Why should I care? That’s the question I kept asking myself during Watchmen, director Zack Snyder’s 163-minute, $100-million adaptation of Alan Moore’s graphic novel. The question Watchmen fans will want to know is if Snyder and company “screwed it up,” and they haven’t (the film is surprisingly faithful to its dense, bleak source material), but having read the book and seen the movie, I’m not sure the original was worth such reverent treatment in the first place. “Somebody’s pickin’ out costumed heroes,” says Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), a Travis Bickle-like avenger in an overcoat and inkblot-patterned mask. The grave solemnity of this line’s delivery points to Watchmen’s central flaw: it ignores the fundamental absurdity of the premise.
In an alternate America circa 1985, Richard Nixon is serving his fifth presidential term and the world teeters on the brink of nuclear war. Crime and debauchery plague the streets as the costumed heroes that once kept them clean have been outlawed (Watchmen skirts between anti-Nixon leftism and the pseudo-fascism of the vigilantes, and the ideological incoherence is troubling). Rorschach is the only hero still on the prowl, but when his former colleague The Comedian is killed, he fears a conspiracy will wipe out the other ex-crimefighters, including Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson), Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman), and Ozymandias (Matthew Goode), who is in reality Adrian Veidt, the only superhero to reveal his identity. Looming as an intimidating presence over the superhero community and the world at large, Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup) has become an actual atomic superman during a freak accident, with awesome powers used to end the Vietnam War.
Watchmen has been touted as a deconstruction of the superhero genre—these heroes have angst, moral qualms with vigilantism, erectile dysfunctions, etc. But again…why should I care? The film and the book present the existential crises of costumed heroes with as much gravity as The Passion of the Christ, which would be interesting, I suppose, if superheroes were real. Because heroes like these are such an intrinsically absurd notion, I find it hard to care about and relate to their problems. I know you’re thinking about The Dark Knight, but that film tried to show how a single comic book hero could exist in a very realistic (and thus relatable) universe, while the hero-infested 1985 of Watchmen is downright surreal. I was reminded of The Incredibles, a film that made similar material infinitely more relatable by treating it lightly.
No review of Watchmen is complete without discussing its ending, which has been altered from the book but still retains its central philosophical dilemma [spoilers ahoy]. Without giving too much away, it involves an apocalyptic scenario hinged upon Dr. Manhattan, which leads our heroes into an important moral issue with potential world peace hanging in the balance.
Some have viewed this ending as posing a deep philosophical quandary, but the situation itself is about as relatable as the type of outlandish pseudo-profundities unleashed by a stoned philosophy student: ‘Okay, dude, imagine this—there’s an apocalyptic scenario involving an atomic weapon who is inherently human with free will, dude.’ Well, since the idea of an atomic weapon with free will is inherently ridiculous, why should I care? Putting this aside, I’m leery about the ends-justify-the-means implications of the scenario, and resent the suggestion that it would bring peace when two world wars and a Holocaust couldn’t. (Might I suggest that in the militaristic, Nixonian universe of this film, such an event would only inspire increased nuclear paranoia, not to mention uproar over the government that created the weapon?) [End spoilers.]
Snyder and screenwriters David Hayter and Alex Tse have done an adequate job adapting a complicated book into a workable screenplay. The key scenes are here, with the biggest cut being the newsvendor/comic-within-the-comic scenes (which will reportedly surface on an extended DVD). Yet perhaps the film is too faithful: every shot has a glowing, artificial sheen similar to Snyder’s 300, suggesting that the director is so reverent to the material that he’s not only presenting the comic book panels, but polishing and laminating them (if ever there was a futuristic universe that deserved a gritty, Blade Runner-style treatment, it’s this one). The film is simply a prettier, shorter version of the comic with a more problematic ending. Why should I care?
Rating: VV
