The original Watchmen graphic novel was a landmark achievement, a thoughtful, formally innovative, complexly plotted meditation on heroism, humanity, myths, mortality, and the nature of gods. Director Zack Snyder’s faithful yet inert film version of Watchmen seems destined to be a landmark achievement in the realm of superhero nudity, but anything more than that seems unlikely.Don’t get me wrong: it’s about time we got a superhero movie in which the sexual content is more than merely metaphorical — my preference is still to see Superman taking Lois Lane on a nighttime flight over Metropolis, but it’s certainly refreshing to see Malin Akerman’s Silk Spectre and Patrick Wilson’s Nite Owl doffing their ridiculous costumes and acting on their obvious attraction for each other. (Too bad Snyder sees fit to punctuate the scene with a juvenile visual gag.) There’s actually a surprising amount of male nudity in Watchmen, most of it courtesy of Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), a nuclear scientist who gets transformed into a giant, indestructible, glowing blue demigod whose disregard for clothing reflects his growing alienation from the human race. We’re told Dr. Manhattan has the power to “bend matter to his will,” and you can’t help but notice that one of his first orders of business seems to have been to give himself a really tremendous cock.
I’m getting ahead of myself, but the plot of Watchmen is so complicated that there’s really no easy place to jump in. We’re in an alternate version of 1985 where Richard Nixon is still president, and where anonymous crimefighting “costumed heroes” were a common sight in the larger cities — although a law banning their activities eventually drove them underground. One of the most notorious of the bunch, a right-wing psychopath known as The Comedian (who apparently earned his nickname by the same logic that hulking linebacker types get called “Tiny” and bald guys get called “Curly”), became a black-ops mercenary type, and when an intruder tosses him out of his apartment window to splatter on the street below, a psychopathic vigilante who calls himself Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) suspects a plot to eliminate all costumed heroes is underfoot. That’s two psychopaths already, and we’re just getting started.
As Rorschach follows the clues, we meet other superheroes as well: the superintelligent Ozymandias (Matthew Goode), now a trillionaire industrialist; Nite Owl, a shlub who put crimefighting aside years ago but never found anything to replace it in his life; and The Silk Spectre, whose dissatisfaction with the emotionally frigid Dr. Manhattan steers her into Nite Owl’s arms. There are all sorts of subplots and tangents too — including stuff like The Comedian’s attempted rape of Silk Spectre’s mother and Rorschach’s stint in prison after getting framed for murder, which provide the film with some of its most truly unpleasant moments.
Indeed, I can’t think of another director who can be trusted less with violence than Zack Snyder. On the evidence of Watchmen and his previous film, 300, he seems to have absolutely no sense of scale when it comes to the impact of violent scenes, no talent for making restraint count for more than explicitness, no adult empathy for characters’ pain or suffering, no awareness that his aestheticization of violence makes even the moments that are supposed to be repulsive seem exultant. (He doesn’t even care if the violence makes thematic sense — his mortal characters seem as superhumanly strong and impervious to injury as Dr. Manhattan.) Snyder stages the near-rape of The Silk Spectre’s mother in the same way as his sick jokes about prison inmates getting their hands removed with a circular saw, or criminals exploding, leaving their entrails splattered over the ceiling. He even seems to get a kick out of showing The Comedian shoot a pregnant Vietnamese woman — “That Comedian! What a sicko!”
Snyder and his collaborators probably faced an impossible task with this film. Just to pare Watchmen down into even a three-hour movie required them to take out pages and pages of material — but with Watchmen, density is kind of the point. Density of imagery, density of backstory, density of character, density of theme. Take all that stuff away — all the metatextual stories-within-stories, all the obsessive backstory and alternate history, all the obsessive recurring images and organizing metaphors — and you take away the very thing that makes Watchmen Watchmen.
What you’re left with is a film that hits all the same plot points (minus the ending) as the graphic novel it’s based on, but without seeming anywhere near as challenging or profound or moving. Jackie Earle Haley gives the most memorable performance, but also the most gratuitously graphic scenes and the worst dialogue. Patrick Wilson isn’t bad either — not many actors are as good as he is at playing hesitancy. A lot of reviewers are dumping on Malin Akerman; she’s not great, but then, Watchmen doesn’t exactly traffic in what you’d call progressive female characterizations. And what a miserable experience making this movie must have been for Billy Crudup — months and months of serving as nothing more than a blueprint for a CGI effect, permitted to speak only in a deliberately uninflected voice.
Alan Moore has said that Watchmen grew out of his desire to explore the idea of putting superheroes into the real world. But the world of Watchmen the movie — full of slow-motion, physics-defying fights, CGI-enhanced visual flourishes, and a design team preoccupied with creating living tableaux that duplicate two-dimensional comics panels — is as airless and artificial as they come.
0 Yorumlar