Doubt, Greed and Capes

Rating: 5/10 (19 August 2009)

** 1/2 (out of 4) By Aaron Dumont
An odd type of noble, embalmed experience that all but transcends, falls beneath and remains firmly aligned with the superhero movie norm, Zach Synder's Watchmen has remained a curiosity to me.
The opening of the movie was a dizzying, glorious promise to a possible masterpiece from a director who had previously made only watchable horrors and asinine high-art-masquerades. The first 10-or-so minutes illustrated a brief, ravishing odyssey through recent history under the influence of superheroes. Acted through a series of tableaux, it all felt much like an experience. It was a perfectly constructed space, full of form and texture and set to Bob Dylan's The Times They Are A-Changin.
Afterwards, the movie roughly runs through the next two-and-a-half hours, grasping and losing the brilliance it started out with. It grows more and more with characters and plot, ripens with great potential, and sprawls in detail and complexity - it's too bad the inspired structure can't handle it. It all becomes a bit too unwieldy for its own good, ending up as a philosophical epic that leaves me cold. It is a movie rich with poetry and disillusionment, albeit one that doesn't know what do with it all.
Something that also struck me during my viewing was the borrowed, stitched-together feel of the movie. It had an unpolished effect that, to a certain degree felt a bit casual. The images and senses triggered were astonishing, but felt much like a carbon-copy of the original graphic novel. This bogged down the message, the approach and the humanism of the whole product. Perhaps it was the ending that truly got to me - under a saturated sky, exactly like in the comic, a young man working at a newspaper office, finds the journal of Rorschach's journal, and the words that began both the film and the journal are read from it. Finish the movie. Fade to credits. The end.
I don't know about you, but it felt simply underwhelming - an all-too-light, all-too-easy route to cut off the movie and make it easy to digest. It was something that made the past events and themes - disenchantment, moral crisis, loneliness, alienation, mortality, decaying politics - seem so less grim, so less real. It was a screaming reminder that what you were watching was merely some fiction. This was theatre. It was Hollywood.
I felt I was watching a masterpiece trapped in the shell of an average, everyday crowd-pleaser. Watchmen was a glorious effort, but an oddly unsatisfying watch. Maybe it was simply trying too hard to film the 'unfilmable' comic series. Overall, it's a mixed bag - a great movie listlessly stumbling about.
Where has all the liberation of cinematic adaptations gone?