A Falling Standard

Rating: 2/10 (8 March 2009)

From the first view of Nixon's nose (frankly just insulting to the audience) to the end credits brought in by an attempt at a Bob Dylan cover (resulting in some of the worst sounds I've ever heard) I never bought into the film Zack Snyder has made.
The "visionary" director brings us an alternate 1985 New York, a New York which looks and feels fake; the result is an immediate disconnect to the characters, which are in effect used as props in the movie. Snyder spends so much time with the look of the movie (the shots, special effects and slow motion) that everything else feels secondary, so much so that when the characters do speak it's jarring. The performances, although pretty good for the most part, are over-shadowed by the film's attempt to recreate the pages of the graphic novel exactly.
Snyder's choices of music, among a very obnoxious sound mix , were misplaced. In the Vietnam sequence Snyder uses "Ride of the Valkyries" in order to illicit the feelings and emotions given to us by Apocalypse Now because he is seeming incapable of doing this himself.
This is the downfall of the movie. In trying so hard to be the graphic novel it loses what it should be as a movie. Why try to copy something exactly as it is? The answer is lack of creativity, originality, and artistic prowess.
This film will be talked about for decades, unfortunately because of vast leaps in the field of penis CGI physics and the most ridiculous sex scene of all time.