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Directed by Zack Snyder
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Watchmen I stand in awe of Zack
Snyder and his writers for having taken the graphic novel, actually the whole
series called “Watchmen,” and turned it into a coherent and
exciting film; and I particularly like the fact that they have given each of
their characters a personality and a separation so that we know who
we’re looking at. Frankly I
could never tell one superhero from another in films like “X-Men,:” so in “Watchmen” at least I knew who
was doing what to whom. The other
thing I liked is that only one Watchman – Billy Crudup
as Dr. Manhattan – actually has superpowers. He’s also a naked blue man
(full-frontal nudity, by the way, I think a first for a non-porno film) who
was given his powers by accident some years before (you’ll find out
how). The story is set in the
middle 1980s (as the comic book was) and is an inventive kind of hodge-podge
of an alternate reality at the time of Richard Nixon’s supposed third
term. We won the Vietnam War, it
turns out, and the film gives us a parody of “Dr. Strangelove” as
the United States and the Soviet Union come close to atomic war. The Watchmen are trying to stop the
war, but along the way they also have to stop for everything from blighted
romance (Dr. Manhattan and Silk Spectre II) to evil
Ozymandias in his castle in Antarctica, to Dr.
Manhattan’s clockwork lair in Mars, to a prison where the Watchman Rohrshach – wonderfully played by Jackie Earl
Haley, whom you’ll remember from his Oscar-nominated performance in
“Little Children” – is sent by mistake. And though there are innumerable
special CGI effects, the film seems to take them in stride as a part of this
alternate reality, so they never get in the way. Can I give you the plot of
this two-hour-and-forty-minute film?
I don’t think so, other than to tell you that since only one
Watchman has superpowers, we’re treated to a lot of punchouts
and the use of hand-tools in ways they weren’t designed for. What triggers the plot, if we can call
it that, is the murder of one of them, the Comedian – flashbacks bring
him back into the film at various times preceding the murder. And although Dr. Manhattan looks
gorgeous in his blue-light and radiance, he doesn’t really use his
powers except to move from one place to another, since he
appparently exists out of temporal life and
time. Is that a problem? Yes, because Silk Spectre
II is still in love with him, even though she goes to bed with Patrick
Wilson, aka Dan Dreiberg, aka Nite
Owl II – to the music of Leonard Cohen singing
“Hallelujah,” about the least sexy song to make love by, but it
was a brilliant choice by Zack Snyder, to show the contradictory forces at
work. The film also features Bob
Dylan singing “The Times They Are A’Changin”
over the title credits. This is a
film that shows a director at work, making choices – always good
choices – and “Watchmen” reflects that – the sense of
a country stuck in a miasma of hopelessness and terror. What the film doesn’t
have is a believable villain – the kind of menacing personality that
Heath Ledger gave to the Joker.
In “Watchmen” the villain is Ozymandias,
just another superhero who lives in his castle in Antarctica and wants to
control the world. Played by
Matthew Goode with a strange voice that swallows up his vowels and spits them
out as though English was not his native language, he’s more laughable
than menacing. But don’t
let that stop you; “Watchmen” is even, dare I say it, worth
seeing twice. |