to work out his frustrated ambitions to work in the adult industry too obviously - the sex on display here is gratuitous, mechanical, and forced (and not least because the age difference between Patrick Wilson and Malin Akermann is so obvious, and disconcerting… oh wait, and that covers Crudup and Akermann as well).

Little is helped, either, with the scoring - heavy handed, also obvious, also forced (among the many ways I felt for AO Scott and his muddled review was his spot-on point that Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” needs to be off the movie song list). And while here’s a lot to praise visually… oh, um, that’s back to the male nudity… mostly the film is a muddy jumble of images that don’t add up. As much as the dense visuals may be true the novel’s graphics… they often lack the sweep of 300’s stark backgrounds and bold colors, and really Watchmen is only visually satisfying in starts and fits.

It’s easy to pan Watchmen as no fun… but “no fun” is only the beginning of where it goes astray. Which is a shame really - I tend to think somewhere in there is a compelling, interesting musing on the nature of heroism, the conflict inherent in “doing what is best” for others… indeed, it strikes me that “Heroes“on NBC may be partly what Watchmen intended (and, lately, gets just as muddled). Because I think that’s the real secret of the allure of comic books - that despite the knocks for being simplistic, the stories of superheroes resonate because they are so archetypal, so necessary as myths and legends. I still believe in comic books and superheroes and superhero movies… I’m not sure Watchmen does… or ever did.

Possibly Related Classroom Projects From DonorsChoose.org Powered by Social Actions

Information and Links

Join the fray by commenting, tracking what others have to say, or linking to it from your blog.

Information
March 7th, 2009
Comments
Feeds and Links
Comment Feed
From This Author
Del.icio.us
Digg
Technorati
Categories
Uncategorized

Other Posts
We’ve Got A Lot Less Of What It Takes To Get Along…
There is water at the bottom of the ocean…

Readers

Shop newcritics

Featured books:


Viewing 19 Comments

 

Trackbacks

(Trackback URL)

  • Fuggedaboutit | newcritics

    May 7, 2009 at 7:19 pm

    [...] that quality with Watchmen, Wolverine is more frustrating because the joyous, fizzy buzz of comic book adventure is much ...

close Reblog this comment
Powered by Disqus · Learn more
blog comments powered by Disqus