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Action-heavy Watchmen misses its mark |
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| Action-heavy Watchmen misses its mark | |
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by Nick Ardizzone -
SGN Staff Writer Watchmen Opening March 6 Finally watching the infamously unfilmable Watchmen was satisfying on a buffet level; there's a lot there, but none of it is particularly good. By trying to appeal to everyone, director Zack Snyder runs the risk of appealing to no one, as Watchmen differs from the source material enough to make comic fans grumble, yet remains dense enough to likely leave the uninitiated cold. For the most part, Watchmen stays faithful to the 1986 comic and looks extremely good doing so. Much of the dialogue is taken verbatim from the book, and you can practically see the speech balloons for the Comedian's "Oh mother, forgive me" and Rorschach's gravelly "Hurm." The panels have become storyboards, the action moves smoothly and naturally, and the movie is shot with the luscious, saturated tones that the comic was aching for. As far as special effects go, I would have been happy just to watch Rorschach's mask for half an hour. It would seem the actors were cast mainly because they looked like their characters, though the choice of geeky Matthew Goode for the blond Adonis Ozymandias is baffling. Aside from that, there isn't much to suggest the cast went through any auditions. Malin Akerman as Laurie Jupiter is especially clunky, and no amount of smoldering Lucy Lawless smirks can make up for her complete lack of presence. Patrick Wilson's Dan Dreiberg is a charming underdog, if perhaps a bit too fit for the paunchy Nite Owl. A glowing blue Billy Crudup does a fine monotone as Dr. Manhattan. The two standouts, Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach and Jeffrey Dean Morgan as the Comedian, are perfect in their roles. Haley plays Rorschach with the fiendish intensity of the comic character, not with the pasteurized backstory of the movie version. Yes, crazy-eyed lunatic Rorschach is cast as an unambiguous hero in Watchmen with the help of a few content omissions, as it would be difficult for audiences to sympathize with a character who takes a meat cleaver to two German shepherds. When Rorschach was cheered by the premiere audience for emptying a deep-fryer on a man's face, I realized he had gone from a vicious, hateful character, terrifying in his black-and-white view of justice, to just another gruff-voiced badass. It is in the additions where director Zack Snyder makes his missteps. The opening credits work, but the obvious music in other scenes - did we need a "The Sound of Silence" montage at the funeral, or "The Ride of the Valkyries" as Dr. Manhattan looms over the Vietnamese? - is goofy and overbearing. Dan and Laurie's love scene, set to Billie Holiday's "You're My Thrill" in the comic, is now accompanied by Rufus Wainwright's silly "Hallelujah," which turns the scene into parody. Another distracting addition to the film is graphic, superfluous violence. A burst of light and smoke as Manhattan snuffs a gangster in the comic becomes a wet explosion which leaves intestines dangling from the ceiling. A man who originally had his throat slit now has his arms cut off with a circular saw. Broken bones punch through skin. The original had plenty of gore with its brutal beatings and juicy V8 nosebleeds, but the movie crosses the line from the gritty to the gaudy, its cartoony violence detracting from the reasons behind the action. The Watchmen comic was revolutionary in part because it showed the reality behind the superhero posturing. This adaptation throws that away in the first 10 minutes when the Comedian punches a chunk out of a concrete wall. Much of this criticism stems from my pedantic adherence to the comic, but who besides a fan would have the patience for this three-hour spectacle? Not all of Snyder's changes are detrimental. The opening credits, which re-imagine the Watchmen through American history set to Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'," are the best part of the film, and the ending substitutes a simpler apocalypse for the original's transdimensional vagina-squid, and is more elegant for doing so. Sadly, a handful of good ideas can't save a movie of this scope. Snyder can't resist the sophomoric allure of his slow-motion 300-style action sequences or his bone-crushing sound effects - both outrageously inappropriate for a rape scene, by the way - and by catering to the action-hungry crowd, he shows he lacks the maturity to handle the story. He made the mistake of dressing a serious drama in action-movie clothes, when Watchmen, at its heart, is about being able to separate style from substance, humanity from superhumanity. There are points in the film when that message peeks through, and that is why I say the movie is not completely blasphemous, and mean it as a compliment. |
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