Movie Reviews: Watchmen

First off, let me correct some misconceptions about this film that I have heard bandied about the Internet.

• This is not an action movie. Girls in latex doesn't equal action. (Feel free to make an inappropriate joke before moving on to the next bullet.)


• This is not a superhero movie. This is an anti-superhero movie.


• The book and the movie are different and stand alone, making the same points. I love them both for different reasons and will always, always, regard Moore and Gibbons' graphic novel as the more groundbreaking work, for all the obvious reasons.


• No intelligent person should be as hung up as this planet has become on Dr. Manhattan's penis.

Now, it is time for actual review.

WARNING: I RESERVE THE RIGHT TO SPOIL THE MOVIE FROM HERE ON OUT. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.



Short overview: I love Watchmen; I think it's a fantastic graphic novel. It is not flawless, but no great work is, and we have it to thank for the way the modern world thinks about the superhero. This film says the same things the book does, but it manages to say them in a way that is unique to film as a medium, and to say them in a way that is still true to the book while being freshened up for our times. If I had to pick one negative word to say about this movie, it is "confusing".

Now, let's dig into the meat.

The music. Whoever did this soundtrack should be proud; they managed to choose songs that were appropriately evocative and that blended well with the scenes they accompanied. I was never lost during the flashbacks because all the pieces, while they may not have actually been written and published/made famous during the era being portrayed, evoked the era strongly enough for me to know when things were happening even without being certain of my Watchmen trivia.

The cinematography. I was a bit annoyed when the prison break and the gang fight both turned into action sequences; but when the gore and the brutality really started coming through in full frontal color, I got what Snyder was doing: he was using action-movie cinematography to bring across the brutality and dysfunction in a way that comic books could not. This kept happening to me throughout the film: a scene that in the comics was unsettling but possible to gloss over was impossible not to engage with in the film, from Big Picture's minion getting his arms sawed off to the Comedian shooting his pregnant girlfriend in the face. And while his need for a slow-motion sex scene in every movie is a little bit annoying during the love scene in Archie, I can forgive that for the breathtaking way he handled the opening montage and credit sequence.

The actors. Billy Crudup did an amazing job of playing the alien ubermensch Dr. Manhattan; Patrick Wilson brought across the nerdy, awkward, kind, yet dysfunctional personality of Nite Owl with flair; Jeffrey Dean Morgan was sublime as the Comedian, who had the psychopathic, self-aware little grin that I always loved; and then there was Jackie Earle Haley, who I will hope and pray to get nominated for an Oscar for his performance as Rorschach. His voice, his mannerisms, his entire style was amazing: he brought a disarming life to Rorschach's final moments that surpassed the same scene in the comics. Hint for second viewings: Watch the motion of his cheeks.

The ending. Yes, it was changed; but in some ways I really liked this change. I won't say it made more sense, because that feels blasphemous, but I will say that I found it allowed them to drop a couple small things (though the presence of Bubastis now makes almost no sense), and it made some of the events of the book feel more synchronized and blended than it did in the book (the shot of an angry Dr. Manhattan used by a newcaster near the end of the movie made me feel like Ozymandias was even more of a genius).

The one negative thing I will say about this film is that it has a very high barrier to entry for those who have not read the book. My friends who saw the film with me had no frame of reference for some of its flashbacks, and so were trying to pick up on the fly the ways to identify when those flashbacks were occurring relative to the main narrative, which can't have been that much fun. I think that it is one of the ways in which Snyder worked a little too hard to make this a film for the fans--as a fan I loved it, but he created a major problem for himself by tying it so closely to the book.



END SPOILERS

All in all, Watchmen is definitely a DVD purchase, and worth the money to see in the theater.

Now, let me take just a moment to talk about Dr. Manhattan's penis.

People, shut up about this. Penises are not new, penises are not bad, penises are not that interesting. It is a CGI dick. You're wasting air and bandwidth on some lines of code.

We have gone through about a century of movies, and a large portion of that has included women baring their breasts and/or genitals; can we get over the fact that in this movie had a penis in it? Your jokes about the big blue cock are not particular funny, and the idea that this is groundbreaking really just makes me a little annoyed. I just hope that what movie producers get from this is the idea that full-frontal male nudity is acceptable in mainstream film, because while I don't crave pictures of other mens' genitalia I think it's time that our Puritan roots get pruned.