nerd rage. (HERE BE SPOILERS)
Perhaps the most telling thing about Watchmen the film is that, in introducing director Zack Snyder, the trailers immediately hail him as the "visionary director of 300." That the producers of the film entrusted one of the most emotional and cerebrally intense storylines in comic book history to a man largely known for his visual flair at the helm of some of the most intellectually and emotionally shallow films of all time tells you a lot about what kind of audience for which the film is intended. In fact, the trailer, if nothing else, provides the first spoiler for any discerning viewer who wasn't aware Snyder had been tapped to direct: you're going to get something that may be visually faithful to the source material, but under the guidance of a man unafraid to capitulate to studio desires for something commercial. In short--before even walking into the theater, you knew Warner Brothers, well aware of the long, storied history of failed attempts to make Watchmen, brought in someone with just enough art cred to appeal to the fanboys but enough box office cachet to put the average ass in the seat.
To that end, the results do not disappoint. Watchmen is, at times, a startlingly visually-faithful rendering of what was, even at the time, a deliberately straightforward (I hesitate to use the world "realistic") piece of sequential art. However, even for as aesthetically pleasing as it is at times, it falls victim to the chief weakness of so many "visionary" film directors past, present and (especially if this film is to be any indication) future in that it forgets that film is a bi-sensory experience. In short: Snyder forgets that we hear a film as much as we see one, and every second of this film seems to prove this mistake. This isn't Snyder's only error, however. While this reviewer freely admits to being one of those devoted fanboys who hates when cinematic adaptations deviate from their printed counterparts, I'm more-than-willing to accept if if those changes both a) add to the richness of the plot and b) are well done. The first two Blade movies, for example, completely re-created an existing character for the cinematic universe; and the Hellboy and Nolan-directed Bat-films not only took liberties with canonical interpretations of the characters, but they established their own comparably-impressive continuities in their own right.
In Watchmen's case, however, the continuity changes seem to be made for no reason; that the film so readily attempts to visually recreate the comic only makes these changes seem more-noticeable and more arbitrary. The film's opening scene, for instance, abandons the comic book's character-building and expository dialogue, choosing instead to invent a lengthy fight sequence that not only seems out-of-character for one of the combatants, but frankly just seems to exist for the sake of having a fight scene--lest, perhaps, the film lose the attention of Snyder's usual audience of 300-inspired neo-fascist mouth-breathers by including a shred of intelligence before the bloodshed. In any case, the scene sets the tone for the entire film, in that it looks damn pretty--complete with a set of shots obviously lifted directly from the source material--but it manages to capture damn near everything about the comic except for the most important thing: its soul. The opening credit sequence cements this failure even more concretely--for the most part, it's a compelling (albeit condensed) account of the massive backstory that undoubtedly made graphic novel so ostensibly unfilmable, but with some needless focus paid to a minor character, barely mentioned in the original story, but given screen time simply as an excuse for Snyder to show two women kissing. Granted, this occupies mere seconds of screen time, but in a film in which every second counts, even this indulgence is an unacceptable error.
Because it is just that--indulgence--which cripples every Snyder film, be it through the inexplicably-fast zombies of Dawn Of The Dead or the blatant racism of 300, or here--in Watchmen, with Snyder's obsession with his own visual ability. Repeatedly, Snyder ignores crucial elements of what makes the source material so compelling in favor of making things look pretty. It's becoming increasingly obvious that Snyder's inability to direct actors is on par with that of George Lucas, another "visionary" whom Snyder equally-obviously attempts to ape; most of Snyder's theoretically-talented cast shows little ability to deliver any lines with any semblance of convincing emotional simulacra, most egregiously Malin Akerman, whose admittedly-phenomenal physical assets do absolutely little to distract from her awfully wooden line-reading. It wouldn't be hyperbolic to suggest Akerman's dreadful performance (in the role of a character supposedly so emotionally crucial and affecting as to resurrect the dead emotions of a living god) is reason enough to ignore the film entirely; how she manages to drag the likes of the normally-impressive Carla Gugino (excruciatingly unconvincing and abysmally miscast as Akerman's mother) down with her is a secret perhaps only Snyder knows. Granted, most of the remaining characters are so horribly miscast that they can't help but seem out-of-place--particularly Matthew Goode, who delivers a valiant attempt at a convincing Adrian Veidt, the story's resident über-mensch whose scheme serves as the driving force of the plot, but whose reedy physique only makes him look like a teenager playing super-hero in Schumacher nipples.
To be fair, the film’s sole strengths come from some of the rest of the principal cast. Patrick Wilson’s Dan Dreiberg (aka Nite Owl II) adds some much-needed humility and believability to the film; he somehow escapes the vacuum of Akerman’s acting, and manages to anchor most of his scenes with a sort of gritty logic that rescues much of the film from Snyder’s masturbatory visuals. As the aforementioned living god, Billy Crudup’s Dr. Manhattan is serviceable in what is little more than a glorified voice-over job for a largely computer-generated animated character; slightly more human is Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s performance as The Comedian, whose death opens the film, but appears considerably in flashback. Perhaps the cast’s greatest success, however, is in its most unexpected source: Jackie Earle Haley. Haley’s Rorschach is a gleaming bright spot of the film, a character he realizes in a performance so heartfelt he actually comes across as believable, whether he’s battering bad guys (among them Matt Frewer, smartly cast as ex-supervillain Edgar “Moloch” Jacobi) or squaring off with his so-called allies, who seem to trust him even less than his enemies. That Haley, a former child actor whose career seems to be quietly resurrecting itself (check out his performance in Little Children, also featuring Wilson), manages to eke such a compelling, charismatic performance out of such a difficult character and successfully makes a racist, homophobic, misogynistic proto-fascist character so likeable is entirely a testament to his ability, seeing as Snyder manages to bungle the job with just about everyone else.
And, truly, it is Snyder who is to blame for the film’s failings, because David Hayter’s and Alex Tse’s script culls so much from the original comic book that, had he not disowned the film (and with good reason), the comic’s original creator Alan Moore truly ought to have received a screenwriting credit for it. Snyder’s repeated failures as a director are such that even the colossal screenwriting fuck-up of changing Moore’s climax, which featured Veidt’s grand plan of creating global harmony through fabricating a nonexistent extraterrestrial threat, to a far-less-risky plan of creating global harmony through fabricating a nonexistent threat from Dr. Manhattan, takes a backseat to the myriad of plotholes Snyder ought to have caught before committing them to film. These holes range from the minor (a prominent “Obsolete Models a Specialty” sign in front of an auto-repair shop, despite the fact that, unlike the world of the comic, the majority of the world’s automobiles still run on internal-combustion engines and are not, in fact, obsolete) to the lazy (The Comedian’s active role in the JFK assassination, from a vantage point that would have actually been seen on the camera that filmed it) to the patently fucking ridiculous (the ending of the film, in which the viewers are shown that the universally-untrusting Rorschach has sent a crucially important package to a magazine without having been given a reason why Rorschach would do such a thing). For that matter, the most awkward thing about the changed climax isn’t the weak, needless story change, but an out-of-character exchange in which Veidt, previously established as far beyond Dreiberg’s ability to best in physical combat, allows the latter to beat him bloody for no clear reason. Even worse is the dialogue in the scene, grossly changed from that of the comic book so that it explicitly states what is originally merely implied.
Really, it is the last detail which proves definitively why Snyder was chosen to direct the film: he is unafraid of dumbing-down the material so that even the most obtuse of viewers can understand it, not realizing that doing so completely obliterates what made the comic book so groundbreaking and, well, visionary. It’s easy to dismiss such criticism as the rantings of an angry nerd; however, when such nerds constitute the core element of the audience for which Watchmen was (and, with apologies to the less-discriminating tastes that may be reading this, is) intended, there really is no excuse for such failures. For that matter, auteurs like Christopher Nolan, Stephen Norrington, Guillermo Del Toro, and Jon Farveau have managed to take iconic comic books and make films that deviate from the source material without sacrificing the soulful elements that made the comics so iconic (with Batman Begins/The Dark Knight, Blade, Blade II/Hellboy/Hellboy II, and Iron Man, respectively). There's no doubt, at least in my mind, that in the capable hands of directors like them, a great film could have been made from Moore's comic; however, after this, it's unlikely such a film will ever exist. With Watchmen, Snyder has created a barely-watchable film, one which, instead of proving the comic to be ultimately filmable, ultimately proves the comic will never, ever, truly be filmed.