This Film Makes Blade Runner Look Coherent.

Rating: 2/10 (18 March 2009)

I did not go to see Watchmen with any great enthusiasm. I am not a comic book fan, never have been (except for MAD Magazine). I truly do not understand the appeal of these poseurs of literature known as "graphic novels"; aren't they just comic books for college boys?
I have enjoyed some comic book films however. I liked Iron Man, Superman Returns, and Batman Begins, but I hated both The Dark Knight and Sin City. Conversely, I liked Road To Perdition, Art School Confidential and Persepolis and they were based on graphic novels so I guess it has more to do with how a particular film is made than its fidelity to source material.
But there was something about the whole Watchmen phenomena that looked to me like it would be a drag for anyone not initiated into the cult and I can respect that to a point.
I now think that "graphic novels'' fall into the same category as opera and NASCAR. Meaning that the people who are fans of those activities believe non-fans are all stupid. Think I'm wrong? Go ahead and make a disparaging comment about the Indy 500 in a red state or demean Tosca in a blue state, you'll get straightened out pretty quickly.
The fans of graphic novels simply do not understand how a person can NOT be a fan.
It's pretty simple really. They mostly all suck. And that includes car races and opera too.
Forget that I don't know the back-story on these Watchmen characters (although the film tries to get you up to speed), even if I did, I don't think I would care about them. And by that I don't mean like the characters. I would've have loved to have hated some of them, but there was nothing to them at all.
It's not because the actors didn't all try hard and they are a talented crew. I would have thought it impossible to make Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode and Jackie Earle Haley uninteresting, but they were. I felt bad for them.
They were undone by the thousand little triumphs of the other film-making departments. Like, the special effects guys who worked to get Dr. Manhattan's blue color just right, to the costume folks who got the masks perfect, the make-up people who got the prosthetics to look properly gory and all of this combined with the editing, cinematography, production design, SPFX, digital effects all the way down to the rainmakers and 3rd assistant sound editors; they all did their jobs perfectly.
To what end?
Just because you use the best ingredients, if the chef is an idiot, that soufflé ain't gonna rise.
So, if the 300 "auteur" wants to be responsible for another "Un Film de Zack Snyder", he should also get the blame when it doesn't work. And Watchmen doesn't work.
But here's a question, did anyone ask why they were making this film?
It's an important question. I understand film as a commercial enterprise and certainly, if Watchmen makes millions of dollars, it doesn't really matter if it sucks as badly as Life Is Beautiful or Forrest Gump, but why was this film made otherwise?
Other than making money (if it even does), can anyone on this film say they worked on it for any good reason other than that?
The fanboys will no doubt blog endlessly in the vacuums of their chat rooms about whether the film is equal to the source comic books and God Bless them for that as long as they keep to themselves and don't bother the adults, but to the filmmakers I ask; what were you trying to achieve with this film?
If you were trying to recreate the world of the comic books, did you succeed? What would that success have looked like on film? Or, is this like asking a Conservative what victory in Iraq would look like, knowing they haven't got the faintest idea.
There were some neat touches; I liked the use of the music from Koyaanisqatsi over the back-story of Dr. Manhattan. I also liked the MUZAK version of Everybody Wants To Rule The World by Tears For Fears that played underneath the attempted assassination of Adrian Veidt.
Otherwise, Watchmen was just a preponderance of pointless action scenes mixed with a retarded view of philosophy and science. I have not seen a film this aggressively stupid since that Ben Stein anti-evolution documentary last year. But at least Stein had the decency to be outright stupid, Watchmen might seem intellectually plausible to someone easily impressed by fuzzy thinking.