A surprisingly sturdy, mildly provocative 105 minute movie is hiding somewhere in Watchmen’s gangly two and three-quarter hours running time.  Dense with shockingly unnecessary exposition, this story about the nature of heroism and identity indulges in a great deal of introspective character study between bouts of flamboyant brutality and fleeting moments where director Zack Snyder’s technical prowess and filmmaking ambition coincide.  He can do action; he even has some skill in eliciting raw, energetic portrayals from his unexpectedly well-cast thespians.  Gerard Butler’s untamed roar, “Madness? This… is… SPARTA!” wouldn’t be nearly so funny if there weren’t some genuinely bent masculine aggression, some beyond-camp emotional authenticity behind it.  Hide tanned golden bronze, beard sculpted like a lumberjack’s wedge, Butler and his cast of nearly-nekkid warriors tore through hordes of 300’s Persian villains like rabid moles tearing through loose topsoil, photographed against greenscreened vistas in a manner that can only be described as pure, unadulterated SNYDERVISION™.

SNYDERVISION™, characterized by the use of what is referred to within the industry as “fast-slo-fast-mo,”¹ as well as a preoccupation with noble, though possibly fruitless sacrifice, has now filtered the world of the most widely acclaimed graphic novel of all time into a feature film.²  As a messy, sprawling adaptation, the product of marketing, focus-testing, and the instincts of a young would-be visionary still learning his craft, the inchoate professionalism of the production serves the film’s gargantuan ambitions and readymade stature, rather than completely defeating it.   From the perspective of the film’s own history, it is a miracle that it got made at all.  A-list talent has tried to mount this production for twenty years and failed to realize it.  Zack Snyder waltzes in, fresh off principal photography of his sophomore effort, 300, and makes in three years what more respected, established filmmakers before him failed to do in decades.  One of Snyder’s problems is that he is trying to make himself into a name brand too quickly.  He’s a talented for-hire director, but the studio wants to sell him as a “visionary auteur,” and Watchmen documents the process of Snyder buying into his own hype, forcing himself to fabricate a style and recognizable set of themes over the course of his his young, spotty, three-films-old oeuvre before he’s really learned the ropes.  At the same time, he is hovers somewhere above “hack,” and SNYDERVISION™ has the potential to mean something someday, non-pejoratively.  The fact is that Watchmen: The Movie became a reality because Snyder isn’t an auteur. He’s a hired gun who knows how to just get the job done, and I respect that kind of work ethic.  Someone needs to tell that to Snyder, before his precocious SNYDERVISION™ overpowers its maker like a Frankensteinian monstrosity sown together from the corpses of previously-published source material.

Snyder has been blessed by some hip casting coups in the past (scoring Sarah Polley, Ving Rhames, and Tyler Burell in Dawn of the Dead, and Butler, Lena Headey and Dominic West in 300), and lands a couple of field goals in Watchmen, using Jackie Earle Haley, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and Patrick Wilson to great effect.  Scads of TV veterans populate Watchmen’s 1985 parallel universe, including bit players and regulars from shows like Eureka, Battlestar Galactica, The 4400, and so on.  Clearly, Snyder and first-time casting director Kristy Carlson are sci-fi/fantasy nerds; if unfamiliar with the shows, they’re sure deft enough to use familiar faces from the geek universe.  SNYDERVISION™ embraces the geek elite, though it is not without its pitfalls, and those pitfalls begin with the cast.  Carla Gugino and Billy Crudup, remarkably attractive, talented actors, are both wasted — she in protracted flashbacks and gaudy old-age makeup, and he in the pivotal role of the Brandeisly opalescent Dr. Manhattan.

In one of the many tranquilizing origin backstories plopped in throughout the film, we learn that a promising young scientist was bombarded with some atomic zappy-dee-do, transforming him into a godlike superhuman, capable of manipulating matter and existing simultaneously at multiple points in space and time.  (Please note that Dr. Manhattan is not just “godlike,” but a godlike “god,” probably with a small g, but perhaps with a more Godlike Big G.  His godlikeness is not literally spelled out for us, even though it is beaten into the figurative godlike mud well before said god- or Godlike individual builds a glass house on Mars, only to have it shattered by the tears of Malin Akerman, who skitters dangerously close to also shattering her range as an actor.)³  As befits a god — or, at least, the humanist conception of a supra-human godlike being — Manhattan, nee Jon Osterman, has grown more and more disconnected from the travails of mortal life.  With the passage of time made relative, and the problems of 5 billion people amounting to a hill of beans in this crazy, godless, antimiraculous universe on which he now possesses greater perspective, it has become impossible to give a damn about much of anything but his own immortal meditations.  He just wants to be left alone, so like any god or disenchanted emo kid, he hightails it to the fourth planet from the sun to await the time when the plot, or fate, or the timeline, or whatever it is he answers to needs him to come back to Earth and sort things out — one way or another.

Crudup’s performance is interesting.  The little we see of him without the computer-generated, lustrous blue body is warm and affecting.  Once he becomes more than a man, his dialogue becomes clinical and self-absorbed; his delivery cold and monotonous.  Contrasted with the growling, hurm-ing Clint Eastwood sociopathy of Haley’s asexually virile Rorschach, the azure, neon bath of Dr. Manhattan becomes the most consistently dull part of the film.   As a thematic construct, Manhattan embodies everything distant and dehumanized about the human conception of godhood, and the entire film hinges upon Crudup’s natural charisma to anchor the performance.  When Manhattan ultimately decides that it is in humanity’s best interests to sacrifice many so that all may live, he frames his acquiescence to Ozymandias’s diabolical plan in terms of the “miracle” of human love he recently witnessed on Mars, even though everyone else recognizes the plan as horribly inhuman.  His subsequent vanishing act — to pop off to another galaxy and create his own (presumably) translucent blue life form — reeks of the humanist indignance toward gods that has taken hold of popular culture since the 20th century.  As an indictment and explanation of the purpose of religion and god-constructs, Watchmen is mercilessly cynical, suggesting that humanity needs “God” to keep it in line, while simultaneously propping up the notion that if there is a God, He’s a ruthless, borderline evil bastard, disinterested in the lives of humans or the final fate.  He’s a tyrant and a scapegoat, without any of the mercy, compassion, or humanity — or, more to the point, any real love –  that characterizes Western civilization’s Judeo-Christian foundations, or the philosophy of interconnectedness and balance that characterizes a lot of the East’s spiritual ethos.  Manhattan saves the world and loses his soul, though I don’t think Manhattan would even acknowledge the existence of a soul, and whether he did or didn’t is almost irrelevant.  His discourse on the subject one way or t’other would be boring as sin.

Eddie Blake, a.k.a The Comedian, is probably the biggest thorn in the film’s backside.  As hard as Morgan works to bring him to life, and as much as Snyder and his writers work to shove him into the story, he never moves beyond the role of an egregiously violent MacGuffin.  Lingering somewhere between the parallel realms of Character and Plot Device, The Comedian’s savage embrace of human nature instigates the mystery holding together the main story, serves as part of the mystical “miracle” that comprises human attraction, challenges Adrian Veidt to come up with a plan that will save humanity, and offers a counterpoint to the value systems held by most of the other characters.  The worst sequence in the film is the hamfisted funeral, in which the primary cast members reflect via flashback on their interactions with the psychotic Blake.  Staged with impressive imagery and no sense of pacing, entire blocks of flashback are wedged into the film — flashbacks that illuminate the characters’ relationships with The Comedian, but which add little or nothing to their psychologies, and which illuminate nothing about their actions throughout the rest of the narrative.  Even Dr. Manhattan’s origin story, narrated in a way that limply mimics the experience of living outside of linear time, is a protracted chore that could have been artfully chiseled down to a 30-second montage, for all the good it does his character.  It’s sad that the opening credit sequence of last year’s The Incredible Hulk demonstrated more narrative economy than the bulk of Watchmen. Editor William Hoy apparently didn’t have the blue stones to put his foot down and trim the SNYDERVISION™ to a more efficient — and equally effective — length.  Not only does Snyder not trust his audience, but he doesn’t trust his actors to convey what needs to be conveyed in more interesting, story-relevant scenes.

The problem is that Snyder, for all his SNYDERVISION™, is actually a pretty good director.  But he has yet to stop trying to be an auteur, to stop attempting to impose the predetermined quirks of a nebulously-defined SNYDERVISION™ on his work, and start doing different things.  I chuckled aloud when the credits for Watchmen acknowledged the film as being based on the DC comic co-created and illustrated by Dave Gibbons.  Alan Moore may have taken his name out of the credits, but it is within the realm of possibility that, even if his name had stayed in there, the Watchmen of a more experienced, mature Snyder would have been “Zack Snyder’s Watchmen,” rather than the the film “based on the greatest graphic novel of all time, from the visionary director of 300.”  Snyder’s taste as a craftsman is still in its formative stage, and the distinguishable traits in his work — vaguely anti-religious themes, fast-slo-fast-mo, intriguing musical choices — wouldn’t necessarily make the film any more dense in a literary sense, but it would make it a more polished, more confidently provocative package.  As it stands, Watchmen is so slick, it’s barely even brash.

The parallel world Snyder envisions is compelling.  His Nixon suffers from cake-face, but the War Room where the president holds court is appointed and shot like the set of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.⁴  Rorschach pauses long enough during a prison break to stalk his prey into a washroom and silently dispatch him; this is glimpsed breathlessly through a swinging door; bloody water cascades across the tiles in what may perhaps be a nod to The Conversation.  A piglike zeppelin rises behind the boardroom windows of Veidt’s skyscraper while inside a cabal of desperate capitalists plead for a piece of the pie (“share it, fairly…”).  Glass, windows, and doors prominently fore- and background the courtship of Dan Dreiberg and Silk Spectre — as well as many other pivotal scenes.  Television sets feature stunning recreations of Meet the Press.⁵  The Nite Owl’s ship, the Archimedes, blows the camera upside-down during a crash landing in the Antarctic.  Ozymandias monologues his evil plan whilst exchanging blows with his antagonists (as opposed to standing around, delivering a lecture, as Manhattan is wont to do).  Then there’s the brilliant opening credit sequence, a series of almost-still-life scenes that would be at home in a wax museum or period photograph, threading along to the tune of Bob Dylan’s understated “The Times Are A-Changin’.”  Torn, ignored posters featuring The Comedian, declaring, “Stomp Out Hunger in Africa” plaster the dirty brick walls of New York’s godforsaken streets.

So much of the film works cinematically that its failure to come together is purely tragic.  Matthew Goode, the anti-Manhattan, was probably cast for his Aryan vacancy, his monochromatic line readings offset by his wispy frame.  If SNYDERVISION™ is challenging the stereotypes we hold about proper supervillains, the good-intentioned, slender Ozymandias/Adrian Veidt is indeed the opposite of what we generally consider a good and proper bad guy.  Except he isn’t.  Stories for a long time have traded on the idea of Things Not Being How They Seem, with a person or thing appearing on the surface to be not the least bit threatening, only to bare its fangs moments later, to the hero’s dismay.  So it’s fairly predictable that Veidt would turn out to be the Big Bad.  Beyond that, it has become something of a cliché for the corporate headmaster to the bringer of destruction.  Watchmen advances the not-so-novel conceit that religious and capitalist overlords work in tandem in contravention of humanity’s best interests.  Goode is a nonentity, and though he embodies detachment as well as Dr. Manhattan, his anti-magnetism makes it very difficult to believe that even the world’s smartest man could climb to the top of the free market without any people skills.  A man you barely notice on screen while he’s explaining how he blew up six major cities is not a leader, period.

Saving the film (and the world) falls then to Wilson and Haley, both of whom are screwed up, empathetic, pitiable, objectionable, and troublesome as heroes – and they’re also sensational actors.  Haley spends most of the film behind a shifting black-and-white mask, grinding out the kind of paranoid diatribes that could wind up as motivational posters on Travis Bickle’s apartment walls.  Locked in rigid poses, spiraling through a cycle of ultraviolence and misanthropy simultaneously condemned and glorified by the film, he’s the uncompromising vigilante, a sexed-up Jack Bauer, without the patriotic flag-waving.  Rorschach works in secret; he calls for complete transparency.  His inflexible ethical paradigm is contrasted by his mask.  Wilson is liberated by his mask; he’s an adrenaline junkie with a trust fund.  A canny enough actor to invite the audience’s pity, as well as a slight note of disgust, he hides his desire, his identity, and his ethical principles consistently, and apparently without reservation.  He’s got the emotional maturity of a teenager and the gadgets to cater to it.  He’s impossible to dislike, however, because his loyalty to his friend elicits a despairing “NOOOOOOOO” that acts as a corrective to Episode III.  As the two most sincere performances in the film, the connection forged by Rorschach’s death is the least manipulative part of the climax.  It’s no surprise that Dan can’t bring himself to tell the world the truth at the end of the film — if the incorruptible Rorschach would rather walk to his death than live to fight another day, what’s the point of fighting the large battle, when the smaller skirmishes are just more fun?

SNYDERVISION™ isn’t visionary enough to reconcile the inert faux-losiphizing, unwieldy size of the film to its eye-candy action and superheroic posturing.  Snyder is 43 years old, but he’s a young filmmaker, and Watchmen is a young man’s movie.  Heroes don’t exist; at least, heroic motives don’t exist.  Institutions of any sort are inherently corrupt.  Human nature is venal, brutal — if it’s worth talking about at all.  Healthy suspicion of the powerful is good, but Watchmen lacks faith in anything and everything apart from the extent to which human beings screw each other over.  Were this thesis supported with a layered, finely-tuned film, it would have been a great movie with a juvenile outlook.

In the film, the miracle of the unlikely union of love and tragedy moves Dr. Manhattan to give a shit about humanity for the first time in a long time.  His attempt at intervention is ultimately unsuccessful, but it is a perfect illustration of Watchmen as a film.  Snyder deserves a hell of a lot of credit for just getting it done, and not embarrassing himself or the story.  This minor miracle may be undercut by the underwhelming final product, and marked by the inability of SNYDERVISION™ to nail the material’s ultimate transition to the silver screen.  We can lament the fact that it is not a great film, but we can also be thankful that it isn’t all bad.  If humanity is doomed in the film, in the real world, the film is flawed, but serviceable, and marks the development of a lot of up-and-coming talent.  They may not save the world — or the entertainment industry — but they certainly won’t destroy it, any more than SNYDERVISION™ “destroyed” one of the most beloved comics ever produced.

Edited by Matt Kessen.

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