•Genre: Action/Adventure, Drama, SciFi/Fantasy
•Running Time: 163 min.
•Director: Zack Snyder
•Writer: Alex Tse, Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons
•Release Date: 5 March 2009
•Cast: Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode, Carla Gugino, Jackie Earle Haley, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Patrick Wilson
Synapsis
When one of his former colleagues is murdered, the outlawed, but no less determined, masked vigilante Rorschach sets out to uncover a plot to kill and discredit all past and present superheroes. As he reconnects with his former crime-fighting legion--a disbanded group of retired superheroes, only one of whom has true powers--Rorschach glimpses a wide-ranging and disturbing conspiracy with links to their shared past and catastrophic consequences for the future. Their mission is to watch over humanity--but who is watching the Watchmen?
An ex-superhero is thrown through a plate glass window, many stories above the city. Was his murder somehow connected to the feared imminent nuclear holocaust between the United States and Russia? Someone seems to want the former do-gooders out of the way in this thrilling, one-of-a-kind, jaded look at superheroes that turns conventional comic-book wisdom on its head.
It's an alternate 1985. Richard Nixon has been elected to a fifth presidential term. But the USSR is encroaching on Afghanistan, and the US isn't taking too kindly to it. Enter the smartest man in the world, Adrian Veidt (Matthew Goode), formerly known as superhero Ozymandias, who is working with the ethereal Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), a physicist who has achieved immortality and near-omniscience owing to a long-ago lab mishap. With Dr. Manhattan's help, Adrian hopes to dissolve the tension between the two superpowers.
But that's not the only conflict, not by a long shot. Since the characters here are unfamiliar to most audiences, there's plenty of backstory, seamlessly edited into the main story as important details that inform the characters. (For one thing, we get to see the rather graphic - more on that later - origin of Dr. Manhattan.) The superheroes have conflict within their own group, which has gone its separate ways - with different goals and outlooks. Not only that, but the world at large isn't entirely on the side of masked avengers, labeling them as vigilantes. By the present, most of them have ditched their costumes for traditional lives; some tinker with their gadgets in their basements, in hiding, and some merely blend into society.
Here's who's left in 1985, in addition to Ozymandias (who's revealed his true identity to the world) and Dr. Manhattan: Nite Owl II (Patrick Wilson), Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman), and The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). Others have gone insane or been murdered themselves in years past; all suffer as everyday humans now.
So how does Watchmen skewer comic-book tropes? Well, they're not always good, you see. Some are, but some maliciously kill, albeit for the greater good. Some take delight in the suffering of man if that man is, say, a child killer. That sort of thing. The truth is, no one here is perfect, not even the superheroes. Another difference is the high level of violence in the movie. This isn't a comic-book movie where the bad guys fall down when they get slapped, no sir. No, the heroes beat the stuffing out of them, with blood, entrails, and the like splattering all over the place. Limbs are dislodged, brains are exposed. It's wildly violent, much like director Zack Snyder's last film, 300, but without the detached, this-can't-be-real tone. This isn't a movie in which the bad guys are brought in for questioning or sent to prison to think about what they've done. This is a movie in which the bad guys are annihilated, period.
In case you're still contemplating taking the kiddies to see this superhero fare, here's another caveat: there's nudity. No, it's not Malin Akerman (although you do get a glimpse), it's the blue-hued Dr. Manhattan himself. Sometimes he's in a thong, but often he's just letting it all dangle there. Funny thing is, it's not really all that shocking. If it'd been one of the humans, perhaps, but Dr. Manhattan is more humanoid than human at this point.
At 160 minutes, the action really doesn't let up. But that's nothing - most movies are fast paced now. This one has a plot that can keep up with the action. In fact, the intricacies of the plot are delicious to unwrap; this was not a movie - superhero or not - where you can predict the end without just taking a wild stab.
I can't understate how tremendous an achievement this movie is. If we're all lucky, this will open the door for more adult comic-book films. The good guys don't always have to be about justice and truth and all that junk, and the bad guys can sometimes get what's really coming to them. I do want to point out that among the outstanding cast, Jackie Earle Haley as the haunted, masked Rorschach is tremendous. Wilson, who appeared with Haley in Little Children a few years back, is also dweebishly strong as the aging Nite Owl II.
Character
Ozymandias (Matthew Goode)
The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan)
Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley)
Nite Owl II (Patrick Wilson)
Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman)
Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup)
Movie Review
For a Cold War, a Blue Superhero (and Friends)
The only character in “Watchmen” who possesses actual superpowers — resulting from an accident at a top-secret government research lab in the late 1950s — is Dr. Manhattan, a blue, bald, naked dude with blank eyes and the voice of Billy Crudup. Dr. Manhattan’s existence is busy and fairly melancholy, but I do envy him his ability to perceive every moment of past and future time as a part of a continuous present.
If I had that power, the 2 hours 40 minutes of Zack Snyder’s grim and grisly excursion into comic-book mythology might not have felt quite so interminable. (“It will never end,” says Dr. Manhattan. “Nothing ever ends.” No indeed.) Also, an enhanced temporal perspective would make it possible to watch “Watchmen” not in 2009 but back in 1985, when the story takes place, and when the movie might have made at least a little more sense.
The original graphic novel, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, was published by DC in 1986 and ’87, first serially and then in a single volume, and it quickly gained a following in discriminating geek circles. The book was very much a product of its moment, both in the history of comics — which were scouting new horizons of complexity and thematic ambition — and in the wider world that “Watchmen” mirrored.
Mr. Moore and Mr. Gibbons confected a dour alternative chronology of cold-war America, defined by victory in Vietnam, an endless Nixon presidency, nuclear brinkmanship and pervasive social rot. At the same time, they offered a self-conscious critique of the national preoccupation with muscled, masked crime-fighters. Their heroes — the paranoid Rorschach, the shy Nite Owl II, the coldly post-human Dr. Manhattan and various other colleagues and rivals — were violent, ambivalent, treacherous and vain, even though they also seemed to be uniquely capable of saving the world from ultimate catastrophe.
Somewhat remarkably, Mr. Snyder’s film freezes its frame of reference in the 1980s, preserving the dank, downcast, revanchist spirit of the original and adding a few period-specific grace notes of its own, including time-capsule references to Lee Iacocca and “The McLaughlin Group.” There is also a nod of homage in the direction of “Apocalypse Now” and a soundtrack heavy with the baby-boomer anthems that still echoed in the ears of Reagan-era adolescents.
Indeed, the ideal viewer — or reviewer, as the case may be — of the “Watchmen” movie would probably be a mid-’80s college sophomore with a smattering of Nietzsche, an extensive record collection and a comic-book nerd for a roommate. The film’s carefully preserved themes of apocalypse and decay might have proved powerfully unsettling to that anxious undergraduate sitting in his dorm room, listening to “99 Luftballons” and waiting for the world to end or the Berlin Wall to come down.
He would also no doubt have been stirred by the costumes of the female superheroes — Carla Gugino and Malin Akerman, both gamely giving solid performances — who sensibly accessorize their shoulder-padded spandex leotards with garter belts and high-heeled boots. And the dense involution of the narrative might have seemed exhilarating rather than exhausting.
I’m not sure that this hypothetical young man — not to be confused with the middle-aged, 21st-century moviegoer he most likely grew into, whose old copy of “Watchmen” lies in a box somewhere alongside a dog-eared Penguin Classics edition of “Thus Spake Zarathustra” — would necessarily say that Mr. Snyder’s “Watchmen” is a good movie. I wouldn’t, though it is certainly better than the same director’s “300.” But it’s possible to imagine that our imaginary student would at least have found some food for thought in Mr. Snyder’s grandiose, meticulously art-directed vision of blood, cruelty and metaphysical dread. As it is, the film is more curiosity than provocation, an artifact of a faded world brought to zombie half-life by the cinematic technology of the present.
The title sequence — in which Mr. Moore’s name, at his insistence, does not appear, leaving Mr. Gibbons listed, somewhat absurdly, as a solitary “co-creator” of the graphic novel — seems to acknowledge the project’s anachronistic, nostalgic orientation. As Bob Dylan sings “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” familiar images from the past are altered in ways both subtle and outrageous. Tableaus evoking Andy Warhol, the Zapruder film, Studio 54 and Weegee-style crime scenes commingle with snapshots from the lives of several generations of costumed crusaders. There is a witty pop sensibility evident in these pictures that gets the movie off to a promising start, even though such breeziness works to undermine the ambient gloom of the source material.
That mood returns in full force, though, as Mr. Snyder and the screenwriters, David Hayter and Alex Tse, demonstrate remarkable, at times almost demented, fidelity to the original. Mr. Moore — whose work has been poorly served by movies like “V for Vendetta,” “From Hell” and “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” — has declared that “Watchmen” is impossible to film. Perhaps he meant to say redundant, since there are times that the filmmakers seem to have used his book less as an inspiration than as a storyboard. The inevitable omission of some stuff — a pirate-themed comic-within-the-comic; a mysterious gathering of artists and writers; a giant squid — may rankle die-hard cultists, but the tone of world-weary, self-justifying rage has been faithfully preserved, which may be a problem for everyone else.
“Watchmen” begins with the gory, glass-shattering murder of the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a thuggish soldier of fortune who once helped Dr. Manhattan subdue the Vietcong. This killing sets in motion a series of flashbacks, digressions and long, expository conversations that take us from the grunge of New York City to Antarctica by way of Mars and that reveal a web of complicated relationships among more than a half-dozen major characters.
It turns out that the Comedian, also known as Edward Blake, once tried to rape Silk Spectre (Ms. Gugino), whose daughter, Laurie (Ms. Akerman), a second-generation superhero, lives with Dr. Manhattan and drifts toward an affair with Nite Owl II (Patrick Wilson). Or rather, with Dan Dreiberg, Nite Owl’s nebbishy alter ego, since an act of Congress has outlawed costumed vigilantism. The suave, calculating Ozymandias (Matthew Goode) has managed to find wealth and power in retirement. But no law can deter Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), whose notebook entries serve as voice-over narration and whose clammy, misanthropic worldview dominates the story.
Speaking of acts of congress, “Watchmen” features this year’s hands-down winner of the bad movie sex award, superhero division: a moment of bliss that takes place on board Nite Owl’s nifty little airship, accompanied by Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” (By the way, can we please have a moratorium on the use of this song in movies? Yes, I too have heard there was a secret chord that David played, and blah blah blah, but I don’t want to hear it again. Do you?)
The sex may be laughable, but the violence is another matter. The infliction of pain is rendered in intimate and precise aural and visual detail, from the noise of cracking bones and the gushers of blood and saliva to the splattery deconstruction of entire bodies. But brutality is not merely part of Mr. Snyder’s repertory of effects; it is more like a cause, a principle, an ideology. And his commitment to violence brings into relief the shallow nihilism that has always lurked beneath the intellectual pretensions of “Watchmen.” The only action that makes sense in this world — the only sure basis for ethics or politics, the only expression of love or loyalty or conviction — is killing. And the dramatic conflict revealed, at long last, in the film’s climactic arguments is between a wholesale, idealistic approach to mass death and one that is more cynical and individualistic.
This idea is sickening but also, finally, unpersuasive, because it is rooted in a view of human behavior that is fundamentally immature, self-pitying and sentimental. Perhaps there is some pleasure to be found in regressing into this belligerent, adolescent state of mind. But maybe it’s better to grow up.
“Watchmen” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has extreme violence, a naked blue man and some superhero sex.
For a Cold War, a Blue Superhero (and Friends)
The only character in “Watchmen” who possesses actual superpowers — resulting from an accident at a top-secret government research lab in the late 1950s — is Dr. Manhattan, a blue, bald, naked dude with blank eyes and the voice of Billy Crudup. Dr. Manhattan’s existence is busy and fairly melancholy, but I do envy him his ability to perceive every moment of past and future time as a part of a continuous present.
If I had that power, the 2 hours 40 minutes of Zack Snyder’s grim and grisly excursion into comic-book mythology might not have felt quite so interminable. (“It will never end,” says Dr. Manhattan. “Nothing ever ends.” No indeed.) Also, an enhanced temporal perspective would make it possible to watch “Watchmen” not in 2009 but back in 1985, when the story takes place, and when the movie might have made at least a little more sense.
The original graphic novel, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, was published by DC in 1986 and ’87, first serially and then in a single volume, and it quickly gained a following in discriminating geek circles. The book was very much a product of its moment, both in the history of comics — which were scouting new horizons of complexity and thematic ambition — and in the wider world that “Watchmen” mirrored.
Mr. Moore and Mr. Gibbons confected a dour alternative chronology of cold-war America, defined by victory in Vietnam, an endless Nixon presidency, nuclear brinkmanship and pervasive social rot. At the same time, they offered a self-conscious critique of the national preoccupation with muscled, masked crime-fighters. Their heroes — the paranoid Rorschach, the shy Nite Owl II, the coldly post-human Dr. Manhattan and various other colleagues and rivals — were violent, ambivalent, treacherous and vain, even though they also seemed to be uniquely capable of saving the world from ultimate catastrophe.
Somewhat remarkably, Mr. Snyder’s film freezes its frame of reference in the 1980s, preserving the dank, downcast, revanchist spirit of the original and adding a few period-specific grace notes of its own, including time-capsule references to Lee Iacocca and “The McLaughlin Group.” There is also a nod of homage in the direction of “Apocalypse Now” and a soundtrack heavy with the baby-boomer anthems that still echoed in the ears of Reagan-era adolescents.
Indeed, the ideal viewer — or reviewer, as the case may be — of the “Watchmen” movie would probably be a mid-’80s college sophomore with a smattering of Nietzsche, an extensive record collection and a comic-book nerd for a roommate. The film’s carefully preserved themes of apocalypse and decay might have proved powerfully unsettling to that anxious undergraduate sitting in his dorm room, listening to “99 Luftballons” and waiting for the world to end or the Berlin Wall to come down.
He would also no doubt have been stirred by the costumes of the female superheroes — Carla Gugino and Malin Akerman, both gamely giving solid performances — who sensibly accessorize their shoulder-padded spandex leotards with garter belts and high-heeled boots. And the dense involution of the narrative might have seemed exhilarating rather than exhausting.
I’m not sure that this hypothetical young man — not to be confused with the middle-aged, 21st-century moviegoer he most likely grew into, whose old copy of “Watchmen” lies in a box somewhere alongside a dog-eared Penguin Classics edition of “Thus Spake Zarathustra” — would necessarily say that Mr. Snyder’s “Watchmen” is a good movie. I wouldn’t, though it is certainly better than the same director’s “300.” But it’s possible to imagine that our imaginary student would at least have found some food for thought in Mr. Snyder’s grandiose, meticulously art-directed vision of blood, cruelty and metaphysical dread. As it is, the film is more curiosity than provocation, an artifact of a faded world brought to zombie half-life by the cinematic technology of the present.
The title sequence — in which Mr. Moore’s name, at his insistence, does not appear, leaving Mr. Gibbons listed, somewhat absurdly, as a solitary “co-creator” of the graphic novel — seems to acknowledge the project’s anachronistic, nostalgic orientation. As Bob Dylan sings “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” familiar images from the past are altered in ways both subtle and outrageous. Tableaus evoking Andy Warhol, the Zapruder film, Studio 54 and Weegee-style crime scenes commingle with snapshots from the lives of several generations of costumed crusaders. There is a witty pop sensibility evident in these pictures that gets the movie off to a promising start, even though such breeziness works to undermine the ambient gloom of the source material.
That mood returns in full force, though, as Mr. Snyder and the screenwriters, David Hayter and Alex Tse, demonstrate remarkable, at times almost demented, fidelity to the original. Mr. Moore — whose work has been poorly served by movies like “V for Vendetta,” “From Hell” and “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” — has declared that “Watchmen” is impossible to film. Perhaps he meant to say redundant, since there are times that the filmmakers seem to have used his book less as an inspiration than as a storyboard. The inevitable omission of some stuff — a pirate-themed comic-within-the-comic; a mysterious gathering of artists and writers; a giant squid — may rankle die-hard cultists, but the tone of world-weary, self-justifying rage has been faithfully preserved, which may be a problem for everyone else.
“Watchmen” begins with the gory, glass-shattering murder of the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a thuggish soldier of fortune who once helped Dr. Manhattan subdue the Vietcong. This killing sets in motion a series of flashbacks, digressions and long, expository conversations that take us from the grunge of New York City to Antarctica by way of Mars and that reveal a web of complicated relationships among more than a half-dozen major characters.
It turns out that the Comedian, also known as Edward Blake, once tried to rape Silk Spectre (Ms. Gugino), whose daughter, Laurie (Ms. Akerman), a second-generation superhero, lives with Dr. Manhattan and drifts toward an affair with Nite Owl II (Patrick Wilson). Or rather, with Dan Dreiberg, Nite Owl’s nebbishy alter ego, since an act of Congress has outlawed costumed vigilantism. The suave, calculating Ozymandias (Matthew Goode) has managed to find wealth and power in retirement. But no law can deter Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), whose notebook entries serve as voice-over narration and whose clammy, misanthropic worldview dominates the story.
Speaking of acts of congress, “Watchmen” features this year’s hands-down winner of the bad movie sex award, superhero division: a moment of bliss that takes place on board Nite Owl’s nifty little airship, accompanied by Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” (By the way, can we please have a moratorium on the use of this song in movies? Yes, I too have heard there was a secret chord that David played, and blah blah blah, but I don’t want to hear it again. Do you?)
The sex may be laughable, but the violence is another matter. The infliction of pain is rendered in intimate and precise aural and visual detail, from the noise of cracking bones and the gushers of blood and saliva to the splattery deconstruction of entire bodies. But brutality is not merely part of Mr. Snyder’s repertory of effects; it is more like a cause, a principle, an ideology. And his commitment to violence brings into relief the shallow nihilism that has always lurked beneath the intellectual pretensions of “Watchmen.” The only action that makes sense in this world — the only sure basis for ethics or politics, the only expression of love or loyalty or conviction — is killing. And the dramatic conflict revealed, at long last, in the film’s climactic arguments is between a wholesale, idealistic approach to mass death and one that is more cynical and individualistic.
This idea is sickening but also, finally, unpersuasive, because it is rooted in a view of human behavior that is fundamentally immature, self-pitying and sentimental. Perhaps there is some pleasure to be found in regressing into this belligerent, adolescent state of mind. But maybe it’s better to grow up.
“Watchmen” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has extreme violence, a naked blue man and some superhero sex.
Credit : MREQ SITE
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