Watchmen

In advance, I expected that I'd be giving the Watchmen adaptation all kinds of leeway to please me. After all, everyone agrees that the book isn't the most adaptation-friendly material so for it even to get Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' classic partly right would seem like a really neat feat. But while the first sight of a black Warner Bros. logo against a yellow background had me feeling that I was in for something special, as it turns out whatever slack I was willing to cut director Zack Synder and co. evaporated awfully quick - like by about the twenty five minute mark. There's so much I disliked about this movie, it's hard to pinpoint what turned me off the most but ultimately I just never felt involved with anything happening on screen. It felt more like a comic book than the comic book itself, a work so artificial and stylized that it was impossible to see its characters as real. And in condensing the comic's sprawling storyline, Watchmen the movie becomes too cramped with incidents to have a natural flow to its narrative and because of that, nothing that happens ever has any weight to it - not even the threat of doomsday.

Among the bigger issues I had with the movie was its violence. I'm all for gratuitous cinematic bloodshed but the adolescent glee that Zack Synder shows here for bone-breaking and meat cleavers to the head only points to why he was the altogether wrong choice for this film. He gets off on the fight scenes (every hero here is some kind of kung fu master, by the way - which might make some viewers unfamiliar with the comic wonder if all of these costumed characters are supposed to have superpowers) and the gore - but whenever someone isn't being beaten, dismembered or scalded, there's a lack of conviction. Even worse, for all the violence in the film he's unable to portray any of it as being truly harrowing. Rorschach's origin, which should close on a true heart of darkness moment, instead ends with a splatter gag that belongs in a Friday the 13th movie (a damn good Friday the 13th movie, yes, but a Friday the 13th movie nonetheless). Synder even caps the climatic death of a major character with a gore punchline. Several reviewers have cited the reflective Dr. Manhattan on Mars sequence as proving that Synder has more up his sleeve than just an eye for stylized violence but outside of the fact that this sequence is recreated almost verbatim from the comic - leaving little room for Synder to contribute his own vision - I feel that sequence missed capturing the original life-affirming poetry of that celebrated issue. Like the rest of the film (save for Jackie Earle Haley's indelible performance as Rorschach and Jeffrey Dean Morgan's equally strong turn as The Comedian), it feels wooden.

And although one of Moore's key points with Watchmen was that these self-styled superheroes were actually pathetic (as Dr. Manhattan remarks at one point: "...friendly middle-aged men who like to dress up..."), Synder is unwilling to be totally true to that. It may be hip to love Watchmen now but it's always been a story about uncool people and I don't think Synder understands how to do uncool. Under Synder's direction, a character like Laurie Juspeczyk aka Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman) is portrayed as being what her comic book counterpart can only imagine she is - slick, sexy, dangerous. As Moore wrote these characters, they didn't turn into conventional superheroes when they put their costumes on. Moore showed psychological acuity, revealing his characters to be ridiculous in how they used their super ID's to compensate for their (sometimes literal) shortcomings. One of the lines of the comic that always stuck with me was the observation of a policemen while Rorschach was being arrested that "the runt wears elevator shoes!" - it showed Rorschach's arrest to be a personal humiliation, tearing away his mystique as a fearsome vigilante. It's those moments that made the book and it's the absence of them that keeps the movie from coming to life.

Before seeing the movie, I thought everything about it looked terrific, that Synder clearly understood the book. But his take on the material is a limited one - the work of someone who is in love with the surface of Watchmen as a book that was racier and more violent than other comics of its era. While the graphic novel was a leap forward in maturity for the comic medium, the movie - for all its technical proficiency - is a case of arrested development.