Watchmen

When Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's comic book series Watchmen was published in the mid-eighties, it was hailed as a breakthrough in the graphic novel world, and rightly so. A deconstruction of the superhero mythos, plus a commentary on the nature of vigilantism and evil itself, it was even the only graphic novel on Time Magazine's 2005 list of the top 100 works of literature from 1923 to the present.

The film version has been kicking around since then, and in the twenty plus years the material has become horribly dated. Watchmen is set in 1985, during the last stages of the Cold War, when nuclear annihilation was on the minds of many. Today this seems somewhat quaint, sort of like the snort of laughter you might hear if someone were to stand on a soapbox and blast someone as being a communist.

But even if Watchmen is a period piece, it is a turgid, unpleasant one, largely due to a director, Zack Snyder, who is reverential to the source material to the point of seeming to lack an original idea. Let me lay this argument out to start by mentioning the soundtrack, which is laced with songs that are so obvious as to defy understanding. A credit sequence, which gives us a montage to explain the history of costumed superheroes, is set to Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'". A funeral is accompanied by Simon and Garfunkel's "Sounds of Silence" (what--they couldn't get the rights to "Funeral For a Friend"?) and perhaps most criminal is a scene of the war in Vietnam set to Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries. Mr. Snyder, I saw Apocalypse Now in its original release at the Ziegfeld Theater in Manhattan, and you are no Francis Ford Coppola. Finally there's a sex scene accompanied by Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah." Any director who would shoot this scene, look at it, and pronounce it fit for general consumption isn't a director fit to helm a straight-to-DVD American Pie sequel, let alone a film using as complex a source as Watchmen.

The novel and film are set in 1985, in a world where there are costumed superheroes. Well, there are costumed vigilantes--they don't really have super-powers, just neat get-ups and some good fighting moves. The only character with any power is Dr. Manhattan, who was once a physicist but after an accident became a shimmering blue figure with powers approaching god-like status (and is endowed to match). He can manipulate matter, see the past, present and future all at the same time, and teleport anywhere (he likes to get away from it all on Mars). With him on America's side, the Vietnam War ends in victory in a week, and enables Nixon to stay in office (Nixon is portrayed in the film by an actor wearing one of the worst make-up jobs in recent memory).

Despite Dr. Manhattan's help to Nixon, masked vigilantes have been banned, so those who were still in operation have retired, except for one, a right-wing sociopath called Rorschach, who wears a mask that has an ever-changing pattern of inkblots. Rorschach doesn't coddle criminals, he's more likely to bury cleavers in their skulls. When another former superhero, a bloodthirsty psycho who calls himself The Comedian, gets thrown out of his penthouse apartment, Rorschach suspects someone is after them all, so he goes to his former mates, who include a dweebish Batman-like type who calls himself Nite Owl, a sexy girl (and Dr. Manhattan's gal pal) the Silk Spectre, and "the smartest man in the world," who goes by the code-name Ozymandias, and has a research facility in Antarctica.

Because the Watchmen comics were so labyrinthian, the resulting screenplay is faithful but bare-boned. Missing are two subplots, a Pirate comic-book called Tales of the Black Freighter and a history of early superheroes called Under the Hood, both of which are being released separately on DVD (and will be included in an extended version of Watchmen). The bare bones, though, are still almost three hours long, but didn't need to be. Snyder can not be called an economical fillmmaker. He is in love with slow-motion, and hammering home points so that even a simpleton could understand. Some scenes intercut with the Comedian's funeral are an example. How many times do we need to see rain pelting the gloomy funeral-goers? And the film's coda, which was accomplished in the comic book in one panel, Snyder manages to drag out to about three minutes of film.

There are problems that would vex the finest of directors, though. As stated, the world is a different place than in 1985, so the Soviet stuff comes across like old people telling us about the days when there was no TV. Also, there's just something inherently silly about seeing superheroes off of the comic book page and in live action. Can we really believe that no one knew the secret identities of these people, even though some of them barely wore masks? Would anyone take seriously a superhero called Nite Owl, who flew an airship called Archimedes? Some of this material doesn't transcend the realm of greasy kid stuff. And what to do as an actor when you're called on to say lines like, "It's tough all over, cupcake, it rains on the just and the unjust," or "What happened to the American dream?"

As for the actors, some hold their own and avoid embarrassment. Patrick Wilson, as the Owlish one, seems almost embarrassed from the start. Jeffrey Dean Morgan, made up to look like J. Johan Jameson, has a lot of fun with the Comedian, and Jackie Earle Haley is quite good as Rorschach (although he's stolen Christian Bale's Batman whisper). Not fairing so well are Malin Akerman, horribly wooden as Silk Spectre and Matthew Goode, too smarmy by far as Ozymandias. As for Billy Crudup, well, he has to play the part of a being who has lost most of his humanity, so his flat line readings are perfectly appropriate, I suppose.

I read Watchmen back in '88, and I'd forgotten most of the details, but seeing the film brought many of the vivid images back, such as dogs fighting over the bones of a murdered child. I'm tempted to pull it off the shelf and read it again--it may take less time than sitting through the movie.