Watchmen Review: T's Take

The most perfect part of Zack Snyder’s adaptation of Watchmen (Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ alternate reality graphic novel) was the pure comic-book yellow that filled the screen for the first 5 seconds of the film. I thought to myself ‘this is the most this film can ever be’. Then the credits rolled, I was fairly impressed by the "3D-as-2D through angled camera flashes" montage sequence, and the film began.

Snyder has said in a few interviews that he wanted to ‘kill the superhero movie’ just as Moore and Gibbons’ killed the superhero comicbook. If that's his goal, I figure let's judge him by his own standard and see how well he did.
I can see that Snyder wanted to do for Watchmen what Peter Jackson did for Tolkien’s trilogy. You get an honest sense of love and admiration for the source material, and a keen eye. But as a result it also suffers from biopic-syndrome (the comic itself being the biographer’s focus). Favorite comic moments, quotes, and images are lavishly recreated. Others are mixed and matched, *sort of* referring to things that actually happened, but not quite. And all the while the dramatic structure gets lost under the weight of getting all those fractured moments ‘just right’. This is part of the reason why Snyder’s assassination mission is doomed to fail. Strike one.

The film isn’t all bad. I did find myself wondering/realizing things about the Characters as well as Moore’s possible thought process while watching the film, things that had never occurred to me when reading the comic (admittedly I’m not an acolyte of Moore’s Graphic Novel, coming to it too late, after its shock value and ideological novelty were gone). No, its not all bad, but there is a LOT of bad. Snyder’s previous effort was 300, based on the Graphic Novel by Frank Miller. Misogynistic and in love with gratuitous violence, Miller can almost be thought of as the Anti-Moore. And yet, in Snyder’s adaptation, he never gives us Alan Moore’s Watchmen. He passes it through some transmogrifying Alternate Reality portal and delivers....poof! Frank Miller’s Watchmen!

The performances come from what I’d call the “Tales From The Darkside” school of acting. Certain performers rise above this at times, but all have moments of wooden staginess. And the love of action, while not always inappropriate, is often so. The film would have been better served to reserve glossy action sequences for one or two well-chosen characters and allow the rest to perform as unglamorously as the source material suggests. This is strike two on Snyder’s assassination mission.

Finally… for a director who’s so self-professedly in love with the source material, (he does impressively cover the lion’s share of the Graphic Novel’s plot, even if most of the novels’ supplemental materials get cast off*) he seems to have no grasp of what's essential. The film is paced fairly well for a three hour movie, but the moments where he ignores either the letter or the intent of the book are made all the more aggravating by this supposed devotion.
In the end, Snyder doesn’t have the heart to land the bullet squarely between the genre’s eyes. At best he lands a glancing blow, a flesh wound, and that’s probably fitting; Snyder shows throughout that he is most concerned with the novels’ surfaces. Problem is, surfaces were the very thing Moore was trying to get beyond.

*this absence kept me thinking as i watched that this really could have worked as an HBO miniseries, and they coudlve included those supplemental materials as either bumpers or online minifilms/articles/photos/etc.


As a side note, if there are any New Yorkers interested in the depth and multiple layer’s Julian refers to in his review, you might want to check out the link below. My friend Jeffrey Lewis is giving a lecture based in part on his Senior Thesis “The Dual Nature of Apocalypse in Watchmen” at Jim Hanley’s Universe on March 19th, 8PM. Should be awesome.

Link To Details for Jeff Lewis' FREE lecture at Jim Hanley's