A Richly Compelling Experience

Rating: 7/10 (25 March 2009)

I was skeptical about Zack Snyder as a director before this film. I hated the Dawn of the Dead remake and I thought that 300 was simply an exercise in style and technical mastery with everything else lathered on top. Roughly two hours prior to seeing this film for the first time, I listened to David Edelstein give his review on NPR, saying that Snyder, in showing reverence to the material's roots as a graphic novel, keeps the camera as still as possible and drains the life out of the film. I don't just disagree with Edelstein. I doubt he and I saw the same film. The movie I saw was a masterpiece of spectacle, a liberation of Hollywood style, a richly textured, densely layered epic that boldly inverts all the conventions of superhero movies and comic books.
Due to the American victory in the Vietnam War as a result of commissioning two superheroes, Dr. Manhattan and The Comedian, to fight for the U.S., Richard Nixon is shown to be elected to his third term as President. By 1985, however, he has outlawed masked vigilantes and rising Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union threaten a devastating nuclear war. The film begins in the apartment of Edward Blake, whose identity is revealed soon after his brutal murder. Following this is one of the most inventive and mesmerizing opening credits sequences I have ever seen, a montage of historical scenes painting, almost literally, an alternate history from World War II through the 1980s involving masked heroes. The montage plays "Times They Are A-Changin'" sung by Bob Dylan, and includes implicit twists on historical events such as JFK's assassination.
The whodunit of the Comedian's death begins to piece together with a global masterplan. The first phase in the plot may be to eradicate the Watchmen. Unlike the Superman films, for instance, Watchmen understands that it's difficult to profit from the complete devastation of the planet, but there was a nuclear deadlock between the U.S. and the Soviet Union that pressured precisely that.
The ensemble cast of superheroes (almost outnumbered by the amount of bit players prosthetically masquerading as iconic people of the times) are clad in classic comic book costumes. Rorshach's cloth mask, with its constantly fluctuating inkblots, is one of the most fascinating superhero garbs ever, always in constant motion, telegraphing his black-and- white view of the world, and how his views shift depending on the overriding emotion of his given mood.
When I say that I was skeptical of Snyder before, I mean that I felt he didn't quite understand cinema enough to be at the helm of such visionary contributions to it. Dawn of the Dead is screamingly pretentious and 300 is beautiful but shallow. But Watchmen not only leaves such an indelible stylistic impression, but also protects its vision with a certain wisdom concerning starpower. There is hardly a name actor in the film. The most well-known faces in the film are scarce: Billy Crudup is masqueraded entirely in an computer-generated image for the vast majority of his screen time; Carla Gugino has little screen time at all save for scenes that span her character's vast differences in age pertaining to the story. Snyder impresses me here, because he understands that casting major stars in these roles would allow the audience to project their own assumptions of a superstar's persona onto his or her character. And he doesn't want that. He wants these very unique characters to flourish in their own right, and for the actors to serve them, not the other way around.
The Watchmen and their distinguished endowments are all the better capable of seeing how weak they really are, and granting all but Dr. Manhattan are human and on the same side, their capabilities are not infinite. Dr. Manhattan, living apart from time and space, is reasonably detached from the future of our infinitesimal planet.
Watchmen has a philosophy of time and space that is strikingly similar to that of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. Dr. Manhattan observes his peers knowingly, having learned through his universal superpowers that everything simultaneously exists. Each "superhero" is deeply flawed, and their effect on the world can hardly be said to be more positive than negative, or more negative than positive. Their effect simply is. By the end, the Diabolical Masterplan that has been discovered is something that Manhattan claims to understand "without condoning...or condemning." There is hardly a way to argue against it, even though one knows how monstrous it is. Such dilemmas preoccupy all the Watchmen, and are exhibited in a film experience of unique, arresting beauty. It might seem unlikely to take solemnly a naked blue man, indeed afforded a penis though no discernible testicles, but Billy Crudup brings a moody distance to Dr. Manhattan that is oddly poignant. Does he recall how it felt to be human?
Watchmen brings remarkable persuasion to these characters. There is even an unsuccessful attempt by two superheroes to have sex, something to which all humans can relate. One masked avenger is a product of superhero rape. I suppose it's needless to say that the film is exuberant enough to be seen more than once. The more one sees it, the more one has to say about it. It's difficult to master all the niceties and connotations, but also difficult not to have a compelling event.