Hallelulah, The Times They Are a Changin' All Along the Watchtower

Rating: 6/10 (25 April 2009)

Could the song choices have been any more obvious, blunt, and uninteresting in "Watchmen"? The opening Dylan anthem actually worked OK I thought, and the montage of comic panel-like shots from the history of this alternate hero-corrupted universe was reasonably well done. The Comedian's death sequence, also not bad -- but by the time we get through this rather long but in many ways too-short and scattered film to the second Dylan song (in its iconic Hendrix rendition of course) I've had enough both of the "duh, of course they'd pick that" pop song choices, which had become emblematic of the "tell, not show" bluntness of the film as a whole.
Right upfront I will state that I'm a huge fan of the comic, have read it half a dozen times over 23 years and regard it as certainly the most challenging and fascinating word on superheros that I've ever read - and I'll also state that I've seen neither of Zack Snyder's two previous films. So of course I've got my idea of how I'd like to see a film based on this work - or not see it - but I've got nothing against Snyder for trying. And he does try I think; maybe he doesn't deserve an A for effort, but I do think his heart was in the right place. Brain, not to sure of that. The film does manage to distill nearly all of the principal storyline from the comic into a reasonably coherent narrative - but that's about it. As others have mentioned, Snyder is often slavishly devoted to his source, to the point of exactly reproducing many sequences so that they really do look as if they've "leaped off the page". What he doesn't do though is create a narrative flow or really get into the complexity of the alternate-world vision and the ironic and parodic elements that make the comic both fresh and at the same time very backward-looking and critical of its medium. The fact that he can orchestrate a sex scene to Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" and seemingly be unaware of the absolute hilarity of the concept is only one standout moment amongst many, but the biggest problem I have with it as a whole is that the film just doesn't move. There's little if any sense of urgency here - sure, the characters talk like the world is ending, but everything from the dully constructed fight scenes to the flashbacks to the anticlimactic climax just feels like its constructed more to be stared at and admired than to make you feel anything or excite. Rorschach's attempted escape from the police for example just feels inevitable and by-the-numbers, a duplication of comic panels that work much better as - comic panels.
There are definitely positive aspects to the film, in fact overall I'd say the cast is (surprisingly, given his reputation) Snyder's biggest plus - well, the casting director probably deserves some props too. Not that everyone or even most of the cast are great, but even the weak links (Malin Akerman's Laurie, Billy Crudup's Dr. Manhattan, and especially Matthew Goode's very weak and unbelievable-as-messianic-madman Ozymandias) aren't really terrible and most of them seem to have at least a bit of commitment. And the strong performances by Jeffrey Dean Morgan (Comedian), Patrick Wilson (Night Owl) and especially Jackie Earle Haley (Rorschach) go a long ways towards making the film watchable. Haley in particular is a standout, virtually duplicating the character note-for-note from the comic and yet really getting some feeling into it, making even the lines that really don't come off well cinematically feel, well, human and natural. His death scene actually gave me a tiny emotional moment, not an easy thing to do in a film so devoid overall of real humanity or emotional power; if this film had come out in December I'd very much like to think he'd be up for some awards, but as it is I doubt he'll be remembered by the end of the year, given how much of a flop this is turning out to be.
And some of the set design (the Archimedes, the Martian sequence) was fine - not that Snyder is doing much beyond replicating the comic in this case. What he and the other creative people behind the scene really failed to do, in a nutshell, was to create anything really cinematic in their interpretation. A filmed comic that is devoid of much of the underlying subtleties that made it so great as a comic - in particular the basic storyline, which as I said is coherent, but really doesn't have anything like the complexity or fascination, the revelatory aspects that the original work has - is just a bunch of pretty moving pictures. And given that the pictures, and the film, don't move and aren't shot in any kind of interesting way, what you're left at in the end is a few fleeting cool images, the intensity of Haley's Rorschach....and that's about it.