“Watchmen” (7 out of 10)
Director: Zack Snyder
Screenplay: David Hayter, Alex Tse, based on the Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore graphic novel
Cast: Ensemble, including Jackie Earl Haley, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Patrick Wilson, Matthew Goode, Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup
Time: 2 hrs., 43 min.
Rating: R (strong violence, sexuality, nudity, vulgarity)
Grandly eloquent, gruesomely grisly and breathtakingly spectacular in what it wants to say, but clumsy and amateurish in its wrap-up.
The much anticipated “Watchmen” deserves a lot more artistic accolade than the knee-jerk criticisms are allowing it. It is, quite frankly, the most wildly ambitious comic book expression on the big screen ever, superior to “Dark Knight,” “Sin City” and other attempts. Measured in terms of sheer creative input and explosive output, it absolutely had me hypnotized by its total audio-visual force all the way up to an ending that you can easily see is sputtering badly, headed for an unstoppable letdown in intelligence and imagination.
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Up until then, the film rarely leaves you in peace. Set in continuous off-tones of deep sepia and and icy blues, its whiplash montage of vigorous images are nowhere arbitrary and everywhere pulsating. Every image is pumped up to max. This is pure comic book artistry supercharged into the demanding designs of the motion picture at uncompromising levels of film mastery. If there’s a conventional confrontation, say a hand-to-hand fight or a lethal threat between individuals, it ratchets the energy up way beyond the orthodox, power-injecting every small aspect of the scene with hardball augmentation of blood, mutilation and bodily destruction.
And yes, as you might expect, this is the ultimate test of the admonition that in artistic expression, one must give the devil his due.
This is not the first time in film history that hideous violence has had to be painfully conceded as having its own energy to be judged in creative terms. The magnificence of the grotesque.
Yet you start to wonder, after almost an hour of this, if the film actually expects to roll continuously on its boosters and after-burners. Shouldn’t we have some serious characters and emotional involvements?
Well, . . . it does seem to want to recognize that, but, let’s see what’s involved.
Based on the comic book, “Watchmen,” often reputed among many critics and Hollywood insiders to be unfilmable, is certainly a grandly offbeat, bizarrely styled fantasy sci-fi adventure set in an alternate universe in a 1985 America. In this, Richard Nixon has been re-elected for a third term and nuclear war with the Soviet Union is imminent. By law, all superheroes have been outlawed. But a group of them calling themselves the Minutemen is inspired back into action when one of their number, “Comedian” (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), is brutally murdered and those remaining realize their own destruction may be imminent. More to the point, they will find that a far more grandiose and villainous plot is afoot, one involving nuclear destruction.
Their talents? Well, for those newcomer audiences to this ongoing saga, there’s the masked Rorschach (Jackie Earl Haley), a sociopath with an ever-changing “Rorschach blot” mask who breaks thugs’ fingers, dorky Dan Dreiberg (Patrick Wilson) who’s a genius with gadgets, the smug Adrian Veidt (Matthew Goode) who has licensed his identity as Ozymandias, “the smartest man in the world,” and seductive Laurie Jupiter (Malin Akerman) who unwillingly inherited her mom’s superhero status. She loves Jon Osterman (Billy Crudup), a.k.a Dr. Manhattan. A government experiment had both destroyed him and granted him unimaginable superpowers that made him a weapon for the U.S. military.
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It is Rorschach who sees a sinister connection between the murder of The Comedian and a coming apocalypse.
The film, with its often sharply observed cultural and political themes in more than a few cannily written dialogue segments, takes its cues from its bleak and barren comic book origins. It attempts to ground extensive violence into strong character and emotional values soundtrack by cleverly cued songs (Bobby Dylan’s “The Times They are A-Changin’,” Simon & Garfunkle’s “The Sound of Silence,” plus Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries”). But in that, it fails. Those attempts come off as terribly ordinary.
The cast is ensemble, that is, not centered on any one. Intellectually, the film thrusts almost satirically, and often effectively, at modern examinations of chaos and order in a context of loony fanaticism and will in the way of The Joker and Batman, even as it pokes generously at the denseness of men, in particular military and presidential authority, in their macho- and ego-driven parodies of power. It has conventional murder mystery elements and various judgments on the subject of heroism.
Indeed, “Watchmen” lays doubt on notions of heroes and villains even as the survival of humanity under the protection of the Watchmen is in itself called into question.
The film draws no world calamity into play that it cannot depict with stratospherically spectacular screen dynamics. Watch Manhattan being consumed by nuclear blasts at the street level, or the incineration alive of a couple standing together in a kiss as their skeletons remain Watch the grandose representations of the planet Mars.
How, you may ask, is the film going to resolve all this? The final interactions are embarrassingly trivial. You may find yourself blanching in chuckles as the empty final statements. But hey, I was glad I saw this movie and do regard it as a landmark production. There really is something missing in your life’s artistic experience, however ugly it may project itself to you in this film.
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I”m Reynaldo Gonzales.
I’m fun of movies.
Just want to post like it here. Thanks!
