Rorschach's journal: March 2009

Rating: 9/10 (9 March 2009)

Watchmen is a film most people approach with an equal amount of excitement and fear. Excitement, because it's been wildly anticipated since 1987 and feels perfectly at home now, its themes of trust, paranoia and the true meaning of heroism being a suitable companion piece to Chris Nolan's The Dark Knight. Fear, because the original graphic novel is considered by many to be the best comic-book ever written in the English language, and given Hollywood's habit of screwing up anything created by Alan Moore (who preemptively had his name removed from the credits and swore he's never going to see the picture), there was a fairly big chance even director Zack Snyder's best intentions were overcome by studio reasoning. The truth? Watchmen is, to this day, the closest any movie has come to capturing the core of Moore's thoughts, one of the smartest comic-book movies of the decade and a visually rich blockbuster.
For the uninitiated (in case there are any), Watchmen takes place in a very bleak 1985: Richard Nixon is now in his fourth term, there's a constant risk of nuclear war with Russia and superheroes have been outlawed. This means the titular group no longer exists, at least on paper. Then, one night in New York, a murder is committed. The police rule it off as standard business, but a masked vigilante named Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) begs to differ: the victim was Edward Blake (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), aka The Comedian, the most violent of the Watchmen, and whoever offed him might be after the others. However, the others aren't that interested in Rorschach's theories: Dan "Nite Owl" Dreiberg (Patrick Wilson) and Laurie "Silk Spectre" Jupiter (Nalin Akerman) are too busy catching up, Adrian "Ozymandias" Veidt (Matthew Goode), self-proclaimed "smartest man on the planet", prefers exploiting his own image and seeking alternative energy sources (okay, maybe he's got a point there), and as for the group's only real "super" hero, Jon Osterman (Billy Crudup), aka Dr. Manhattan (a living atomic weapon after a lab accident), well, he's so all-powerful he no longer cares about the world. But what if Rorschach's right? What if someone wants to destroy the world and is making sure no one gets in the way? As Bob Dylan says during the beautiful opening montage, the times they are a-changin'...
Watchmen was, ad is, a lot more than a comic-book: it's a mixture of poetry, politics, visuals, sex, violence, psychoanalysis and much, much more. Like all of Moore's work, what matters the most is the subtext and symbolism, starting with names like Rorschach (the famous test), Ozymandias (a poem by Shelley and, like the quote by Juvenal which gave the graphic novel its title, a warning against the abuse of power) or Dr. Manhattan (Project Manhattan is what led to the creation of the nuclear bomb). In a way, Watchmen was also a reflection on the superhero genre in itself, and Snyder retains some of that aspect as well, most notably the multiple generations subplot (the current Silk Spectre is the original's daughter) and the significance of the costumes (in Nite Owl's case, it's a substitute for Viagra). Of course, he couldn't include everything in a 160-minute feature, but the key story is left intact (save for the theory that two of the "heroes" might be gay) and brought to the screen word for word.
The same goes for the images: using the original panels by Dave Gibbons as storyboards (and convincing Gibbons to design the one scene that differs from the graphic novel), the director repeats the miracle of 300, bringing Moore's bleak world to life the exact way it was first conceived. Even better, he has managed to dodge the problem of not including the poetry and philosophy quotations by working extra hard on the soundtrack, picking a series of defining tunes that accompany the live-action treatment of Gibbons' illustrations. The result is visually and aurally striking (exhibit A: the Dr. Manhattan-centric segment), and the main reason Watchmen works so damn well on the big screen.
And now, the "but". It's only one, but it's rather significant: although he's done a terrific job with the casting, why did Snyder insist that poor Matthew Goode, a bona fide Englishman, speak with a German accent? Sure, the character has a German-sounding name, but those speech patterns make him less charismatic as the picture progresses. Everyone else does a fine job, though, even Malin Akerman who is still best known to audiences as Ben Stiller's heinous wife in The Heartbreak Kid. Standing out - inevitably - is Haley's Rorschach, one of literature's (and cinema's) most credible psychos, a creepy yet strangely relatable vigilante who sums up the story's moral ambiguity to perfection.
So, is Watchmen the best comic-book adaptation ever? Of course not. Okay, but is it the movie fans and casual moviegoers alike deserve? Oh, yes. It's ambitious, complex, dark and uncompromising. And yes, it's based on the Citizen Kane of comic-books, which makes it a must-see in any case.
8,5/10