Supersaturated

Watchmen is a stylish, graphic and
unsubtle adaptation of the classic comic

GRAPHIC, NOT NOVEL: Watchmen

by MALCOLM FRASER

Superhero epic Watchmen arrives with some cards stacked against it. First the release was held up by a lawsuit between studios, then the notoriously cranky writer Alan Moore (who created the original DC Comics miniseries with illustrator Dave Gibbons) had his name taken off the film and publicly dissed it. On top of it all, early criticism of the adaptation by Zack Snyder (300) hasn’t been positive, or so I’m told. But the Watchmen movie is hardly deserving of all this hateration; it captures Moore’s epic, complex and fairly misanthropic story as well as a Hollywood blockbuster could possibly be expected to do.

The story takes place in an alternate version of our world, where costumed superheroes and villains have been a part of society since the 1940s. The Watchmen are a group of superheroes who were used as human weapons in Vietnam and the Cold War, then disbanded (after widespread protests over their vigilante ways) by order of President Nixon, who in the film’s 1985 present is serving his fifth term. The references to contemporary geopolitics were a weak link in both The Dark Knight and Iron Man, and by smartly setting the story in its original ’80s milieu instead of adapting it to the present day, the filmmakers can fully exploit the “what if” sci-fi potential of Moore’s Cold War setting.

The former Watchmen are multimillionaire do-gooder Adrian Veidt (Matthew Goode), superhuman scientist Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), now working on alternative energy research, his frustrated girlfriend Sally Jupiter (Carla Gugino), Dan Dreiberg (Patrick Wilson), who gave up the superhero life reluctantly and still dreams of it and antisocial vigilante Rorschach (Jackie Earl Haley), who’s still fighting evil-doers under the radar. Haley, the former child actor who was so creepily brilliant as the pedophile in Little Children, is particularly strong as Rorschach, whose disdain for humanity occasionally seems reflected by the story’s pessimistic and cynical world view.

The complicated plot finds the team forced to work together again after a series of former superheroes and villains start turning up dead. The comic was ahead of its time in portraying superheroes as fleshed-out people, and the movie goes out of its way to depict their insecurities, flaws, prejudices and occasional bouts of erectile dysfunction in between costumed ass-kickings.

There’s no question Snyder is an unsubtle filmmaker; like 300, this film is essentially a series of set pieces, each further over the top than the last. The action scenes are stylish, surprisingly graphic, and visually spectacular, and the sex scenes are filmed exactly the same way. It lacks The Dark Knight’s depth or atmosphere, but with such an ambitious plot and so many characters, Snyder gets in as much as he can in the film’s almost three-hour length.

Die-hard Moore devotees may be disappointed, serious cinephiles even more so, but this film isn’t really for either of them. It’s for the masses who ate up 300 along with recent superhero flicks, and on that level its balance of thought-provoking social allegory and unabashedly populist entertainment is just about right. n

WATCHMEN OPENS THIS FRIDAY,
MARCH 6