Given the many attempts over the past two decades to bring Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ landmark graphic novel “Watchmen” to the screen, it’s no surprise that its eventual film adaptation would be met with nearly impossible expectations. And given the fact that I read the 12-issue miniseries in its original run before writing my college senior thesis on it, I admit that my expectations were as high as anyone else’s.
So now that there’s a “Watchmen” movie, it’s disappointing to report that there was probably never a good way to make a “Watchmen” movie.
Moore and Gibbons created a world in which our recognizable reality was completely transformed by the very fact that superheroes actually existed; the movie never captures that alternate universe. “Watchmen,” on paper, not only redefined how comic books could tell stories but it also told its own story in a manner unique to comic books themselves.
“Watchmen,” the movie, can’t compete on that playing field, and it certainly doesn’t twist and amplify cinematic narrative in the way that Moore and Gibbons did on the page. In fact, as directed by Zack Snyder (“300”) and adapted by David Hayter and Alex Tse, “Watchmen” feels constantly torn between reshaping the story for the big screen while including enough visual and verbal quotations from the original work to keep the fanboys happy.
The final result is something of an awkward mishmash, with certain characters rendered extraneous while others don’t have a consistent logic behind them. And woe to the actors here — Patrick Wilson and Billy Crudup being the best of the bunch — stuck with lines that were great in word balloons but fall flat when spoken aloud.
In “Watchmen,” the presence of the nearly omnipotent Dr. Manhattan (Crudup) has changed the world as we know it. It’s 1985, and a popular Richard Nixon is still in office (thanks to Dr. Manhattan’s swift handling of the Vietnam War).
The film opens with the brutal murder of The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), which leads the sociopathic vigilante Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) to suspect that someone is gunning for the world’s remaining superheroes, including the retired Nite Owl II (Wilson), Ozymandias (Matthew Goode) and Silk Spectre II (Malin Ackerman).
While the others initially dismiss Rorschach’s suspicions, a series of events convince them otherwise: Dr. Manhattan is accused of causing cancer in those closest to him, leading to his exile to Mars, while an attempt is made on the life of billionaire Ozymandias, known as “the world’s smartest man.” All of this happens under the shadow of imminent nuclear war.
The mysteries and complications of the book unfold in a much bumpier way here, with Snyder taking as many opportunities as he can to throw in slo-mo gore, men being set on fire, and women getting punched in the face. And whereas each chapter of the book illuminated the characters and the world in which they live, the movie densely crams in so much exposition and flashbacks that it’s hard not to think, “Ugh, not another origin story.”
I also can’t remember a recent film with such lazy music supervision. Not only do we get a love scene scored to Leonard Cohen’s ubiquitous “Hallelujah” — a song just under James Brown’s “I Got You (I Feel Good)” and Smash Mouth’s “All-Star” on the list of Songs We Never Need to Hear in Movies Again, Ever — but they throw in “Ride of the Valkyries.” In a Vietnam sequence.
If you have never read “Watchmen,” I can’t imagine that these troubled mopes running around in superhero costumes on the big screen will be of much interest. And if you have read “Watchmen,” get ready to cringe. A lot.