There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.
There are plenty of important things going on in the world and in my life right now, but at the moment I'm going to talk about Watchmen. I got to see it last night with kingseyeland and Brian G. after a couple of delays, and have been thinking about it since I left the theatre. Here we go with a review/reaction.
The thesis, in short: Zack Snyder's Watchmen is wildly ambitious, wildly inconsistent, wildly entertaining, and sometimes just plain wild. I'll recommend it to those with a stomach for graphic violence and an appetite for an unconventional, thoughtful, and visually stunning comic book adaptation. I think it stops well short of being the finest comic-to-screen translation; your mileage may vary.
As anyone who's familiar with his previous funnybook opus, 300, should know - and that's nearly all of the audience who's going to be seeing Watchmen, I'm sure - Zack Snyder thrives on excess, and viewers of his work should not really expect much in the way of subtlety. I'm pleased to report, though, that in contrast, Watchmen does deliver satisfying narrative(s), layered characters with real psychology, exploration of some pretty heavy themes, and plenty of actual acting. Oh, and there are lots of subtle bits, really, but that has more to do with what Snyder includes in the dense mise en scene of every shot, not to mention the excellent efforts of a great cast, than the tone of the story that Snyder submits for our viewing pleasure.
Much of this has to do, of course, with the difference of source material. Frank Miller and Alan Moore arguably represent the two poles of the graphic-novel-as-literature trend of the last 25 years or so. Whereas Miller embraces the pulpy roots of the genre, Moore reaches outside the comic canon to comment on what the comics are about. Neither is necessarily more valid than the other, and it's probably a matter of individual taste as to which is going to push your buttons. I suspect that Miller's bookshelves are full of the likes of Mickey Spillane and Robert E. Howard, whereas Moore's collection probably more closely resembles that of a college English professor.
Moore's writing rewards the literate reader with a dense catalogue of references and relationships to other literary works. This is, after all, a guy who name-drops Thomas Pynchon in V for Vendetta and based his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series on a crossover collection of the adventure novel heroes of Victorian England. Watchmen gives us a similar palimpsest of source material and meta-commentary -- for example, anyone who took a survey course in Brit Lit would, I hope, instantly recognize the name Ozymandias, appropriated by the would-be leader of the titular group of "costumed avengers," and be prepared to understand the psychology of that character.
WIth that said, here's a caveat: I actually haven't read the Watchmen graphic novel; I've spent the last several months wanting to do so without taking any concrete action to get it done -- so I can only truly comment on the content and presentation of the film.
Zack Snyder happily jumps on board and translates the literary system of references of Moore to filmic references that fit within his own creative "language." It's hard to miss, but fortunately easy to appreciate, Snyder's shout-outs to Kubrick and Coppola, among others, throughout the film. Coming from the world of commercials, like the Scott Brothers, Snyder is a polished visualist whose work shows potential of achieving some of the notoriety and significance of, say, some of Ridley's better works. He certainly displays every bit as much boldness of style, and a truly interesting perspective. There are other visualists out there whose work I'm hardly ever interested in, despite its slickness and beauty - Michael Bay being potentially the worst of them. Watchmen is as engagingly three-dimensional as 300 was deliberately two-dimensional, and both, it is obvious now, were carefully made choices. It's amazing to watch, most of the time, with lots of little strokes of visual genius that should make repeat viewing very satisfying -- like the fact that the ever-shifting inkblots on Rorschach's mask get blasted sideways when he gets a wicked blow to the face. One nice touch among hundreds.
It's what Snyder does with his canvas that sometimes proves troublesome, as there seems to be a fundamental tension between how Snyder uses film as narrative and the themes that emerge from Watchmen that clearly demand the audience's thought and attention. Watchmen is a morally ambiguous story, without doubt, and deliberately crafted as such. The members of the eponymous team of heroes - who, if I'm not mistaken, never actually seem to form a team in the way we're used to seeing superhero squads like the X-Men or Justice League - are difficult to relate to, across the board. They have all made serious moral and ethical compromises that would make your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man vomit, and that Batman would find utterly repellent even in his most anti-social mood. From a trigger-happy, smiley-face sporting mercenary to a hubristic captain of industry to a superhuman whose very existence is becoming increasingly detached from Earthly concerns, these are not people who inspire you with a sense of comfort and security when they come to save the day. (That's not even mentioning a couple of comparitively normal, likeable characters who quite literally seem to get off on their costumed heroics.) When the arguable moral compass of the film turns out to be a psychopath - more than one reviewer has compared the bitter, pronoun-shunning vigilante Rorschach to Travis Bickle, and I have to agree - you know you're not dealing with an easily parsed tale of good vs. evil. This is fine and in fact much more interesting to me than a work whose moral perspective is spelled out in absolute terms.
The trouble is that Snyder's storytelling style seems really to have more in common with the pulpy, cynical, and heavy-handed satire of Frank Miller, not to mention his tendency to overload visually on gore and skin. Snyder's more-is-more approach compromises the film in at least two ways:
First, the presentation of violence in Watchmen is frequently just gratuitous and excessive. It's tasteless, really, and I can't find much justification for it in most of the places where it occurs. When something bloody happens, we see it in lurid detail, often in slow motion; we don't get the benefit of a discreet cut to blood spattering on the wall or other useful film euphemisms that help us get the picture without losing our lunch. My buddy Brian G. is not what I'd call squeamish, but I heard frequent expressions of astonishment at some of the more shocking incidents coming from his seat throughout the movie. There's also plenty of flesh on display in Watchmen - be prepared for full-frontal male nudity, folks - but that's not really as troublesome to me, despite a few places where I thought some judicious editing might have been just fine. I'm no prude, mind you, but such things didn't really seem like they had a legit place in this story.
Second, the social and political overtones of Watchmen are played very heavy-handedly, in so outrageous and cartoonish a fashion that it actually makes the "big picture" of the film's world difficult to care about or take seriously. As I'm sure you're aware by now, Watchmen takes place in a fictional 1985 in which the cold war rages, but the US won Vietnam thanks to the direct intervention of one of the superheroes in our story, and Richard Nixon is serving his fourth term as President as a result. It's an interesting if dated premise, which still allows for lots of interesting exploration of world relations, war, and nuclear brinksmanship that defined the second half of the 20th century . . . and to reveal a few things about our own time. (It's impossible not to notice the presence of the World Trade towers in several key shots of the New York skyline, and think about them in a contemporary context.) However, these are played very broadly, as though we'd miss the point if we didn't see a jowl-shaking, pointy-nosed, gruff-talking Nixon cartoon (really a terrible acting job), or call out the names of '80s cultural icons like Pat Buchanan and Lee Iaccoca. As such, it's pretty hard to get involved emotionally with the fate of the world - and make no mistake, the fate of the world does hang in the balance, as with many a superhero saga.
I would identify these as the most obvious obstacles to my own appreciation of the film. On the whole, an inconsistency of presentation seems to be the rule in many more ways than these, but oddly it's not always jarring. The film as a whole is indeed a byzantine weave of many different stories, which in some ways demand very different telling. At many individual points of the film, the style employed at that precise moment seems just right, but fitting it in with some of the other portions proves challenging. The parts are almost all outstanding; it's the whole that I'm having difficulty reconciling. It may be equal to the sum of the parts, but it is certainly not greater.
Maybe the best barometer of this is the music, which seems to split into as many different places and identities as does the quantum-displaced Dr. Manhattan, the only character in this work whose powers are truly super. I'm more attuned to music than I am to some other elements, admittedly, and I think there are many choices that seem to fit perfectly within their local context of the scene they're in. Others just jar you right out of the picture. Several '80s pop tunes are used, presumably to remind us of the time period we're dealing with, but I'm hard pressed to figure out what exactly 99 Luftbaloons has to say about anything in the story. (There's also a fairly cheesy use of Leonard Cohen.) Then again, we get a few blasts from the '60s, as Simon and Garfunkel make a difficult-to-explain appearance, and two Bob Dylan tunes actually do make noteworthy contributions.
Maybe the best use of music from another source comes in the wonderful sequence that deals with the history of Dr. Manhattan, in which Philip Glass's moody, brainy work from Koyaanisqatsi and Einstein on the Beach* is employed to great effect. What better to describe this character, the product of nuclear displacement from time and space, than music that dispenses with ordinary ideas of how time should be experienced, not to mention the fact that both sources originally dealt with subject matter very closely tied to the nuclear age. Meanwhile, the original score components composed by Tyler Bates are featured in comparatively little of the film and leave no lasting impact, doing little to tie the remaining parts together or establish any unifying themes - something that this film really, really needs.
Maybe it's the ultimate irony that the central theme of the story of Watchmen comes down to understanding how things come apart and are put back together - but failing, arguably, to achieve the latter in a meaningful way. Maybe it's an obvious connection, but William Butler Yeats seems to haunt the film - and maybe even inspired the graphic novel:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Ultimately, the center of Watchmen does not hold -- but it is beautiful and thought-provoking to watch things fall apart throughout the film, upending everything you might expect about a traditional superhero narrative, which moves in precisely the other direction from chaos to certainty. (That is, unless you're talking about The Dark Knight, the "happy" ending of which contains an unpleasant irony that's somewhere in the same league as where Watchmen leaves us, albeit on a much different scale.) It's an astonishing mess that I fully intend to see again, and any decision on whether Dr. Manhattan can put it back together will have to wait until I can read the book.
*If I'm not very much mistaken. IMDb doesn't yet have information on the source material and I didn't stick around to see the specifics listed in the credits.
The thesis, in short: Zack Snyder's Watchmen is wildly ambitious, wildly inconsistent, wildly entertaining, and sometimes just plain wild. I'll recommend it to those with a stomach for graphic violence and an appetite for an unconventional, thoughtful, and visually stunning comic book adaptation. I think it stops well short of being the finest comic-to-screen translation; your mileage may vary.
As anyone who's familiar with his previous funnybook opus, 300, should know - and that's nearly all of the audience who's going to be seeing Watchmen, I'm sure - Zack Snyder thrives on excess, and viewers of his work should not really expect much in the way of subtlety. I'm pleased to report, though, that in contrast, Watchmen does deliver satisfying narrative(s), layered characters with real psychology, exploration of some pretty heavy themes, and plenty of actual acting. Oh, and there are lots of subtle bits, really, but that has more to do with what Snyder includes in the dense mise en scene of every shot, not to mention the excellent efforts of a great cast, than the tone of the story that Snyder submits for our viewing pleasure.
Much of this has to do, of course, with the difference of source material. Frank Miller and Alan Moore arguably represent the two poles of the graphic-novel-as-literature trend of the last 25 years or so. Whereas Miller embraces the pulpy roots of the genre, Moore reaches outside the comic canon to comment on what the comics are about. Neither is necessarily more valid than the other, and it's probably a matter of individual taste as to which is going to push your buttons. I suspect that Miller's bookshelves are full of the likes of Mickey Spillane and Robert E. Howard, whereas Moore's collection probably more closely resembles that of a college English professor.
Moore's writing rewards the literate reader with a dense catalogue of references and relationships to other literary works. This is, after all, a guy who name-drops Thomas Pynchon in V for Vendetta and based his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series on a crossover collection of the adventure novel heroes of Victorian England. Watchmen gives us a similar palimpsest of source material and meta-commentary -- for example, anyone who took a survey course in Brit Lit would, I hope, instantly recognize the name Ozymandias, appropriated by the would-be leader of the titular group of "costumed avengers," and be prepared to understand the psychology of that character.
WIth that said, here's a caveat: I actually haven't read the Watchmen graphic novel; I've spent the last several months wanting to do so without taking any concrete action to get it done -- so I can only truly comment on the content and presentation of the film.
Zack Snyder happily jumps on board and translates the literary system of references of Moore to filmic references that fit within his own creative "language." It's hard to miss, but fortunately easy to appreciate, Snyder's shout-outs to Kubrick and Coppola, among others, throughout the film. Coming from the world of commercials, like the Scott Brothers, Snyder is a polished visualist whose work shows potential of achieving some of the notoriety and significance of, say, some of Ridley's better works. He certainly displays every bit as much boldness of style, and a truly interesting perspective. There are other visualists out there whose work I'm hardly ever interested in, despite its slickness and beauty - Michael Bay being potentially the worst of them. Watchmen is as engagingly three-dimensional as 300 was deliberately two-dimensional, and both, it is obvious now, were carefully made choices. It's amazing to watch, most of the time, with lots of little strokes of visual genius that should make repeat viewing very satisfying -- like the fact that the ever-shifting inkblots on Rorschach's mask get blasted sideways when he gets a wicked blow to the face. One nice touch among hundreds.
It's what Snyder does with his canvas that sometimes proves troublesome, as there seems to be a fundamental tension between how Snyder uses film as narrative and the themes that emerge from Watchmen that clearly demand the audience's thought and attention. Watchmen is a morally ambiguous story, without doubt, and deliberately crafted as such. The members of the eponymous team of heroes - who, if I'm not mistaken, never actually seem to form a team in the way we're used to seeing superhero squads like the X-Men or Justice League - are difficult to relate to, across the board. They have all made serious moral and ethical compromises that would make your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man vomit, and that Batman would find utterly repellent even in his most anti-social mood. From a trigger-happy, smiley-face sporting mercenary to a hubristic captain of industry to a superhuman whose very existence is becoming increasingly detached from Earthly concerns, these are not people who inspire you with a sense of comfort and security when they come to save the day. (That's not even mentioning a couple of comparitively normal, likeable characters who quite literally seem to get off on their costumed heroics.) When the arguable moral compass of the film turns out to be a psychopath - more than one reviewer has compared the bitter, pronoun-shunning vigilante Rorschach to Travis Bickle, and I have to agree - you know you're not dealing with an easily parsed tale of good vs. evil. This is fine and in fact much more interesting to me than a work whose moral perspective is spelled out in absolute terms.
The trouble is that Snyder's storytelling style seems really to have more in common with the pulpy, cynical, and heavy-handed satire of Frank Miller, not to mention his tendency to overload visually on gore and skin. Snyder's more-is-more approach compromises the film in at least two ways:
First, the presentation of violence in Watchmen is frequently just gratuitous and excessive. It's tasteless, really, and I can't find much justification for it in most of the places where it occurs. When something bloody happens, we see it in lurid detail, often in slow motion; we don't get the benefit of a discreet cut to blood spattering on the wall or other useful film euphemisms that help us get the picture without losing our lunch. My buddy Brian G. is not what I'd call squeamish, but I heard frequent expressions of astonishment at some of the more shocking incidents coming from his seat throughout the movie. There's also plenty of flesh on display in Watchmen - be prepared for full-frontal male nudity, folks - but that's not really as troublesome to me, despite a few places where I thought some judicious editing might have been just fine. I'm no prude, mind you, but such things didn't really seem like they had a legit place in this story.
Second, the social and political overtones of Watchmen are played very heavy-handedly, in so outrageous and cartoonish a fashion that it actually makes the "big picture" of the film's world difficult to care about or take seriously. As I'm sure you're aware by now, Watchmen takes place in a fictional 1985 in which the cold war rages, but the US won Vietnam thanks to the direct intervention of one of the superheroes in our story, and Richard Nixon is serving his fourth term as President as a result. It's an interesting if dated premise, which still allows for lots of interesting exploration of world relations, war, and nuclear brinksmanship that defined the second half of the 20th century . . . and to reveal a few things about our own time. (It's impossible not to notice the presence of the World Trade towers in several key shots of the New York skyline, and think about them in a contemporary context.) However, these are played very broadly, as though we'd miss the point if we didn't see a jowl-shaking, pointy-nosed, gruff-talking Nixon cartoon (really a terrible acting job), or call out the names of '80s cultural icons like Pat Buchanan and Lee Iaccoca. As such, it's pretty hard to get involved emotionally with the fate of the world - and make no mistake, the fate of the world does hang in the balance, as with many a superhero saga.
I would identify these as the most obvious obstacles to my own appreciation of the film. On the whole, an inconsistency of presentation seems to be the rule in many more ways than these, but oddly it's not always jarring. The film as a whole is indeed a byzantine weave of many different stories, which in some ways demand very different telling. At many individual points of the film, the style employed at that precise moment seems just right, but fitting it in with some of the other portions proves challenging. The parts are almost all outstanding; it's the whole that I'm having difficulty reconciling. It may be equal to the sum of the parts, but it is certainly not greater.
Maybe the best barometer of this is the music, which seems to split into as many different places and identities as does the quantum-displaced Dr. Manhattan, the only character in this work whose powers are truly super. I'm more attuned to music than I am to some other elements, admittedly, and I think there are many choices that seem to fit perfectly within their local context of the scene they're in. Others just jar you right out of the picture. Several '80s pop tunes are used, presumably to remind us of the time period we're dealing with, but I'm hard pressed to figure out what exactly 99 Luftbaloons has to say about anything in the story. (There's also a fairly cheesy use of Leonard Cohen.) Then again, we get a few blasts from the '60s, as Simon and Garfunkel make a difficult-to-explain appearance, and two Bob Dylan tunes actually do make noteworthy contributions.
Maybe the best use of music from another source comes in the wonderful sequence that deals with the history of Dr. Manhattan, in which Philip Glass's moody, brainy work from Koyaanisqatsi and Einstein on the Beach* is employed to great effect. What better to describe this character, the product of nuclear displacement from time and space, than music that dispenses with ordinary ideas of how time should be experienced, not to mention the fact that both sources originally dealt with subject matter very closely tied to the nuclear age. Meanwhile, the original score components composed by Tyler Bates are featured in comparatively little of the film and leave no lasting impact, doing little to tie the remaining parts together or establish any unifying themes - something that this film really, really needs.
Maybe it's the ultimate irony that the central theme of the story of Watchmen comes down to understanding how things come apart and are put back together - but failing, arguably, to achieve the latter in a meaningful way. Maybe it's an obvious connection, but William Butler Yeats seems to haunt the film - and maybe even inspired the graphic novel:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Ultimately, the center of Watchmen does not hold -- but it is beautiful and thought-provoking to watch things fall apart throughout the film, upending everything you might expect about a traditional superhero narrative, which moves in precisely the other direction from chaos to certainty. (That is, unless you're talking about The Dark Knight, the "happy" ending of which contains an unpleasant irony that's somewhere in the same league as where Watchmen leaves us, albeit on a much different scale.) It's an astonishing mess that I fully intend to see again, and any decision on whether Dr. Manhattan can put it back together will have to wait until I can read the book.
*If I'm not very much mistaken. IMDb doesn't yet have information on the source material and I didn't stick around to see the specifics listed in the credits.