Watchmen

Watchmen

By Jonathan Fisher, March 7th, 2009



Watchmen is a dark, reflective and haunted film. It's a maddening film for me to review, because I am among the enormous fan base of the original comic book (or 'graphic novel' for those who don't want to admit that they read comic books), and understandably came into the film with a different perspective than those who have not read the source material. My job as a reviewer, though, is to judge a film as its own, independent piece of work, so I guess I'll have to try as best as I can to leave my preconceptions at the door during this review. Wish me luck.

Watchmen is set in the real-world 1985, though this real world is full of small changes to our own. Watergate never happened, Richard Nixon changed legislature to allow him to run for a third term, and he is now serving his fifth term as U.S. President. Nuclear war with Russia is a worrying and very real danger.

Superheroes (of sorts) were common before an anti-vigilante law was passed by President Nixon. In the 1940s, a group of ordinary citizens began masking their faces and fighting crime. They eventually banded together as the "Minutemen" -- kind of a real-life "Justice League". They are not superheroes as we know them -- most of them were common people, who did not expect their cape and cowl activities to amount to much of anything. They became popular, but such was the expectation of them to solve all of the world's problems, and the limitations that beset them by virtue of them being human, and not super, that public opinion swayed heavily against them.

The movie opens with a virtuoso scene chronicling the murder of former superhero The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). To put my Watchmen novel fan hat on for a moment, this scene, like most scenes in the film, evokes perfectly the look and feel of the novel. I have a suspicion fans are going to think this adaptation is just about perfect.

Back to reviewing the movie. I said earlier that the superheroes are all human, with no real 'super' powers of note. There is one exception. Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup) is a god-like being, created after a particle acceleration accident decimated his human body. A fascinating touch regarding Dr. Manhattan is the way that the public reacts to his existence. The U.S. military coins his name because of the ominous implications it will have for America's enemies. He is referred to as 'the man to end worlds', and one journalist proclaims, "God exists. And he is American." Keanu Reeves as Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Still hammered away at one, emotionless note. Crudup as Dr. Manhattan could easily have gone the same way, but his dialogue is more philosophical, logical, and when he speaks, his voice is imbued with a deep sense of lost humanity.

After The Comedian dies, Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), a gruff-voiced, almost inhuman being who wears a mask with shifting colours reminiscent of a Rorshach Test, begins an investigation. He believes that someone is targeting former superheroes. He approaches Dr. Manhattan and his girlfriend Laurie Jupiter (Malin Akerman), whose mother was a masked hero in the 1940s, but they take him lightly. Rorshach moves on to Dan Dreiberg (Patrick Wilson), another former hero. Another former hero is Ozymandias (Matthew Goode), now regarded as the smartest man on the planet, who lobbied hard for the Watchmen to return to 'save this world'.

That's all that I think I should tell you of the plot, except to mention that The Comedian's death appears to be part of a greater conspiracy. The genius of the original novel, and now the film, is the way in which the story elevates this tale of heroes, humans and a society at large to the level of an epic tragedy. Like all great comic books, there is a subtext of commentary in Watchmen, and here it is a gripping exploration of the notion of 'super'-heroism. Could our real world really deal with having a superhero like Dr. Manhattan? In the movie's most visually breathtaking and mentally stimulating sequence, Dr. Manhattan retreats to Mars, and engages in a discussion with Sally Jupiter about whether he should save the world or not. "In my experience," Dr. Manhattan says coolly, "life is an over-rated phenomenon." One of the problems of having superheros in our real world may be that they would think we aren't worth saving.

Watchmen is one of those 'I Can't Believe They Finally Made It' projects. Several attempted productions of the novel have been attempted, but until now all failed. Many people (including writer Alan Moore, who has taken his name off any adaptation of his work after the horrendous The League of Extraordinary Gentlement -- including this one) believed the novel is inherently unfilmable. Terry Gilliam, Darren Aronofsky and Paul Greengrass are all directors that came this close to making Watchmen.

Above: The Minutemen as imagined
in the film, and
Below: as drawn in the comic

At last it has been filmed, this time by young director Zack Snyder (Dawn of the Dead, 300). I liked 300, but found it had far more style (and testosterone) than substance. I was a little concerned that Snyder would focus on the action in Watchmen, not the ideas. I'm happy to say I am pleasantly surprised. Snyder, in Watchmen, has found material that he could apply his remarkable film-making style and retain a force of ideas behind it. So many of his directorial flourishes (which could well be seen as pretentious by the film's detractors) I found utterly wonderful -- the opening credits sequence, for instance, is one of the best I've ever seen. Once again, to put on my Watchmen fan cap, fans of the novel will adore the credits sequence, as it summarises and explores the universe of Watchmen with great grace and fluidity. It is set to "The Times, They Are A'Changing" by Bob Dylan, which presents a peculiar paradox -- these things that Dylan is singing about would presumably be moot in a world with superheroes that changed the outcome of the Vietnam War. Somehow it isn't, and the use of other songs by Dylan and Jimi Hendrix on the soundtrack is curiously haunting. As Dr. Manhattan says, even he can't change human nature.

I have one or two minor quibbles, but again they stem from my love of the book (I've been trying this whole review to keep my knowledge of the book out of it, but I think I have to concede defeat here). I won't bore you with the details of the specifics of these quibbles to avoid risking sounding like a crazed fanboy, but I will say that one change I did like was the new ending. For the uninitiated, I will give you a cryptic two-word hint about the ending in the book that will not ruin anything for you, but will hopefully make you understand why it had to be changed for the big screen: Giant Squid.

Watchmen is a masterpiece. It joins The Dark Knight (which it could not differ more from in style and tone), and Iron Man in resurging the 'comic book' movie, imbuing it with real ideas and sophistication in a way that we have never seen before. It is rare (although it is becoming less rare), to step into a world like the one created in Watchmen, and to leave it feeling a little wiser, a little more emboldened, and still be able to say -- that was a hell of an entertaining movie.