Review: Watchmen (1/5)

Watchmen
(Zack Snyder):
Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode, Carla Gugino, Jackie Earle Haley, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Patrick Wilson
Running time: 161 minutes

A couple of moments into Watchmen, the much-anticipated Zack Snyder adaptation of the revered graphic novel, a US army general turns the hand of a doomsday clock a minute closer to Armageddon. It takes a while to notice, but the clock is slow. Doomsday actually started just a few minutes before and it lasts for exactly 161 minutes – not quite as long as the Book of Revelation would suggest, but long enough.
Snyder, a second-rate director with a third-rate mind, has lovingly recreated Watchmen’s neo-noir surface with a rich, glossy polish. And he has honoured the comic’s complex structure at the complete cost of his film. The graphic novel – set in 1985 in a parallel universe where America has lost its soul – has become a film without soul, as vapid as the world its writer, Alan Moore, was annihilating. It’s as if Daniel Plainview’s straw reached across the room and sucked all Watchmen’s milkshake.
The opening credits are a breeze: a smooth montage through an alternative history of America. We see Andy Warhol painting superheroes instead of Campbell’s soup; Vietnam ending in a US victory; a blue man (AKA Dr Manhattan) being the first person on the moon; while Nixon steers America ever closer to nuclear war with Russia. Poor Nixon can’t get a break. We’ve just seen David Frost twiddle his nose in Frost/Nixon and now he’s being blamed for having forced the Watchmen vigilantes into retirement. When one of them is murdered – the amoral Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) – Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), a pathological private eye, sniffs out a scheme where costumed superheroes are being picked off to clear the way for a fiendish mass-murder plot.
Rorschach wears a mask that looks like a dirty dishcloth and growls deep in a voice like he eats Dark Knight DVDs for breakfast. There’s Daniel Dreiberg, or Night Owl II, a techno-geek caped crusader lonely in middle-age and played with blank eyes by Patrick Wilson; there’s Matthew Goode’s Ozymandias, a gymnastic billionaire who turned his hero into a corporate franchise; there’s Doctor Manhattan (Billy Crudup), who is technically the only superhero as he has genuine powers – he fizzes blue phosphorescence and can rearrange molecular matter at will after a lab accident in the 1950s. And then there’s Malin Akerman’s Laurie Jupitor, AKA Silk Spectre II, who looks like she’s been poured from a foaming alchemy beaker into a latex lingerie costume.
Akerman, an actress with a number of calamitous comedies under her belt, now sports a cleavered fringe and mahogany hair. She is indeed a beautiful woman, which is a useful distraction, because she can’t act for nuts. She has the cool possession of a small mammal caught unexpectedly in front of oncoming traffic.
But if you remember 300, you’ll know Snyder has never been much good with actors. Or feelings. Or anything remotely human. He just wants sexy carnage. In a flashback, the Comedian is asked about the American dream. “It came true; you’re looking at it,” he says. And the film plays into a loss of faith in American idealism where caped crusaders are amoral, perhaps even evil. We see the Comedian firing a shotgun into a crowd with his tongue hanging out, and Snyder, too, directs with his tongue wobbling. The camera indulges in excessive, grotesque violence that I don’t remember from the novel. The joint of an arm is snapped in two; a child murderer has his head chopped in half. It stinks of misogyny. In a flashback, we watch an attempted rape where moments before, the camera glides over the woman’s lingerie-clad body with slathering tongue. In cinematic terms, it’s as close to saying she was asking for it. A pregnant woman is shot dead. A woman is doused head to toe in blood. The camera looks on with manic glee. Where Alan Moore wrote a superhero book for adults, Snyder delivers a film for 14-year-old boys.
It seems no surprise the film can’t settle on tone. It strives for seriousness and then, in a Vietnam flashback, slips into a silly parody of Apocalypse Now with ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ and helicopters thumping the soundtrack. And what about that cringing sex scene where Night Owl II and Silk Spectre II get it off? It’s a constellation of cheese: a full moon beams into the bedroom while two other full moons shine on the bed; then Leonard Cohen, who would put anyone off their game, erupts into ‘Hallelujah’ when the couple reach their peak.
Snyder wants to observe the multi-layered novel to the point that he entombs his own film. Where the movie needs hurtling forward momentum and snap and swing in the rhythm section, it instead grinds to a halt, turning again and again to lumbering back-story to explain who’s who and how they got there.
To read Watchmen is to relive the Cold War anxieties of its age. It drips doom. Snyder slips in a reference to global warming but the film has no atmosphere, no sense of dread. It’s all surface tension. The grim finale of Moore’s deconstructive novel was an obituary for superheroes. Snyder tweaks his self-destructive film to slip in a suggestion for a superhero sequel. The shame.