Brilliant, beautiful, ugly, fascinating, baffling, thrilling, but where's the story?

Rating: 9/10 (8 March 2009)

Let me start off by saying that don't believe anyone can fail to admire the sheer audacity of the Watchmen. Unlike, TDK which danced around the R-rating, but stuck with PG-13 to ensure the box office, this movie embraces the R. It runs with it. This movie is frightening enough in terms of sheer intensity of, well, everything, not just the violence. It will twist your stomach. It all but shouts the viewer to deal with it or leave. You got to like that.
Yet while I was all prepared to give a thoughtful review when I got home from the showing this morning, I couldn't do it. Thinking about this movie is the wrong way to approach it. Ebert says a movie is about feeling. It should be about more than feeling, it can be about more than feeling (think of Vertigo, a movie about as far removed from this one as you could imagine), but sometimes feeling is all you have. Fine. Watchmen is a visceral experience, one that overwhelms every other aspect of the film. Intellectually, the film makes little sense, even as satire. Ebert, for example, is carrying on in his reviews about quantum physics and the vistas, visual and otherwise, opened by Dr. Manhattan. I cannot think of a more wrong headed approach to this film. You want Quantum Mechanics? Read a book.
This movie is like a gut punch and a kick when you are down. You don't see it coming and as you are gasping for breath, you certainly do not see where it is going. To the movie's credit, so powerful are the feelings little else matters, but I will mention them anyway. There are great characters, so appealing I wanted to see them in their own movie -- I really liked Nite Owl and Silk Spectre, who together give the film what positive uplift it has. Rorsach? Of course. The visuals are amazing, the narrative drive seldom flags. And by those standards, I guess that is what you would call them, Watchman is fantastic. I can't recommend it enough, though leave the kids (and your girlfriend) at home. But as a story, I'm can't really comment. What is there to comment on? It's not there. Save the world, blah blah. Done that. There's something that might have been a story if the writers had been permitted to create one, but they weren't. That shadowy something, to be sure, is serviceable enough, but is as brittle as Dr. Manhattan's Mars contraption. Brilliantly edited, wonderful to behold, but it is crushed by a hurtling meteor of feelings. And if feeling is what you want, then for 2 and 3/4 hours this movie will transport you away from a world that is numbing, to somewhere.
Here's an example of what I mean. In this alternative history, sticking just with the opening montage, we see the Comedian, one of the "SuperHeroes," (and one nasty dude) assassinate Kennedy. Why he does this we are never told. How he gets away with this we are never told. What are the implications of this horrendous crime in the Watchman universe, we never learn. This is not a minor narrative lapse. And don't shove the comic book in my face as I'm watching the movie. In a real film, this act would be crucial to understanding this very twisted character. It is not so much the lapse of taste (there are plenty of those), but a complete failure of story telling judgment. Of course, no one cares, certainly not audience I was with to whom the Kennedy assassination is as psychologically remote as the building of the pyramids. But to me it is bothersome. Again the movie attitude was -- got a problem with that? Go home. I stayed.
Admire the Watchmen for its daring, its courage, its brilliance. See the film for it astonishing polarities of beauty and ugliness, be fascinated by the characters, wonder at the scope of it all. But don't think about it. There's no story there.