Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
3/13/09
The phrase “The Citizen
Kane of graphic novels” has become as attached to Alan Moore &
Dave Gibbons' 1986/87 comic book series Watchmen as “Greatest Film
of All Time” is to Citizen Kane. The series is as dense as
it is brilliant, sporting a flashback-filled, perspective-jumping structure
that helped to inspire the TV series Lost. But because it
tells a single, closed story on a gigantic scale, nobody's really thought
about adapting it for TV, any more than almost 20 years of big-name directors
like Terry Gilliam and Paul Greengrass were able to wrestle down a script
for a big-screen version. And thank Dr. Manhattan they waited.
Because in 2009, we find ourselves at the moment when the world, between
state-of-the-art special effects capable of bringing it to smooth, believable
life and a new commitment by major studios to back comic book movies with
real artistic teeth, is finally ready for it. 300
director Zack Snyder has produced a movie as dense for 160 minutes as those
classic comics were for 12 issues, retaining every last Watchman
word and thought he can find room for while subtly nudging the story in
more compact and cinematic directions when necessary. The result
may not be the Citizen Kane of Comic Book Movies, but it is a worthy
addition to that growing late-00's collection of really awesome superhero
flicks.
The year is 1985, the world
is like our own, except that “costumed adventurers” began fighting crime
in the years after World War II. In ways both large and small, their
intervention led to a harsher, more conservative society, one in which
Richard Nixon (Robert Wisden) has become de facto President For Life and
the single most important man in the world is the former John Osterman,
transformed by a lab accident into Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup).
The Doctor is the world's only truly superpowered human, with powers are
not unlike a God's: total control of molecules both living and inanimate.
Like the nuclear weapons for which he's named, Dr. Manhattan's very existence
changed the world in which he lived, turning the face of superheroism darker
and more violent until fighting crime in a costume was banned. As
our story begins, one of the most famous “retired” crimefighters, Edward
Blake aka The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is tossed to his death from
the windows of his high-rise apartment. One “hero” who never gave
up, the mad vigilante Rorschach (Jackie Earl Haley) begins his own investigation.
He's certain the murder was the beginning of a crusade to wipe out all
the former crimefighters. That theory seems vindicated when shocking
revelations about his power's side effects drive Dr. Manhattan into exile
on Mars and the “smartest man in the world” Ozymandias (Matthew Goode)
barely dodges an assassin's bullet. These events touch other survivors
of the age of costumed adventurers; two generations of the Silk Spectre,
Sally Jupiter (Carla Gugino) and her daughter Laurie (Malin Akerman), who
begins a tentative relationship with the second Nite Owl, Dan Dreiberg
(Patrick Wilson). Dr. Manhattan's departure from our world has upset
the balance of power, leading to bold Russian moves into Afghanistan that
seem to signal imminent nuclear war. Is there any way Superheroes
can prevent the end of the world? And when they try, who will watch
the Watchmen?
A brilliant opening credits
musical montage set to Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A' Changin'" takes
us through 40 years of superheroic alternate history, announcing from the
get-go that Watchmen will be an insanely dense movie experience.
Even so, it only scratches the surface of its' source material, but it's
remarkable what a great job Snyder and his writers David Hayter and Alex
Tse have done making this epic work as a movie. They made two pivotal
decisions: streamlining to focus almost entirely on the heroes (after
an initial visit to the crime scene, there's no evidence the police are
even investigating Blake's murder) and making key changes to the ending
that allow them to significantly simplify the earlier parts of the story
(more on that later, walled off behind Def-Con 1 Spoiler Warnings).
Fans reactions to the cuts
will likely depend upon how married they are to certain elements that just
had to go, from detailed backstories boiled down to just a few minutes
of screentime to supporting characters reduced to cameos. Most significant
is the loss of the Tales of the Black Freighter comic book and the
newsstand where it's sold: Watchmen's window to the outside
world. As a result, the vice-grip of impending nuclear apocalypse
is a little less palpable because all of the movie's characters are trying
one way or another to do something about it. Fans can take some solace
in the fact that the Black Freighter will live on as a direct-to-DVD
animated feature that will later be rolled back into a (presumably far)
longer extended cut of Watchmen.
But for the moment, let's
focus less on what's not here than what is. The creative team sticks
so closely to the chapter and verse of the parts of Watchmen they've
chosen to keep that the movie feels almost eerily faithful. When
was the last time you saw an adaptation of anything that included so many
of its' most quotable lines? While the movie can't disappear into
lengthy flashback sequences a la Lost, it does its' best to divvy
out the important backstory in quick flashes, and my favorite issue (#4,
“Watchmaker”) is effectively boiled down into a short sequence that accurately
captures Dr. Manhattan's unique relationship with space/time. And
I'd be remiss not to point out what an extraordinary job the production
team has done making the look of the comics leap off the page. From
all the heroes' costumes, weapons and vehicles to the composition of specific
shots, it really feels like watching the graphic novel come to life.
And the actors succeed in
doing the same for their iconic characters. Haley seems born to play
Rorschach, never seeming constricted by his mask, but unleashing even greater
depths of madness with it off. Morgan is an evil delight as The Comedian,
probably the first movie character ever to be so rotten he guns down both
a pregnant woman and JFK in the same film. Goode exceptionally projects
the smooth arrogance of a man who modeled his superheroic persona after
the pharaoh Ramses and Alexander the Great. Gugino disappears into
the graphic novel's vision of a Betty Page-style pin-up girl as superhero
and effectively dons old age makeup to convince us she's Akerman's mother.
Matt Frewer, sporting some scary prosthetic ears, does a fine job as the
ravaged, older shell of the Minutemen's greatest enemy.
Billy Crudup really shines
as my favorite Watchmen character, the elusive Dr. Manhattan.
Keeping his voice emotionlessly level at all times, he totally nails the
well-meaning embodiment of all our nuclear fears. Dr. Manhattan can
take anything apart and examine its' component molecules, but he can't
begin to understand people, in part because he hasn't been one himself
for decades. And the actor really stepped-up on-set by not just serving
as his own motion-capture stand-in but wearing a couple thousand little
blue lights so Manhattan's glow convincingly touches everything around
him in a way that would never have looked as good with CGI.
While the story is quite
sympathetic to its' rogue's gallery of mad heroes, Dan Dreiberg and Laurie
Jupiter emerge as its' true empathetic center because neither of them has
been broken by their adventures in the way the others have. Wilson
and Akerman are very good in the roles, and their romance really pops.
I liked that the movie dials back Laurie's bitterness at having been pushed
into superheroism by her Mom a bit, and just by speeding up the timeline
of events, it can't help but make Dan seem a little less shiftless.
The Nite Owl is an interesting movie superhero because he's both literally
and figuratively impotent without his suit. Being Nite Owl doesn't
get in the way of Dan Dreiberg being who his is because he's pretty much
nothing if he's NOT Nite Owl, and I really loved the way Wilson plays his
rebirth once he gets back to business.
There's a LOT going on in
Watchmen both on the plot and thematic levels, deconstructing both
the nature of fictional superheroism and real-life reactionary politics.
While few of the actors cast in the roles do much more than let us know
who they're supposed to be, it's interesting to watch the smattering of
real-life people, from Nixon and Kissinger to a hilariously doomed Lee
Iacoca, and the roles the story assigns them in an alternate world where
Dr. Manhattan's intervention won the Vietnam war in a week and The Comedian's
been killing off liberal icons for decades.
Just as it helps both to
have read the graphic novel and to been versed in the cliches and theory
of the genre, Watchmen is best viewed with a clear memory of the
80's, the decade that spanned my 8th through 18th years. For those
who weren't there, let me explain it like this: we had the same creeping
certainty many feel today about melting ice caps and a coming environmental
apocalypse, only it was the nukes that made it hard for us to get to sleep,
and the end was coming any minute now. The Doomsday Clock that figures
prominently in Watchmen makes a good metaphor for the Cold War 80's
dread of all things nuclear. It was set to five minutes before midnight,
and no 80's kid could say with any level of certainty that the world would
be here six minutes from any given moment.
In the spirit of the decade
his movie views through a funhouse mirror, Snyder has made Watchmen
feel like the most technologically advanced, MPAA-immune 80's movie possible.
Pulling his bright color schemes and stationary camera angles from the
source material, he also fills every available moment with blaring era-appropriate
pop music (yes, there was a time when "99 Luftballons" would just be playing
in the background while two characters talked) and even finds time for
an old-fashioned pop song-backed sex scene. And I don't think anyone
could have written a better song for the closing credits than Leonard Cohen's
“First We Take Manhattan” proves to be.
*****SUPER-SPOILER ALERT:
IF YOU PLAN TO DO SO, READ NO FURTHER UNTIL YOU'VE BOTH SEEN AND READ
WATCHMEN*****
As I referenced earlier, part of what makes it possible to commit this
story to film is a reimagining not so much of the ending, but of the plot's
climactic revelations. The graphic novel's “Architects of Fear” scheme
is brilliantly set up throughout, particularly with the way the madness
of the Black Freighter story gives us just the slightest taste of
a psychic blast of horror capable of killing millions. But it's also
extremely complicated, and perhaps the only part of the novel that has
become dated. After all, while not on the same scale, we have since
witnessed mass murder in Manhattan galvanize the world behind a common
enemy and the effect barely lasted a year. I actually prefer the
alternate scheme Hayter and Tse have drempt up, particularly in the way
it makes Dr. Manhattan's exile a most significant and logical part of the
plot. It's also a good move to make the tragedy more global.
Given the new ending, I'm honestly not sure what purpose editing the Black
Freighter storyline back into an expanded cut will serve, but I am
curious to find out. And the changes do make Ozymandias' beloved,
genetically enhanced pet Bubastis an odd dangling thread, but the movie's
smart not to piss fans off by getting rid of him. Further credit
to the filmmakers that even with some pretty substantial changes to the
events that dictate them, the climactic scenes and dialog unfold just like
their graphic novel counterparts and still feel organic. *****END OF
SPOILERS*****
Of course, some of the specialness
of Moore and Gibbons' storytelling style, which combined traditional comic
narrative with “found objects” like book chapters, police reports, and
magazine articles, could not translate to the screen in any form, so Watchmen
the movie must inevitably be a little more routine than its' inspiration.
But even taken entirely on its' own terms, this is a great movie for fans
of “what if?” stories and the mythology of superheroes. It will test
the attention span and plot-following skills of non-readers, but they're
not the people this movie was made for anyway. Non-geeks can stick
with the Citizen Kane of non-superhero movies, Citizen Kane. |
