Watchmen

Review:Watchmen

Dir. Zach Snyder

2009

Runtime: 162 mins

Cert. 18

Watching the Watchmen is thrilling, but can also be difficult. Not just because they represent the uncomfortable unravelling of the superhero, one of our most enduring modern myths; the film, although often dazzling, is also a dizzying, unforgiving torrent of cinema that can be as nauseating as it is intoxicating.

Boldly setting itself up in an alternate 1985, in which rising cold war tensions threaten the world with fiery Armageddon, Watchmen concerns a screwed-up bunch of retired superheroes doing their best to solve a murder and stop the superpowers from nuking us all to kingdom come. And by ‘screwed up’, I mean in ways beyond struggling to pluck up the courage to ask Mary Jane to the high school dance. Take the Comedian (Jeffery Dean Morgan), a neo-fascist assassin for president Nixon (the closest the film gets to a traditional supervillain), who has a taste for murder and sexual violence. The magnetic Morgan makes the Comedian one charismatic bastard, and makes you feel dirty just for enjoying his scenes. Patrick Wilson plays Dan Dreiberg, or ‘Nite Owl’, a nice guy who writes for ornithology journals in his spare time. Poor old Dan also can’t get an erection unless dressed in his kinky Nite Owl get-up, and watching this awkward middle aged man come alive and kick/grab serious ass through the magic of playing dress-up is one of the film’s many surprising pleasures.

Watchmen manages, for the most part, to beat the odds and emerge from its labyrinthine source material intact. Despite being a lot of fun, it’s a long and exhausting film, but one that could have easily filled several more hours if not for Snyder’s deft editing choices. The twisting narrative arrives through frequent flashbacks that take us through the imagined history of American superheroes, and also through the book’s main protagonist, the sociopathic ‘hero’ Rorshach. Rorshach, played by Jackie Earle Haley, is more terrifying than the new emo Joker, a man whose commitment to his mission as a crimefighter has eroded his psyche leaving him an almost feral predator. Haley’s performance is riveting as he shows us the depths to which a hero’s iron will can drag him, and Rorshach devours almost every scene he’s in.

The film’s other noteworthy performance comes form Billy Crudup as Dr. Manhattan, the apparent offspring of Michelangelo’s David and a Smurf. Manhattan is the world’s only superhero to possess actual superpowers (the rest describing themselves as ‘costumed heroes’), and my, what powers he has. With complete control over all matter, Dr. Manhattan’s emergence from an old-fashioned scientific mishap (think radioactive spider bite) changes the world in a myriad of ways. Most significantly of these, the USA hopes that in Dr. Manhattan lies the ultimate nuclear deterrent. He may well be all these things and more, but is he still just a man? Crudup gives Manhattan just the right level of eerie detachment, even through layers of cgi nakedness, for a hero who has outgrown his world. Less inspiring are the performances of Matthew Goode as Ozymandias, the ‘world’s smartest man’, and Malin Ackerman as the Silk Spectre, failing to outperform her skintight latex stockings. Which are excellent.

On the downside, the film is uneven and the pacing, based heavily on the source material, alternates wildly between cape-and-cowl fisticuffs and drawn-out sitting room conversations. The plot lurches jarringly from New York to Mars and back, and loses some of its momentum along the way. Diehard fans will undoubtedly notice the cuts made by Snyder in order to fit Watchmen into 162 minutes, but his choices, as I said, could not have been much better.

Watchmen is a book that demands to be revisited, and the film will most certainly reward this too. Although the bone-crunching action sequences trundle the plot along at a steady rate, there is a wealth of colour and depth packed into each frame that can only be appreciated when the viewer has a little breathing space, something that the film does not give away freely. The DVD release, likely to include a much lengthier cut, will most probably give us that chance. This is a film about how the world messes people up, and the wacky things they do to cope with it. A feast for the eyes and an ordeal for the senses, Watchmen winds up these eccentric do-gooders we call superheroes, pulls off their masks and asks what makes them tick.

8/10

-James