Film Review: 'The Watchmen'

Superheroes are not well-adjusted. Unless your demons are of exceptional ferocity, chances are you can resist the inclination to don a costume, adopt a second identity and fight crime (whether events have conspired to equip you with superhuman powers or not). The notion of the superhero as essentially a vigilante who took a wrong turn en route to a Hallowe'en party has been around at least since Frank Miller reinterpreted Batman as the Dark Knight. In a series of comic books published from 1986 to 1987 (later republished in one volume as a 'graphic novel'), Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons extended the conceit as far as it could reasonably go. And after many years of repetitive debate as to whether 'The Watchmen' was susceptible to cinematic adaptation (and several false starts, involving such worthies as Terry Gilliam and Darren Aronofsky), Zack Snyder has supplied as definitive an answer as we can expect, if it is less satisfactory as a film.

John Simon has long argued that adaptation from one medium to another rarely works given the inseparability of form from content in any work of art. If it can be done, he has written, it's not worth doing, and if it's worth doing it can't be done. I'm a shade less of a purist than Simon, and can think of several instances where cinematic renditions have transcended modest sources in other forms. 'Casablanca', for instance, was based on an eminently forgettable, and now virtually unfindable play. And as far as comics are concerned, it is at least arguable that Christopher Nolan's reimagining of Batman is both darker and more substantial than the original. (To be sure, events have colluded with Nolan, such that the Dark Knight's battle with Heath Ledger's capriciously malevolent Joker echoes, by design or otherwise, our competing anxieties regarding random violence and the imperfectly accountable power opposing it in the age of domestic terrorism. This Joker lacks Theodore Kaczynski's weakness for unreadable manifestos, but anthrax in the mail is just the sort of prank one can see appealing to him.)

But for this to work, those responsible for the adaptation must take not only risks but liberties, and Snyder's effort is as lifelessly reverential as anything this side of Masterpiece Theatre. Moore and Gibbons posited an alternative history of the United States from the mid-1940s through the early 1980s, in which at least two generations of superheroes (the first designated themselves the Minutemen, and were at least as much publicity stunt as gang of crimefighters, the second were the Watchmen)become recognized public figures. This reworking of the recent past includes an American victory in Vietnam (courtesy of Doctor Manhattan, a onetime physicist who acquires through nuclear accident the ability to rearrange matter by force of will, as well as a blue coloration that may be more amusing than intended) and Richard Nixon's reelection to at least a third term as President. Congress has passed legislation banning superheros and the superpowers are locked in a seemingly endless nuclear stalemate, while New York is in a state of urban decay as grim as its reality at the depth of the early '80s recession. Moore at least seems to entertain serious literary ambitions, and has been quick to dissociate himself from film adaptations of his works that he deemed unsatisfactory, as he did with 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen', 'From Hell' and 'V for Vendetta.' ( I don't recall quite why, but in the last case it may be because the lengthy disquisitions about anarchist theory, with references to Kropotkin and Bakunin, got the chop.)

It's an understatement to call the narrative complex, encompassing as it does forty years of half-invented history and the personal stories of two generations of characters, most of them possessing multiple identities. Snyder gets off to a good start, with an opening montage replete with the visual inconography of modern America, in which the character Silhouette, hijacks the waiting lips of the girl being kissed in Alfred Eisenstadt's famous V-J Day photograph in Times Square, while another superhero, the Comedian, guns down JFK from behind Dallas's famed grassy knoll, as Bob Dylan warbles 'The Times They are a'Changin.'' But from here on, the trajectory is one of remorseless decline.

The graphic novel is striking in the vivid bleakness of its dark-hued colour schemes and the almost stately elegance of composition in the nine-panel grid of most pages. The most memorable images of the film, from an early scene in which the aging and dissolute Comedian is ejected through the window of his skyscraper apartment, are replicas of frames from the comic book. (I had not read the original in its entirety before seeing the film; when I perused it afterward, this struck me quite forcibly.) If anything, Snyder's fondness for slo-mo when he thinks he has a particularly fine image points up the extent to which the film can degenerate into a sequence of still images with an '80s soundtrack. Satisfying as this may be to either enthusiasts of the original, or connoisseurs of visual appropriation, the unprejudiced viewer can be forgiven for wondering just what the point might be.

Snyder's past effort, The 300, displayed his proclivity for lingering over instances of graphic violence, and the same impulse is in abundant evidence here. In addition to the forced amputation of a thug's two arms and the fatal scalding of another by an upended vat of boiling cooking oil, we have at least the customary allotment of fistfights and shooting, most of them choreographed competently enough, though with no great creativity. The crunches of bone and dull thud of tissue giving way beneath various blunt object are rendered with considerable verismo, and the viewer who is taking in the spectacle through IMAX (as I did) may soon find himself in a condition of sensory overload. But the power of the immediate assault on one's senses does not stay with one, and there is little to produce a more lasting effect.

Part of the problem is that Snyder and his scenarists, David Hayter and Alex Tse, out of either a misguided conviction that Moore and Gibbons's original is a classic to tamper with which would constitute lese-majeste, or an equally mistaken deference to the aficionados who think along such lines, have excised little save for a comic-within-a-comic, 'Tales for a Black Freighter.' Too much remains to comfortably fit within 160 minutes, and as a result many of the elaborate 'back stories' can be conveyed only in great slabs of exposition-speak thrust into the mouths of various characters, in only the roughest approximation of English as it has ever actually been spoken. The difficulties inherent in portraying a superhero credibly can only be compounded when one is required to spout such verbiage.

The characters in The Watchmen fall into a dodgy middle ground; not content to be stock figures with a few bells and whistles added, but falling well short of three-dimensionality. Some of them would probably struggle in any event, and I suppose it is all for the best that Malin Ackerman (as the second Silk Spectre) is fetching in skin-tight spandex; fetching enough, at any rate, for her physical grace to distract the spectator from her stiff way with her lines. Jeffrey Dean Morgan, as the cheerfully nihilistic Comedian, Edward Blake, fares best, not least because his is the major character least prone to windy rumination. As Rorschach, the right-wing vigilante whose mask bears an eternally shifting inkblot, Jackie Earle Haley is required to recite voiceover narration that helps nudge the story along but is decidedly less evocative than the running commentary by Harrison Ford that Ridley Ford chose to delete from the director's cut of Bladerunner, or Travis Bickle's similar grumbling about the corruptions of an equally enfeebled New York.

The unhappiest lot is that of Billy Crudup, whose Dr. Manhattan is the only one of the Watchmen who possesses superhuman powers and finds himself increasingly indifferent to the humanity with whom he now has little in common. When not expressing his residual human frailty in whiny outbursts over the collapse of his romance with Silk Spectre, now inclined to seek solace in the arms of the nebbishy Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson), he reshapes planets and engages in pseudo-philosophical attitudinizing that seems to be one part dimly-remembered and half-understood Nietzsche, one part the detritrus of undergraduate bull sessions from some long-ago Friday night. If all this sounds like surpassingly sedate behavior for someone who is nominally an action hero, rest assured it is fully as tedious as it sounds.

The sensibility is not only that of the pretentious adolescent, but the pretentious adolescent of a particular generation, namely the one that noisily and ostentatiously brooded over its chances of surviving to adulthood with Ronald Reagan in the White House. So it comes as no surprise that the major plot twist concerns a plot to engineer a nuclear incident that will scare the leaders of the superpowers into modest moves in the direction of detente and away from future confrontation. Yet the nuclear anxieties of the 1980s are of academic interest alone in the hands of Zack Snyder and his collaborators, whose ambitions exceed the provision of meretricious diversions but whose talents do not. "Who will watch the watchmen?", asks a graffito Alan Moore has taken from Juvenal. Once nostalgia for coming of age in the 1980s passes, I suspect few will.