Camp But NotYerKidsComicBookMovie

Rating: Null/10 (30 March 2009)

It's taken me some days to decide about Watchmen. I enjoyed it far more than I'd expected, given the indifferent reviews and the vivid descriptions of graphic violence and spraying blood that a friend had given me. So I waited for the hype to die down and approached it with an open mind and an empty stomach. I haven't read the comic book (graphic novel or whatever's the current politically correct appellation.)
I gave Zack Snyder's last creation 300 a straight 10/10, but possibly for reasons he'd not appreciate (all that beautiful muscular male flesh) and I think as a creative force, Snyder is best described as feverish. But Watchmen is well executed, well edited, creatively made, briskly camp and occasionally witty with a few (but really not enough) one liners. It's also overly long, somewhat pretentious, occasionally daft, ever so slightly racist and very bloody. But more about the gore later.
It's the 1980s in a parallel universe. Nixon is into his third term having won the Vietnam War for America, the normal rules of government abandoned. A retired superhero The Comedian (who reminded me vaguely of Robert Downey Jr.) is murdered. Is it a plot to annihilate the last of the superheroes? Were they out of control? Public opinion turned against them, so they've been living quiet lives out of sight - especially the big guy, Dr Manhattan, who is a very fetching shade of blue from the top of his bald head to the bottom of his feet and all points in between. Dr M, product of a nasty lapse in lab HSE rules, is all ponderous technobabble and hands. He's lost touch with his humanity and sounds like a mating between Data from Star Trek and HAL from 2001. This is a guy who can grow in size at will; I like him.
Rorschach, masked Invisible Man style and asthmatically husky, investigates the death while Dr M wrestles with his inner demons. M's girlfriend Laurie - the daughter of another superheroine and played by leggy Malin Akerman - leaves him for Nite Owl II who is the Watchmen's Clark Kent. They decide to get back into the old tights (very tight in Laurie's case. Can one only be a superheroine in groin splitting leotards and a garter belt?) and start righting wrongs, while Ozymandias, the brains of the gang (bearing a striking resemblance to David Bowie) makes a fortune and may well be killing humanity to save it from itself. With me so far? Good. He lives in an Antarctic reconstruction of the Temple of Karnak with a genetically modified tiger. Dr M lives on Mars, and with poor Laurie tortured by her love for him Venus style, you don't have to be a genius to understand Snyder's agenda. But I don't have a problem with that, this is a fantasy and it's not subtle stuff. Nite Owl and Laurie get it on quite nicely and both look suitably buff and perky naked. Patrick Wilson has a nice butt. Watchmen works its way to a not unexpected conclusion in a fairly entertaining way with enough sex to keep me interested.
Now, that blood and gore, which ruins the camp allure. We see an axe splitting a head open, a guy getting his hands taken off by electric saw, the remains of a kidnapped female 6 year old fed to dogs, a woman's face as she's beaten up and then splayed face down over a pool table as a prelude to doggy style rape (but she must have enjoyed it, right? Apparently she went back for more later and got pregnant with Laurie. Now doesn't that bring a lump to your throat?) There's a guy getting boiling cooking oil in the face, others set on fire, beaten senseless and the usual routine shootings. All vital for that important 18 – 30 male demographic without which we are led to believe the movie industry wouldn't exist.
Watchmen is an R certificate in the USA. Which actually means that small kids can watch it as long as a 'guardian' is with them. I saw it 3 weeks into its run, quite late at night, which meant, thank goodness, a fairly grown up audience. My friend saw it a few days after it opened and much earlier in the day and the theatre was full of kids. Now I blame the parents when children see a totally unsuitable movie, and I don't especially blame Snyder who is out to make a buck like all corporate execs. But I'm less enamored of Warner Brothers marketing machine. They know that a movie this expensive will not return a healthy profit unless a large number of under 18s go and see it, so they market it as a Superhero movie (watch the trailers) when it's borderline horror in places. The R rating allows everyone to be totally disingenuous and say "Well it's all down to parental supervision." But the truth is far too many parents can't be bothered to censor what their children see, or to hire a baby sitter, so young kids sit through this stuff, munching popcorn and sodas while little girls are ripped up by dogs, women get raped and men get their hands chopped off. And we wonder why so many are dysfunctional?
And what is it with Snyder and the irritating narrations? We got one in 300, (in slightly off kilter Queen's English. Why? The actor's Australian. I assume the Spartans spoke some kind of ancient Greek dialect so why not just do the narration in an Australian accent and be damned? It's just as (in)accurate.) Here we have Rorschach's hoarse narration which is intensely grating after 2 hours. I am deeply suspicious of any movie which requires a voice over to explain the plot.
But on the whole, as a consenting adult, I actually quite enjoyed Watchmen. I'm just worried about the non consenting kids.