Watchmen

Watchmen is a strange film. The more I think about it, the less it seems that I should like it. It fails Hitchcock's litmus test, and yet I have to say it: I liked Watchmen. Despite its flaws – and it is a very flawed film– the movie's triumphs are entertaining, thought provoking, and on rare occasions deeply moving. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons seminal limited series needs no introduction among even the most neophyte of comic book connoisseurs, so forgive me if this is treading well walked ground but it's impossible to talk about this movie without at least touching on the themes of its inspiration.

Watchmen is an incredibly dense narrative with multiple layers of meaning and a spider's web of connections. It is at once a political thriller, a meta-textual deconstruction of the superhero, a meditation on power dynamics in society, and polemic of the major philosophies that have driven the better part of the twentieth century; and that's just naming a few off the top of my head. Terry Gilliam dropped the project, famously calling it unfilmable, this was followed by a good two decades of development hell that seemed to prove him right and helped to strengthen Moore's faith in Glycon.

For his part, Snyder's film focuses on translating the main plot of the book with a devotion that is obviously heartfelt, but perhaps ultimately misguided. The most ubiquitous criticism of this movie seems to be that it was too slavish to the material. I'm not entirely convinced that's the case. Indeed, most of the movie's weakest bits are when it deviates from the material. The problem with this film, is that Zack Snyder is not an actor's director. He has a very strong sense of the tableau, as evidenced by the lavish opening credit sequence. In a sense, this is a strength, as comics are all about the tableau. Unfortunately, when it comes to coaxing performances out of actors, or simply accommodating them, Snyder is woefully out of his element; and in a film filled with outlandish characters his actors are paddling upstream the entire time to inject some much needed humanity into the story.

Luckily, most of the main cast is up to the lion's share of the work. Billy Crudup is the standout performance, his frail and lonely god is incredibly nuanced and though he is certainly disconnected he is also sympathetic. Patrick Wilson and Jackie Earl Haley both brought touches of their characters from Little Children to their respective roles as Nite Owl and Rorschach. Haley, in particular, took one of the most grandiose of misanthropes and managed to not only make him believable (without the benefit of a decent back story) but also make the word “hurm” sound entirely natural. Morgan's Comedian is sometimes stilted by simply impossible lines; but his cynical amusement with the disgusting elements of civilization is on the money, and “Jesus Christ Sal, can't a guy talk to... to his old friend's daughter?” is one of the best moments of the film. Goode is a convincing intellectual, but his cold distance makes him entirely unsympathetic. Ackerman is the actress who needed a director's guidance most of all, her performance, along with most of the supporting cast is stilted and perfunctory.

Seeing as the actors, for the most part, seemed to have such a firm grasp on their characters, it's a shame that Hayter and Tse didn't. Rorschach's misanthropy remains intact, but his Objectivist outlook is noticeably neutered, if not removed entirely. Dr. Manhattan's judgment of humanity is turned into a trite lover's note. Ozymandias never gets a chance to ask Jon whether he did right in the end or admire Alexander's solution to the riddle of the Gordian Knot. Not that it matters because we never see the locksmith fix Dan's door. While that last detail is an example of the kind of subtlety this movie sorely lacks, the first three examples were a matter of a few lines, and so their absence is both frustrating and confusing. Snyder has said that there is about an hour of footage that didn't make this cut, while there are people who would say the movie is already too long as it is, I'm anxiously anticipating the Director's Cut in the hopes that it gives the third act the time it desperately needed to breath and the context that it deserved.

Looking back on this review, it seems that this movie has precious little to offer. Still, I find myself remembering the stand off between Dr. Manhattan and Rorschach, the quiver in Haley's lip as he begs for release from a world he cannot be a part of, the pain in Crudup's voice as he laments that for all he is capable of he “can't change human nature”, and I can't bring myself to call this a bad movie. Warts and all, it works.