Rating: ****Certain things you thought would never happen: an African-American man getting elected President of the United States; Guns ‘N Roses releasing another studio album; enjoying a soup that eats like a meal; affordable jet packs for all; there’s a whole list. Once upon a time the whole notion of a filmed adaptation from the groundbreaking graphic novel Watchmen was on it, but all it took was one maverick named Zack Snyder to take all his Hollywood capital and put it into the film they said couldn’t be made. At this point, Watchmen represents more than just a movie, it’s a monument like those in ancient times: largely symbolic and taking decades to build.
What’s surprising is that despite the years and expectations, this Watchmen stands up miraculously well and manages to not just succeed as a faithful adaptation of the graphic novel, but is a thrilling movie event in its own right. I purposely avoided re-reading the novel before seeing the movie so as to floss false expectations from my mind and judge Snyder’s work on its own. The fact that there’s even a Watchmen movie at all is a minor miracle, but the fact that it turned out this well must be classified under some kind of celestial alignment that happens only once every millennia or so.
But that’s not to say that this film is not without its issues. The script is streamlined to perfection, but it does so by sacrificing subtext and foreshadowing. But while the film is certainly faithful to a degree not just expected but demanded by the fans, the occasional clinical detachment of Moore’s writing sometimes doesn’t translate to the film medium. At times the Watchmen movie doesn’t feel like it has its own identity, and like the Harry Potter movies it sometimes seems that the only way to full appreciate it is with the source material in hand.
But like I said, the movie captures not just the story and themes, but the numerous inspired moments of the various scenes as well. As in 300, Snyder used the original graphic novel as a visual template. I’m unwilling to say “storyboards” because to me that implies that storyboards and panels taken from works of sequential art are interchangeable. The most dramatic of which is the often mentioned opening credits sequence which has the dual affect of cramming a great many of the novels Easter Eggs into one awe-inspiring set. Snyder’s sense of scene serves him well, and say what you want about this Watchmen but it’s never not a visual feast to behold.
Snyder gets bonus marks for the mostly spot-on casting that avoids previous requests for big stars (Robin Williams as Rorschach?) in exchange for using character actors. Patrick Wilson is appropriately bland as Nite Owl II, obviously the least interesting and the least troubled of the heroes. But because of this, Wilson gets to be the steady rock in which a lot of the characters can bounce off of. He was perhaps the most surprisingly affective members of the cast, considering he’s the most “normal.”
By the far the standout of the film though is Jackie Earle Haley as the aforementioned Rorschach. Now this character is so hard-boiled that it takes an actor of great finesse to play pulp without an ounce of self-consciousness, which Haley easily manages to do. Plus he has to act practically the whole time in a face covering mask which ain’t easy. But bonus points to Haley for somehow managing to do a gravely voiced hero without making it sound ridiculous like another hero from a big superhero movie from last summer I could name.
But the casting might not be the divisive part of this film no matter who you might think should have been cast as whom to begin with. That honour belongs to how Snyder and crew decided to tinker with the ending. Basically the conundrum comes down to the fact that the story basically ends the same, but the how is just a little different. In other words: no space squid. The world doesn’t unite under the threat personified by some Cthulhu-like beast engineered to look like invaders threatening the Earth, but what Snyder and the screenwriters do is arrange something much more in keeping with the story, and not quite as random. But what plays out well in nine panels on a page doesn’t necessarily work as well on screen, and although the ending is more or less true to the graphic novel, it still isn’t quite cinematic enough to work on the big screen; it feels drawn out and static.
But what I can’t deny is the package Snyder created. Unlike a lot of superhero movies which are preoccupied with creating a world apart, Watchmen feels very much of our world. There’s really no swelling superhero score, but instead a pop culture time capsule of songs setting the tone. This alternate 1985 is brilliantly and thoroughly realized, even if the make-up on the actor playing the fifth-term President Richard Nixon looks like it was modeled after Bob Hope’s caricature (i.e.: huge nose). I can say unequivocally that this is the best Watchmen movie that we could have expected coming out of Hollywood. Is it perfect? No, but it is what it was always supposed to be: a $150 million art house picture about men in tights.
