New on DVD Jul 22 2009 @ 07:42 am
REVIEW: Watchmen
Directed By: Zack Snyder
Written By: David Hayter, Alex Tse
Starring: Billy Crudup, Jackie Earle Haley, Patrick Wilson
Running Time: 162 min minutes
Rated R Strong graphic violence, sexuality, nudity and language
Originally posted at Cinexcellence.
Watchmen, Zack Snyder’s adaptation of the much-loved graphic novel of the same name, was released theatrically on Friday. Having not read the graphic novel, all I knew about the film going in was what I saw in the previews.
The opening credits sequence in Watchmen sucked me into the film, and I was hooked for the first thirty minutes. Through the historical montage, complete with living photographs and revisionist events, I felt like I had a decent grasp of the universe that Watchmen took place in. It’s a rare feat to accomplish this with such a sweeping story. That said, there were times when the multiple narratives felt disjointed and episodic. And while the film is largely about The Watchmen themselves, I would have liked to see more in regards to the societal look on things
There was also a lot of pop music that was included in the film, ranging from Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are a-Changin’ to Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. The integration of the music with the visuals worked well for a while, but soon became more of a distraction than a complementation of the film.
Watchmen is an ensemble piece at heart, housing a horde of different characters, but the two that interested me the most were Rorschach, played perfectly by Jackie Earle Haley, and Nite Owl II (Patrick Wilson), who comes across as Clark Kent with Batman’s toys. In some ways I would consider him to be the main character of the film, although there wasn’t much of a resolution for him at the end of the film.
Billy Crudup also made an appearance in the film as Dr. Manhattan, the God-like character in the film. His personal dilemmas and choices were a much-needed intellectual boost in the film, resulting in a cool ending. And while the character of Ozymandias (Matthew Goode) wasn’t in the film nearly enough, what glimpses we saw of him were intriguing to say the least. I would love to read Watchmen if only to learn more about him.
Sadly, however, director Zack Snyder tends to put more emphasis on “graphic” than “novel”. Starting out as a serious, gritty epic, I was surprised at the change in tone partway through the film and Snyder’s self-referential winks and personal fetishes. (At least there weren’t any drugs in the film.)
I’m certainly not opposed to violence in film if the story calls for it and is used well. But to quote Alfred Hitchcock, “There is no terror in a bang, only in the anticipation of it.” And on a similar note, Roger Ebert wrote in his review of The Winslow Boy that, “Sixty seconds of wondering if someone is about to kiss you is more entertaining than 60 minutes of kissing.” Whatever happened to suspense, subtlety, and the imagination? There are better ways to show violence in a film. And in the case of Rorschach’s back-story, some well-placed shadows would have been far more effective, stylistically and emotionally, and would have fit with his film noir presence.
As an extra tidbit, I noticed a similarity between 300 (Also directed by Snyder) and Watchmen. The former ends with Dilios telling the story of the 300 Spartans in the oral tradition of story telling, while Watchmen ends in a similar way, but with the written tradition. Perhaps Snyder’s next film will end with a typewriter…or maybe I’ve just been a communications major too long.
In any case, Watchmen, while having some interesting characters, cool visuals, and a promising story, fails to tell that story well. Instead of getting a developed character-driven epic about humanity, we’re left with an adolescent storyteller infatuated with gratuitous sex and violence. And we’re left wanting more.
on Jul 22 2009 @ 9:13 am 1. Luke Harrington said …
I tend to agree. The film was, from what I hear, a success in terms of translating the novel to the screen — but simply as a film, it wasn’t much of anything. It felt long, bloated, full of itself and purposeless. It also didn’t help that it came out more than two decades after the comic, now that the “superheroes — but GRITTY superheroes!!!” shtick that it (admittedly) invented has been done to death.
That said, I have to disagree with you, at least to a point, regarding the violence. To me it felt a little bit refreshing to see a film that took the “gritty superheroes” thing to its natural conclusion. After seeing the wishy-washy “OMG WE’RE SO GRITTY, BUT WE STILL NEED A PG-13 RATING” blandness of the The Dark Knight (*ducks, lest there are any Batman fans reading*), this felt refreshingly honest to me. There were moments when it was over-the-top to the point of feeling pornographic, but at the same time, that felt true to its world.
on Jul 24 2009 @ 8:55 pm 2. Rick Olson said …
Joe, I tend to agree … never having read the book, I had to judge it as a film, and it fell pretty short in my book.
And I don’t think graphic-violence can be equated with grit. Just ask Billy Wilder or John Huston or any Welles or any director of classic noir (for example), who managed to be plenty gritty. If “Batman Returns” wasn’t gritty it wasn’t because it wasn’t graphically violent, it was just a lousy movie. I’m with Joe: graphic violence is a lazy way of acquiring what a weak script and anemic direction — both in evidence in “Watchmen” — doesn’t provide.
(Good to see you all back, Luke!)
on Jul 26 2009 @ 6:01 pm 3. Luke Harrington said …
(Thanks!)
You make a fair point, Rick, and I can’t really argue. I guess what I was trying to get at was that far too many superhero pictures try to have it both ways. They want to be in-your-face with their grittiness, but they still want to be shiny, fun, and not overly transgressive — to make sure that they remain palatable to the masses, and thus fulfill their bottom-line obligations. They also seem blissfully unaware of the fact that a film about a guy in a rubber suit is inherently silly, and thus can never be truly gritty on the level of, for instance, a Wilder noir.
That’s why I have to give Watchmen at least a little bit of credit. It wasn’t trying overly hard (or even at all) to be palatable to the masses — it was a sick, twisted film about sick, twisted people who did sick, twisted things to each other. The most effective scene (aside from the opening montage, of course) was, in my opinion, the part where Rorschach threw hot grease on one of his fellow prisoners. It established his character as some sort of pathetic inversion of a Nietzschean Ubermensch. If they had just implied it, it hardly would have had the same impact — we may have gotten the general idea of what he was capable of, but we wouldn’t have been forced to stare unblinkingly into his soul.
on Jul 30 2009 @ 10:21 am 4. Film-Book dot Com said …
Nice review Demme. The parts of this film were certainly better than its whole.
Having not read the 12-part comic series Demme, you will be more satisfied when you sit down to read it.
I also agree with your theory of less is more in reference to the violence in the film.
on Mar 03 2011 @ 10:34 am 5. Beaulah Dames said …
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