Here's draft 1 of my review: fair warning, it's a little long--so don't read it if you're pressed for time. However, comments are appreciated, as it's not due until to-morrow A.M.
One of the recurring motifs in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ graphic novel Watchmen is an ad for ladies’ perfume that appears here and there on billboards and in television advertisements. The fragrance is called “Nostalgia”—and it is a fitting place to begin talking about Zach Snyder’s springtime offering of the same name, a nearly 3 hour adaptation of Watchmen to the silver screen that winds up feeling less like a superhero movie and more a movie that longs for the past—like a kind of love letter to the 1980s.
Snyder, part of the creative team that brought us 300, doesn’t exactly have the sort of resume that inspires confidence of a steady directorial hand—and like his last film, Watchmen has a few too many Michael-Bay-esque slow-motion action sequences, and not enough close-in character studies to allow the virtuosic performance of Jackie Earle Haley to shine in the way that we sense it might have. On the plus side, there is much less yelling—and many of the twists and turns of Moore’s Byzantine plot are recreated faithfully (with one gigantic exception, which I’ll avoid spoiling here). In the end, it’s an enjoyable movie, well-paced and well-photographed and (mostly) well acted. But the problem is that its devotion to the visual iconography of the original comic book—and indeed, to the 1980s more generally—makes of this film precisely the sort of “nostalgia” that Moore implicitly critiqued by depicting “longing for a distant past” as the sort of impulse that can be patented, bottled and sold to a waiting army of suckers, desperate to be told what they should consume.
Fans of the graphic novel will likely approach this film with perhaps the least interesting question that can be asked about it: is it faithful enough? This is understandable. After all, many of these young people have been waiting for this film, we may say, for their entire literary lives. Watchmen is a graphic novel that inspires missionary zeal; it is passed around with the hushed reverence of a sacred ritual, and the world is divided accordingly into the rapt faith of those who see Watchmen as a virtuosic expansion of the possibilities of the graphic novel and the sad apostasy of those who decry its misogyny, its ultra-violence, its moral simplicity and its utter lack of characters with redeeming qualities of any kind.
And is it faithful? Mostly yes, with a few crucial omissions and one huge exception. But the spirit of Moore’s novel is lost in the sands of time, and Snyder’s film makes almost no attempt to retrieve it. Snyder’s Watchmen elegizes the aesthetics of the 1980s—and the soundtrack, which includes every youth anthem from Bob Dylan’s “The Times They are a’ Changin” to Nena’s Cold War protest song “99 Luftballons” is a heavy-handed accompaniment to a movie that is likewise about the impending threat of nuclear holocaust. And this may be why Snyder’s tribute to Moore comes up a little short of the profundity of the original: Moore’s novel was not a love letter to the 80s—and his was not an 80s that was cutely populated with 3.5” floppy disks (as a high-tech office in Snyder’s Watchmen is) but with stark and awful moral choices, and a trenchant criticism of the empty mathematics of nuclear war in which we must ask ourselves: how many lives are worth how many other lives? This was the ghoulish arithmetic that helped Harry Truman sleep at night, but Moore offers it up as the urgent question of 1985, and refuses to allow his reader to walk away from the choice without staring, horrified into the utilitarian abyss that it opens up.
Watchmen ends up being a complex film—filled with riveting action sequences and stunning visual effects. It runs nearly 3 hours, and at that length we might fairly expect that it would address itself more clearly to some urgent crisis of today, the way that Alan Moore addressed himself to the peculiar crises of the 1980s, of Cold War, of Reaganomics and Lee Iacocca. To be sure, all these things are present—but here they are viewed through a haze of nostalgia, and the novel’s most urgent criticisms now seem a little quaint and empty. What remains is the bare bones of a comic book movie; and that’s not so great.
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