Watchmen

Watchmen

Zack Snyder almost did what directors and producers such as Joel Silver, Terry Gilliam, and Paul Greengrass (amongst others) stalled: he almost made a Watchmen movie. Almost. He came close. The characters are all there (or at least 90% there), the plot is the same (except for a change in the the villain's MO, one which I actually didn't mind), and some of the themes are mentioned.
But Snyder is not one for subtlety. At all. And that is this film's largest problem: it's a film with so many ideas and themes and characters commanded by a director whose previous films are a decent zombie film remake and a bombastic, nihilistic adaptation of a graphic novel by an author who has lost sense of subtlety. To give him reign over a complex story such as Watchmen wasn't the worst crime in the world, but it wasn't the smartest move either. It's like a man with developing cataracts was asked to drive a schoolbus of open cans of paint. Sure, he'll get them to where they need to go, but in the process he'll take some detours, wrong turns, and dead ends and every individual color and shade will get mixed into a warped blur. But it's a pretty blur...or something (wow, what a bizarre metaphor I'd concocted right there).
But while I didn't hate the film, there are reservations I have (the old-age make-up, the Nixon make-up, Malin Ackerman's stiff performance, a complete lack of nuance and subtlety from some of the actors and themes), and there are some things Snyder did that added to the story.
First off, the ending HAD to change. There was no way the batshit-insane-climax from the graphic novel would translate well on screen, and the way Snyder worked aroudn that worked...although the aftermath of the villain's destruction is merely hinted at: an act of destruction in each of the world's major cities that kills millions, and what we witness are a wide shot, and a few moments of Dr. Manhattan and Laurie walking around a crater where 42nd Street should be. The scope of destruction, and the toll it takes on both the villain and the heroes, are muted significantly from the graphic novel, and, as a movie, become a spectacle without depth. The audience doesn't understand the scope of the villain's plot because the aftermath isn't shown the way it should have been. (Not only that...but the villain himself is barely featured in the film AT ALL).
Then again, the lack of violence in that scene is more than made up for within the rest of the film, but not always the way it should have been done (in my opinion). For a film attempting to deal with mature themes and situations (rape, separated parents, abusive childhood, failing to live up to your parent's ideals, etc. etc.), I thought the violence was goofy. The opening fight scene, set to Nat King Cole's "Unforgettable" was well staged, and the slow-motion shot of the Comedian falling out of the window worked...but later in the iflm the violence becomes too stylized, too slick, and too blatantly bloody. Snyder is no doubt an adept action director...but Watchmen is not at all an action movie. While the graphic novel certainly had moments that could translate well on screen (Dr. Manhattan's self-imposed exile to Mars; the prison breakout; Laurie and Dan's attempted mugging), in Snyder's hands those scenes (aside from the Mars sequence, which was pitch-perfect) become spectacle, yet another superhero scene, and the violence (along with the CGI-added blood) become at once both more intense and wholly unbelievable. Had Snyder shot the action without the aid of slow-mo effects (which he used less extensively than in 300, yet still often enough to to notice and thus take me out of the movie).
And although I'm trying to differentiate between the graphic novel and the film and to view the film on its own terms, the film owes so much to the source material as to make it impossible to separate. In fact, if the graphic novel hadn't existed, a film like this might not have been considered at all: a big budget, two-and-a-half-hour superhero film with little action, psychotic characters, a convoluted plot set in an alternate 1985 and featuring no-name actors (face it: Carla Gugino, Billy Crudup and former child-star Jackie Earle Haley are the biggest names this film has)? No one would consider a film like that without it being based on a previous medium.
Snyder does pull a lot of things together nicely, however. The aforementioned opening credits were perfect, and summed up nearly five-decades' worth of backstory without slowing down the film and was itself shot beautifully; the Mars sequence (my favorite in the graphic novel and in the film) was perfect; and Jackie Earle Haley and Billy Crudup were absolutely perfect as Dr. Manhattan and Rorschach respectively (it was the Mickey Rourke-as-Marv-in-Sin City sort of perfection).
When Snyder put aside the theatrics and actually allowed emotion (REAL emotion) to enter into the scene, the film clicks. He understood the distance Manhattan felt towards the rest of mankind, a being so beyond any of us that his detatchment is evident in his voice and every nuance of mannerism. He understood the alienation of Rorschach, coming form a broken "home" and forced to work the streets...but still just barely missed explaining why exactly he became a vigilante. The subtlties of Dan's impotence were hinted at...but never explanded upon. Half the time I felt as if Snyder had done it, he'd adapted the unadapatable. But the other half...it felt like he as winging it ("You guys want Big Figure? Here's a midget overacting." "You guys want the rape scene to be intense? Here's the whole thing with exaggerrated sound effects and oddly overacting on Jefferey Dean Morgan's part." "You guys want a prison riot? Here it is in SUPER SLOW MOTION".)
At the end of the day I felt like what small moments of greatness and many moments of decentness combined with the terrible decisions, the ill-advised decisions, and the miscasting to provide a barely decent adaptation of the most dense graphic novel (and arguably the greatest) ever written. Alan Moore was right: Watchmen can't be adapted successfully as a film. This is as close as we've gotten. This isn't so much a review of the film as it is a comparison between the film and the movie, and I think that's fine since the film is too devoted to the source material to truly transcend it and become its own thing.

I was really hoping he'd nailed it too.

Oh, and when I saw the movie there was an 8-year-old (or thereabouts) in the audience, and my favorite moment came when Rorschach hacks a rapist to death, and the kid screams, "I saw the blood hit his mask!"

And you know what's immature? People giggling like little children every time they saw Dr. Manhattan's giant blue space dick. (In fact, his nudity is one of the prime reasons why the film is a commercial failure. Go figure. Welcome to 2009)