Watchmeh

Rating: 4/10 (29 May 2012)

I missed the theatrical release of Watchmen in 2009, and just saw the Ultimate Cut on video. It is 3 1/2 hours long. It wouldn't have run a minute over 2 if all the slo-mo played at normal speed.
By the way, don't watch the Ultimate Cut. It's worse than the Director's Cut, because it includes Tales of the Black Freighter in the film's runtime instead of as an extra. The Tales in the graphic novel were a nice parallel narrative of gathering darkness and insanity. In the movie, they're badly animated, badly integrated, break the flow and lack all sense of visual style, dread and foreboding. The comic uses greens, reds and yellows to convey a look of runaway putrefaction, and shows the protagonist's mental degradation by always playing with the color scheme. The movie version has flat sand, flat blue water, flat green corpses, flat shadows. The protagonist looks like Nathan Explosion, and voiceovers everything he does in a mildly distressed monotone. In the comic, the Tales end simply, with hands stretching out to grab a rope, and yet the horror is suffocating. In the movie, they end with grinning demon pirates with glowing red eyes, straight out of second-rate 80s Disney.
So, what about the live action film? Well... It's faithful. It tracks the source material like a dachshund tied behind a bicycle. The only major change has been the ending  and, mirabile dictu, it's better (well, the concept is better – they ruined it with song, but more on that later).
Jackie Earle Haley is about as good a Rorschach as we could hope for. Danny Woodburn has a sweet scene or two. Patrick Wilson is a sad nerdy lump in tweed. That's the performances.
Visually, the movie is a treat for aficionados of glowing blue penises. Credit where it's due, Zack Snyder doesn't tend to soft-pedal violence, nor did he nerf Dr. Manhattan's nudity. It's good to see a major motion picture that doesn't think seeing a dong will destroy my mind forever.
Unfortunately, that's about all that can be said about the visuals. The idea of special effects is to make the impossible or nonexistent look real. Snyder has kind of a reverse Midas touch, where even his real sets end up looking phony. Every surface in the whole movie looks like it was rendered with the Doom 3 engine. The worst is the glass clockwork thingamabob on Mars – I almost want to donate some CPU time on my video card, so they can add some radiosity to it or something.
On top, they added a green Matrix tint to almost every scene, except for a flashback to green Vietnamese rice paddies, which are tinted orange.
The music. How can you take so much good music and make such trite and horrible use of it? The opening montage –the only good use of slow-motion in the movie – is set to "The Times They Are A-Changin'." Flying to an Antarctic fortress? "All Along the Watchtower." Not obvious enough? How about a burial set to "The Sound of Silence." The solemn, dark ending? Mozart's "Requiem," bringing you schmaltz since Bunny Lebowski's kidnapping.
The worst was the Vietnam flashback. Quick, what music do you think they picked for that one? That's right. It was "Ride of the Valkyries." God, did I hate this movie at that moment! About the only good use of music was Philip Glass's sublime "Prophecies," during Dr. Manhattan's transformation.
Sound effects... It's the Hollywood thing, where every object visible on screen needs to make some sort of a clank or a clink or a shwing, otherwise the stupids won't notice that it's there. Snyder seems intent on doubling even the usual excessive sound environment, just to make absolutely sure that people notice that THERE'S A HAT TUMBLING THROUGH THE AIR!! When a character flicks a smiley-face badge into an open grave, it's the only thing happening on screen. There's no way to miss it. But just in case, they'll make it sound like a Russian helicopter as it falls: "PLINK!... whoosh-whoosh-whoosh-whoosh-WHOOSH-WHOOSH." The action is just as subtle. Everything is in slow motion. Fight sequences are in slow motion. Punches are in slow motion. Rorschach's improvised flamethrower is in slow motion; the Comedian's Army-issued flamethrower is also in slow motion. Silk Spectre walks down a flight of stairs in slow motion. Twice. Getting into a car – slow motion. Getting out of a car? Slow motion. Elevator doors open in slow motion. A blue energy weapon explodes in slow motion. An assassin aims his gun in slow motion, fires it in slow motion, misses in slow motion, and gets his ass kicked in slow motion.
What if we still don't get it? Break the action down even more! Remember the hallway fight in Oldboy, how fluid and awesome it was? Here's the Watchmen version: a bad guy runs towards the good guys. Cut to his face, centered in the frame for a second. It gets punched (with a whoosh before and after). Cut to another static bad guy. He gets kicked. Cut to static body part. It gets broken/blown off/whatever. There is no flow, no sense of motion.
It's like Snyder thinks the only way to make people actually notice what's happening on screen is to center and pause on the action, and maybe also shake people by the lapels. It's like a four-year-old trying to get an adult's attention. "Mom look. Mom, look what I got. MOM, LOOK. Mom, you aren't looking. LOOK MOM!!!" Yeah. Watchmen is Ambitious, Personal and Faithful to the source, for all that's worth. It's just not really all that good.
Too bad, because the money people probably looked at the numbers and decided that mature, uncomfortable science fiction doesn't sell, and they shouldn't make any more. The real lesson is that they should; just put it in the hands of Alfonso Cuaron.